Savage Amusement The Autobiography of a Semi-Unknown Semi-Genius - A Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist in San Francisco in 1975.

The Ocean in a Bottle

When I told you I was embarrassed

To know you so well as to become you,

I was confessing a terrible emptiness.

When I look down and see my cloudy

Transparency, I become afraid.

My yearning to be full doesn’t diminish you,

But makes you unbearably desirable.

I don’t see through you, like I said I did,

I can’t become you, I can’t fill myself with you.

If I alone ghost the space between us,

I will succeed only in vacating myself.

Sometimes, I’m lost outside my bones,

And I look so hard for them, I think I see

Other people’s bones beneath their flesh.

When I feel their bones and their flesh,

Temporarily, I quit looking for my own.

I find myself in being alone.

Download here:

Savage Amusement Introduction

Savage Amusement original

Savage Amusement

The Boy Who Named Himself is a fable, written in Lucknow, India, in early 1992 and performed for a small group of delightfully indifferent people from around the world  on the lawn of the Carlton Hotel. One older woman said, at the time, “You may think this story will change the world, but it won’t.” She was right, of course. The world does or does not change itself. 

Download here:

The Boy Who Named Himself

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.

Download here:

Cafe Life 

Minnie the Mermaid is a fictional story, written in the 90s, of sexual abuse, alcoholism, friendship, abandonment, love and fear. “I don’t know who these people are, and I can remember nothing in my life that parallels this story, but both of these characters came to life for me, and I cared for them as long as they were with me.”

Download here:

Minnie the Mermaid

Invisible Lion is a chronicle of the immediate aftermath of 22 years of drinking. Every such change is a kind of death, and every survival is a kind of rebirth, when something has died, and something, if anything, is born. It is also the furthering chronicle of the life of a poet.  Invisible Lion ’85 is the third in a trilogy of journalese autobiographies along with Savage Amusement ’75 and Dear Nadja ’82.

Download here:

Invisible Lion/original

Invisible Lion