Six Degrees of San Francisco

I recently returned from a trip to San Francisco.

And San Francisco is home to City Lights.

City Lights was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin. It remains one of the few truly great independent bookstores in the United States.

City Lights was the first to publish the Beat poets (Jack Kerouac coined the term "Beat Generation," describing the down-and-out status of himself and his peers during the post-war years).

The term Beatnik as in Beat Generation, is a loose synonym of Hippie.

And I am a Hippie Mom. 

And this Hippie Mom is also a poet.

Here are my first two published poems:

******************************************

Pet Therapy Part I

He gave the young woman a kiss.

Pet Therapy Part II

He gave the old woman a puppy.

*******************************************

Yay. Uh huh.  Right.  

Good news is I don't write much poetry anymore.  You can probably see why.

Not only am I published, I've made money writing poetry.  

Years ago I won the poetry slam at The Original Sub Shop and shared a cash prize of $7 dollars and some change.  A friend and I were sitting at a table when the slam was announced.  For fun we decided to enter. My friend, let's call her Carolyn, wrote about hommus, and I wrote about abortion.  We combined the two poems into one and my friend read it in that exaggerated, annoying drawn out voice that all the poets use.  Yes, hommus and abortion--sure winners every time.

And that friend, Carolyn, was with me in San Francisco.

Where we saw City Lights.

And City Lights has published many of the books of Charles Bukowski.

And here is a poem by Charles Bukowski:

B AS IN BULLSHIT

B kind
B a good listener
B able to engage in physical combat
B a lover of classical music
B a tolerator of children
B a good horseplayer
B an agnostic
B generous on the freeways of the world
B a good sleeper
B not fearful of death
B unable to beg
B able to love
B able to feel superior
B able to understand that too much education is a fart in
in the dark
B able to dislike poets and poetry
B able to understand that shit is necessary
B aware that in every life a little bit of shit must fall
B aware that a hell of a lot more shit falls on some more
than on
others
B aware that many dumb bastards crawl the earth
B aware that the human heart cannot be broken
B able to stay away from movies
B able to sit alone in a room and feel good
B able to watch your cat cross the floor like a miracle
B able to recognize bullshit even when you hear it from
B ukowski

But wait. Aren't you supposed to be writing the raw and often ridiculous details of the trips to San Francisco that have marked life-changing events, you say.  Yes, I am.

But I can't let April go by without a tribute to National Poetry Month.  

Just not possible for this Hippie Mom.

posted at Humor-Blogs