sometimes the moon covers the sun
im not sure how, but my mom knew lawrence Ferlinghetti.
he came to a pot luck and we drew on paper plates together.
i didn't know that he was a famous beat poet and that he opened "city lights bookstore" at that time.
later that same week i learned that he had been arrested in the mid 1950's on obscenity
charges for publishing allen Ginsbergs "howl"
it kinda blew my 17 year old mind to hear how some one could start a book store,
and pay to have a book of poems printed and then get put in jail and have
all the books taken away by the cops. i had no real way of understanding how that could
happen.
it made me think poems must be very powerful.
A Coney Island of the Mind was perhaps the first book of poetry i every saw.
my dad had the poem about the "dog trots freely in the street" memorized.
it had a picture on the cover that
i thought was old disneyland and thought the book
must be about the most awesome stuff ever. i had to read it over and over to figure out
what the hell it was talking about. i romanticized it long before i ever knew what "poems" were.
after i drew pictures on plates with lawrence, i bought a copy of "howl" from him at city lights
along with some of ferlingehetties other books.
he wrote some stuff inside the cover for me.
i don't remember what he wrote, however he encouraged me to keep being creative.
those books all got stolen when i was in college. i still look in used book stores at copies of the books to see if i can find what he wrote to me.
i still feel there is something about poems that i don't get. they must be more powerfull
than i know. those cops sure thought so.
whollly smokes.
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