News:

Poem

The Planet needs your help.
Give to the
Fund for Local Reporting! come and see me on the street corner

down here in west berkeley

see me howling in grief rage pain

i don’t know what all my howling is

because my grief rage pain blind me

naked in my filthy matted dreadlocks



yet we have had a marvelous symbiosis

the black cashmere rising academic

and the fallen silenced poet naked

howling in grief rage pain



the burnished panels and the discreetly

deferential colleagues

and the naked filthy one alone on the

street corner, invisible to all who pass,



joined through the years by grace, and love,

and our children, and an enduring curiosity. . .



Berkeley, August 1999