Music Night, abstract poetry and art, was written and painted one night in the Honey Bear Bakery Cafe, in Seattle, in the mid-Nineties. Music Night Stanzas is a better version of the printing that accompanies the artwork.
January 5, 2009
January 2, 2009
Cafe Life
Café Life is a character study of the “third place.” Not home and not work, it is the café, coffeehouse, neighborhood bar, old style candy store or soda fountain. It is the modern equivalent of the town square or the watering hole where all the animals come.
Café Life is a partial gallery of the characters of one such place, The Owl and Monkey Café, on Ninth Avenue, on the NJudah trolley line, in San Francisco, during January of 1981, just as the Reagan Presidency was about to begin, not long after John Lennon had been shot, but it could be any year in any similar place, where people gather around a watering hole or a fire to warm themselves or refresh themselves, to find themselves, or to avoid themselves.
Such a café is a clearing in the woods that’s safe and unsafe at the same time. Some people will stay too long, and some people will stay away. Eventually, almost everyone will show up. I made a decision to sit still, in one place, for as long as I could, to stop running, to see who would come to me if I didn’t move. Over several years, I met literally thousands of people. This collection chronicles a few of them.
I’ll be forever grateful to The Owl and the Monkey Café and places like it. They are wonderful places, and I celebrate their existence. I’ve been writing, happily, in cafés for nearly forty years.
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November 30, 2008
Fleshy Blue Boat
Fleshy Blue Boat is a collection of light poems, written in the early 70s.
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November 23, 2008
Death
Death, a book of poems written in 2000, defines the reality of everything that exists, outside the only moment of being itself, the only moment that is not confined to the graveyard of the past and the future. Death also brings what we fear into the reality we live so that it is exposed as nothing to be feared.
Divide the painting of death into two sides, and see the two faces of death.
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November 11, 2008
The Exquisite Poet
In 1975, I was part of an anthology of San Francisco poets, Five on the Western Edge, published by Momo’s Press (Hilton Obenziner, Stephen Vincent, myself, Larry Felson, and Beau Beausoliel). Hilton had previously published a volume of poetry, The Day of the Exquisite Poet is Kaput. I loved the audacity of that title, but I took slight offense at the pronouncement, without trusting myself to challenge the implication. I didn’t have the equivalent audacity to claim that I was an exquisite poet; I didn’t think I was and, at the time, I didn’t know what it might be to be an exquisite poet. Recently, I told Hilton how I felt about his proclamation, and he pointed out that he’d said the day of the exquisite poet was kaput, he hadn’t said that the exquisite poet was kaput. Now by definition, the exquisite poet may be very beautiful and delicate, perfect and delightful, sensitive and capable of detecting subtle differences, and felt with a sharp intensity; superb, fine, lovely, and wonderful. No poet can claim these definitions for himself, but I can claim to recognize these sensibilities in the poetic expression of being itself. The Exquisite Poet is Alive and Well and Living Among Us, implies that us includes me, and that I can easily and happily claim to be true.
The story of Ag and Eg is the background for these poems. The Exquisite Poet is oddly the most personal of my poems, making it something of a manifesto, not different from other poems but more personal, in a way.
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Ag and Eg in the Garden of Heaven
The Exquisite Poet, Prose Form
The Exquisite Poet, Poem Form
November 2, 2008
Philip Blanc in San Francisco
Philip Blanc in San Francisco was published by Panjandrum Press in 1972. These light surrealist excursions, as someone once described them elicited this response from my mother, “Stephen, were you on drugs when you wrote this?” I said I was not, that I wrote them in the library at San Francisco State on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. The drawings came later.
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November 1, 2008
Walking in Ellensburg
Walking in Ellensburg is a continuation of the sort of poem begun in San Francisco Snapshots, thirty years before. The quiet of a small town in summer opens the spirit to the kind of frameless being that children enjoy, different from the life of the city, then or now. As I walked the streets of Ellensburg, Washington, in the summer of 2008, I saw things I had not seen from my car, my bicycle, or even walking with a purpose.
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October 31, 2008
Too Much Beauty
Too Much Beauty has gone through several permutations. It began as poems written over a year from 6/06 to 6/07. During that year, 600 poems became six books, then two, including the selected poems, called Alone, and the complete prose version, A Prisoner’s Cave in Heaven. Then Alone became Alone in Too Much Beauty, then simply Too Much Beauty. “Alone” finally felt stark and incomplete.
I wrote and lived as a poet of the heart for many years. I’ve written several books of love poems, but this one chronicles a transformation. I was a hungry romantic, and desire was my meat and mead, but there’s always been a stubborn awareness of the reality behind and beyond the romance of my life. I was a romantic of my own life, and I was a romantic of life itself. This book began in that same temper but with an awareness of the reality that saw through the romantic, to the core.
For twenty years, after letting go of my addiction to alcohol, I shed other addictions, and the last to go was the addiction to desire. This book chronicles the lifting of that obsession. I imagine most people reading this will say, “What’s the problem? What is life without desire? Why would I even want to read about someone breaking the addiction to desire? Isn’t that like breaking the addiction to breathing?” This is not about breathing, but I can imagine someone overly concerned with taking the next breath, unable to breathe freely, without first catering to their concern. This is about the addiction to something that colors the reality, the way all addictions gradually take away more than they give.
For anyone whose life is dependent on living in a romantic reality, I can only say that letting go of romance leaves one’s reality intact. Reality has been a deeper pull on my spirit than any romantic sense I’ve ever had. In the East, the attachment to desire is spoken of as the great Satan of consciousness. Westerners have nodded sympathetically at those Zen saints who seem to have gone a bridge too far for the rest of us. I was pulled by these two inclinations, to live in the brightly colored world of romantic attachment and to want to know the clearest reality for myself.
After an extraordinary time in India, almost by accident, I became even more determined to let go of the attachments of the mind. This has not been easy, especially for one whose mind is rich and fertile. I used to say that when you have a brain that won’t quit, it’s exhausting. I have a mind that won’t quit, but I know how to quit the mind. But, as I say, the romance of reality takes nothing away from reality, and romance has become less appealing to me, as a way of life, and more appealing as a way of play.
I made the break. I was in a loose relationship with a woman, and we talked about these things, freely and openly, laughing about being in a non-relationship, where the love that remains is more important than the love that attaches to the other. We never became lovers, but I couldn’t shake the desire to be lovers with her. It became obvious that my convictions were at odds with my attachment to desire. Awareness was clouded by consciousness, which was still affected by old habits of thought and feeling. Desire was running the show, when the show was about living beyond attachments.
These poems, the story of Too Much Beauty, is not the story of living alone, it is the story of recognizing desire, moving beyond desire, living beyond desire, and finally living free of desire. There is an arc in this letting go. The early poems are a mix of joyful passion and calm consideration, of mind and feeling and heart living in the open reality of contemplation and serene awareness. Then there is a darker period of loss and emptiness that contradicts the joyful emptiness of Being Itself. Slowly, the passion beneath passionate behavior emerges, not the same as being passionate, the way any articulate poet can be, but living in the essence of passion.
In living dispassionately, I sought not the end of passion, but the revelation of the roots of passion, where passion doesn’t come and go, and doesn’t rise and fall on the occasion of its object. That had been my goal and my expectation all along, even when I didn’t believe it, even when I was living in the passion of my poetic nature. I have let go of my passionate profession, and I have found the reality of my being. This being does not come and go. It is not dependent on another. My reality is identical to itself. I don’t have to match my words to a passionate profession, or vice versa. I am what I am, and it is good.
After these poems were written, I still had to make a break from the woman of the poems, not because of anything she did or didn’t do, but because I had kept her close in my romantic mind. She had been a loving supporter of my work, and she obliged me by cutting the last imaginary ties to any romance with her. My mind of thoughts and feelings is remarkably slow, compared to my poet self, i.e., the self of awareness. Finally, there’s no difference between them. It’s now been years since I felt the obsession lift. I know from my time letting go of alcohol, and the years after, living in the freedom of non-attachment, that this freedom is real.
Steve Abhaya
October 28, 2008
The Cock Poems by Georgio Vesta
“The Cock Poems by Georgio Vesta” were written in the mid-Seventies and published in City Lights Magazine. They were performed at Opal Nations’ place in San Francisco, by Wendy Miller, in male drag, appearing as Georgio.”
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The Cock Poems by Georgio Vesta
October 26, 2008
The Lost Poems of Jesus
The Lost Poems of Jesus is an apocryphal discovery of divine imagination. I wrote these poems, originally, as expressions of my own, and they were published under the title Outbursts of Love. Recently, I re-imagined them as if they were poems Jesus might have written when he was in his twenties and an unknown carpenter, falling deeper and deeper into his own awareness of the spirit. There is a kind of expression in these poems that resembles the way Rumi spoke of what he called The Beloved. I am not a practicing Christian, but I don’t believe I am saying anything here that could be called untoward or inappropriate for such a man, as Jesus might have been, before he began his ministry.
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