POETS PLACE
AUGUST 2020
AUGUST!!!! What? How did we get to August so fast! Is it me or am I getting …can’t, won’t say it. The “O” word. This month will mark the 5th month of the lockdown, stay at home, quarantine, social distancing, stir craziness!!! Writing and eating has kept me alive, but sane?? No way!!!
Hey everyone, I can’t thank you enough for keeping this column alive! Keep those poems and stories coming! Everyone is welcome! Including YOU!!!
ENJOY!!!
On a slant
By Linda Kaye
7/8/20
leaning towards a new leaning
drifting without understanding the
drift
reaching for the light to run from the darkness
wasting time in a world full of waste
daydreaming during my nightmare
seeing but not looking
ghosted during lovemaking
being chastised while in chastity
cripples mentally forever
a normal abnormality
alone but not lonely
happy but not happy
rusty brain
ruthless atrophy
loveless body, body less loved
choked out
loss of guile
relative reality
has come to pass
Illumination
By Mary Cheung
5-10-20 -7-25-20
12:23pm
Warm golden light,
Burning through the haze.
Dawning of my consciousness,
Pulling me out of my daze.
Clicks into focus and its clear to me now.
The things that I have and I am grateful for.
As opposed to the greedy wanting,
That obscured me from before.
Its easy to get lost,
Lose your direction.
Drowning in our own needs,
Is it a necessity?
Or just our own greed?
Moving in automation from one day to the next.
sometimes it takes the end of the world drama to sharpen your view.
Its not the what I want and don’t have.
But the what I have and am lucky to have that counts.
I see it, its clear.
Tragedy brings us focus, shows us what is dear.
Lets not want for the end,
To move us to make amends.
Live each day like its special.
Because it is.
Treat our fellow humans and oneself with kindness and love.
Because it's deserved.
I've planted the seed,
Now let it grow.
Let the wonder and joys of life be revealed to you,
and
illuminate your soul.
Mary Cheung- she is an innovative Artist and Costume Designer. Her works contain a strong sense of story as well as a highly sensuous style. She mostly works in paint or photography and sometimes making art that is wearable and innovative. She states “I am usually more of a Visual style Artists and have only recently been open to sharing literally art/poems, often paired with visual art of my creation, birthing a new form of spoken word art as another form of expression”.
Cathay De Grande
By Reverend Dan Buhler
1982
In 1982, my favorite literally underground place to hear live music was the Cathay De Grande, a venue located in the basement space of what was once the Nickodell restaurant, a popular lunchtime watering hole during the Hollywood studios heyday. It was located one street South of Hollywood Blvd. and one street East of Vine Street, at the corner of Selma and Argyle Avenues. In 1980, the space had been renamed Cathay de Grande and now housed a Mandarin restaurant at the street level and downstairs a person could find one of the most adventurous bookers of live punk and underground music in the city, and one never knew what would happen after going down the dark stairway for an evening’s entertainment. The downstairs venue was dark but not completely unfriendly, dingy but still somehow charming, but with plenty of danger still lurking around the edges of the room.
Monday nights at the Cathay de Grande were often “Blue Mondays”, my favorite night at the club, where one could see (In My Humble Opinion) the premiere blues-with-punk-attitude bar band in Los Angeles, Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs. This was an extremely scruffy band that got by on musical fury and drunken charm. Top Jimmy, born one James Paul Koncek, got his nickname a few years earlier while he was working at the late night L.A. eatery, Top Taco. Later, he became the roadie for the Los Angeles poety-punk band X, even appearing with them during their segment in Penelope Spherris’ Los Angeles punk documentary, The Delcline of Western Civilization, where X bassist and vocalist John Doe can be seen giving Jimmy a tattoo. During a sound check for an X concert, Top Jimmy came onstage and did an impromptu performance of The Doors’ Roadhouse Blues upon which everyone discovered that he possessed an incredible blues howl. Very quickly, Top Jimmy & The Rhythm Pigs were formed and from the start they were a dirty, ugly, soulful band that could heat up the room and everybody in it.
For a young 21 year old beer drinker like me, driving up to Hollywood for a Blue Monday at the Cathay de Grande was the high point of my week. I usually had Monday nights off from work at Tower, since they had me working closing most of the other days I worked. The store manager at the time really didn’t like me and was always trying to fire me for some perceived infraction or another. He decided to annoy me by giving me the worst work shift in Tower history: Tuesday, 5pm to 2am, so that the floors could get waxed after midnight, Wednesday Off, Thursday 4 to midnight, Friday, 4 to midnight with the Metal Boys (a portion of the Tower work crew that loved playing local metal albums way too freaking loud), Saturday 4 to midnight with the Metal Boys again, Sunday 9am - 5pm (yes AM!), and Monday I had off. Thank goodness. On one particular Monday night, my friend Dave and I drove the thirty miles up from Long Beach to the Cathay de Grande and were ready to hear some monster rhythm & blues. Dave was the husband of a girl I dated in High School. At the time, my social life was so bad that I was actually hanging out with my ex-girlfriend’s husband. Dave got into my troublesome 1972 Capri and we made our way to the big city. When we arrived at the Cathay de Grande, we headed downstairs, got some beer, got a booth near the band and prepared to get drunk and kick out some jams. Seeing a band inside the Cathay gave me a feeling of what seeing the Beatles at the Carvern Club in Germany might have been like. The darkness of the club, the intensity of the music were so different from every other part of my life. I felt cool at the Cathay, or, as cool as I could, being intensely not cool. Classic Chess blues was playing over the scratchy sound system, and Dave and I quickly downed our first round. I was feeling good. Suddenly, there was a tap on my shoulder. It was Mari.
Jesus Fucking Christ. Mari. The girl who only one year earlier tore my young passionate, romantic, utterly naive heart completely out of my chest and ground it into pulp with the nonchalance of somebody throwing away a cigarette butt. Let’s flashback to 1980 when I first started working at the Tower Records store in Anaheim, and I was really just happy to be working in any record shop since the one that I had been working at (Billboard Record & Tapes, 10900 Los Alamitos Blvd in the Los Alamitos Plaza in the city of, you guessed it, Los Alamitos) just went out of business. I was thrilled to be at Tower, then the “largest record store in the known universe” (according to their radio ads) and I was learning the ropes of the big leagues of the retail record industry. One day, while I was doing an inventory of Polygram rock albums, the cool punk girl that I worked with but never really talked to sided over and begun to flirt, coyly asking if my dental retainer, which I wore in an attempt to correct sixteen years of poor decisions from my previous dentist and orthodontist, was any impairment in kissing. Her name was Mari and she was a red hair pixie punk who was five years older than me, dug glam rock, drove a 1955 Ford Fairlane and somehow seemed to find me attractive. Flattered, we were soon dating, and I was stoked to be hanging out with a real live genuine punk rock and roll girl. It was like my high school rock and roll dreams had come true. I was working for the best and largest record store in the country and I had a punk rock girlfriend. For a twenty year old kid I was living the life. We would hang out in her bedroom at her parents apartment in Garden Grove, listening to the latest punk and new wave imports before getting busy with youthful exuberance. Despite my hanging around in her bedroom, Mari’s parents were always very nice to me, and I was on good terms with them. She was a mom and her dad was a proud retired fireman. I was trusted enough that I was told about Mari’s older brother who had committed suicide a few years earlier. I’m glad that they felt that they could confide in me. Eventually, Mari and I were spending most every evening together and things were going along great until a few months later when Mari got very sick and had to go into the hospital for several weeks. I would visit her after work and on her better days, she would show me the many stethoscopes that she had stolen from the hospital staff during her stay. When she got healthy enough to leave the hospital, the first thing she did was to get herself transferred from the Anaheim Tower Records store to the Tower Records store on Sunset Blvd in West Hollywood. The BIG Tower. At the time, the Sunset Strip Tower was the Mecca for all serious record shoppers, and being able to get a job there was considered very choice. She got a job working in the newly-opened Tower Video Annex on the other side of Sunset Blvd, a video store that, like it’s record store companion across the street, carried an incredible collection of videos, giving the store quite a bit of prestige. She moved out of her parents apartment and found a apartment with a couple of roommates somewhere in Hollywood. She was always busy and we saw little of each other but being a young romantic I still though we were a couple. That all changed one day when she came back to the Anaheim Tower to visit me for lunch. She picked me up in her ’55 Ford Fairlane and we got some fast food, and then she suggested that we go to a nearby park. That sounded great! It was so good to see her, but I could tell she had something on her mind. I asked her what was up. “I’m seeing a guy who does heroin,” she stated matter of factly. “I wanted you to know, I’m really sorry”. That’s what she said, that she was seeing a guy who did heroin and that she was really sorry. She just slammed in the gut with a crowbar and she was really sorry. I stayed cool on the outside even though I was completely imploding inside. She might have kept talking but I heard little else after that, and after she drove me back to work I walked quietly into the back room. I was keeping my cool just barely, a when my co-workers asked how my lunch with Mari had been, I froze. I tried to hold my emotions but instantly every single speck of agony, loneliness and sadness erupted out of my mouth right in front of my coworkers and I cried loudly the wail of every dumped guy who was ever dumped before me. Throughly embarrassed but unable to stop sobbing, I ran into the dingy employee restroom and continued to cry, becoming soggy with my tears. After about twenty minutes or so of my wailing, my co-workers eventually got me out of the small room and allowed me to mourn in the managers office for the remainder of my shift. I was completely shattered. All my self-confidence was gone. I knew I was alone, and while I did not want to continue, I did. But I sure was a mess.
And now it was a year later, I’m at the the Cathay de Grande on Blue Monday waiting to hear my favorite band Top Jimmy & The Rhythm Pigs and then all of a sudden she pops in out of nowhere. I was stunned. She looked a little goofy in a black cowboy outfit, but otherwise she looked like Mari. Thank goodness Dave was there. He reminded me to play cool, and I did, giving a casual “hey” and “how’s work”. She talked but I didn’t really hear her in the loud club. She seemed to be by herself, but I did not invite her to sit with Dave and me. She then left and Dave got us a couple more beers.
Around eleven o’clock or so, Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs started their set and it was as if the gods of the blues themselves were pushing the Rhythm Pigs to play harder than I had ever seen them, with Steve Berlin wailing on the saxophone, Carlos Guitarlos strangling his lead guitar, Dave Drive obliterating his drums, Gil T. thumping the bass and Dig the Pig chugging away on rhythm, the Pigs were making having a good time in a room with my ex-girlfriend as easy as it could be. But even the mighty Rhythm Pigs only had so much power.
When the Pigs finished their set, some punk guy I didn’t know came up to me and said that the girl I had been talking with earlier was now passed out on the floor. Concerned, I got up to take a look and found Mari so completely out of it that neither splashing water on her face nor shaking her would get any reaction. I then knew my evening was about to change. Fortunately she was breathing and I gave Dave the keys to my Capri and told him to get himself back to Long Beach and that I would get my car back tomorrow somehow. Mari’s purse had somehow not been stolen and inside I found the keys to her Ford Fairlane. I slung Mari on my back (which was not easy considering she was nothing but dead weight at the time and totally not helping) and trudged up the stairway back to street level, where I set her butt on the floor of the tile lobby of the Cathay, and set about to look for her car. She was utterly out of it, but I was able to lean her against the wall without too much trouble. Her eyes were closed and she was completely sweated through her clothes. I headed to the door.
“Hey! You can’t leave her here!” shouted the Cathay doorman.
“I’m not leaving her here, I’m going to go look for her fuckin’ car!”
“Bullshit!” shouted the guy, “You can’t leave her here!”
“Look!” I said, “Here’s my damn wallet!” I tucked my wallet down the unconsious girl’s top. This seemed to placate the doorman. Then Mari immediately projectile vomited all over herself and the floor.
“I’ll be right back I swear”, I told the doorman. He cursed and then stopped himself, with a look that said he knew I was about to have a rotten time. I ran out the door and started to look for Mari’s Fairlane which was fortunately just around the corner. I came back to the lobby to the received doorman and scooped up Mari who had thrown up a few more times but was still unconscious. As I was carrying her to the car in the cold night, some clown asked “What did she take?” to which I replied “Fuck if I know”. I got her in the front seat of the Fairlane, a big comfortable bench seat, and leaned her over so that she could lie down with head resting on my lap. I started the car and headed off.
But where? I had absolutely no idea where she lived in Hollywood, and she wasn’t talking. I didn’t know any of her friends in Hollywood. The only people in her circle that I did know were her parents who lived a good 45 miles away, in the city of Garden Grove. I had no other choice. I headed the car to the entrance of the 101 Freeway South, and as I did, Mari’s back arched and she immediately vomited a seeming endless flow of smelly warm puke, which collected between my pants legs and ran down onto the upholstery of the Fairlane. This was going to be a very long, wet ride. She burbled a few attempts at words, but mostly just vomited. I turned on the radio and shook my head at my situation. Mari continued to vomit between my legs as I drove the length of the Harbor Freeway and then down the San Diego Freeway into Long Beach. Once in Long Beach, I realized that I still had not contacted her parents to let them know about the wet vomiting package I was about to bring to their door. I stopped the car at the only place that I knew was open in Long Beach, the 7/11 store near the airport. Once I parked, I slid myself out from underneath Mari’s head, leaned her against the passenger window and walked my puke covered self inside the store. The clerk was nonplused. I got an orange juice and some water, paid, walked my puke covered self outside to the payphone and called directory assistance. They had a listing for Mari’s last name in Garden Grove. They connected me to the number.
It was about 3 in the morning.
“Hello Mr. T_____? Hi, this is Dan, Mari’s old boyfriend, remember me? Well uh, I have to tell you that I was at a club in Hollywood tonight and I found Mari passed out on the floor and I couldn’t leave her there but didn’t know where to bring her so I all I could come up with was bringing her back to your place if that’s okay.”
Of course It was, and I drove to Garden Grove with Mari continuing to throw up on my pants every now and then. Arriving at her parents apartment, I again flung her on my back, and up the stairs to her parents apartment. When I made it to the door, I rang the bell and both her parents answered. They must have turned her old bedroom into another space, for they had a made a makeshift space on the living room floor, with an inch of towels padding her from the floor. Her father helped her off my back, as she was covered in puke and still mostly unconscious. I explained the evening to them briefly and her mother thanked me for bringing her to them. I really had no other option.
“Somebody must have slipped her a mickey”, her father said and I had to agree. He was very grateful and offered to drive me and my puke-covered clothes the ten miles back to Long beach. I accepted the offer and as we walked to his car I mentioned that Mari’s car interior was a bit of a mess. He said he wasn’t too worried about it, and I gingerly got into his car and sat my puke covered pants on the clean towels that Mari’s mom had provided. When I got home, I entered the backyard through the side gate, kicked off my shoes and peeled my vomit covered clothes off my cold damp legs. A shower had never felt so good.
Reverend Dan Buhler has been a late-night radio institution in Los Angeles since 1996, playing the best Rock ‘n’ Roll music of the last 100 years on his award-winning, late-night KXLU radio program Music for Nimrods. He is a member of the Bloody Brains band and lives in Northeast Los Angeles with his wife Carol and two cats, Junior and Baby Lux.
RevDan airs Music for Nimrods on KXLU 88.9 FM on Friday nights early Saturday morning from 3-6AM; Wednesdays at 3-6PM on 88.9FM KXLU and Sundays 4-7pm LIVE on TWITCH.TV/reverenddankxlu.com
ESSENCE OF BEAUTY
By The Poetess Reigns
July 31, 2020
What is love?
But a LOVE...
A Love that is meek
With fantasies to seek
What is an emotion?
Whipping roars within the ocean
The ocean deep
As the dancing clouds meet
What is beauty?
Where does it meet?
Beyond the surface
And between the Sweet
The Sweet sensations of lust
Hidden between the bust
Of the WOMAN
Streaming across her hand
Gifting into the land of beauty
Is it merely skin deep?
When the Orpheus
Of the orchestra speaks
Into the hearts of men
Women and children descend
Into a musical lyre
What the dramatical theory
Of Life
Living beyond strife
Into the Abyss
While the souls coexist
Amongst the Elite
Sipping the wine of the sweet
Nectar of the fruit
Topping the trees roots
Seductive is Thee
Essence of BEAUTY
The Poetess Reigns aka JackieRay Phillips is Creator of The Poetry of Justice Show, Where Social Consciousness Meets The Arts. The Show is designed to spark the interest and awareness of social diversity ranging from arts, entertainment and social justice at large. Catch The Poetry of Justice Show Saturday nights 6:00-8:00pm PST Live @Yikesradio.com and @AcceleratedRadio.net in addition to all other podcast streaming platforms. You may also view and subscribe to the Show’s YouTube channel @The POJ Show With JackieRay. Follow us on IG @The POJ Show With JackieRay and FB @ The Poetry of Justice Show and JackieRay Phillips.
August Prayer: 2020
By Ronald G. Carrillo
These days are still
With something foul lurking in the air
Only the wind spreading truths
We are all linked together in this viral pool of humanity
From China to California
Our vanity gods hitting upon hard times
Paying for centuries of environmental crimes
Viral and bacterial fines being handed down
The planet knows how to heal itself
Mother Nature the divine feminine healer and protector
Allowing man to conjure his own vectors
Like a teenager in rebellion playing with his own devices
Mother Earth copes despite man’s interferences
This viral storm a pandemic of pandemonium will pass
But the most fragile will be on the frontlines of its killing fields
Then the darkness will subside and meld into light
Purple sonata of song from skyscrapers of pain and privilege
Female voices that trace our history in blood
Chitlin circuit performers lead the way with gospel support
The stain of slavery is a plague ripping the stars and stripes apart
She is losing her democratic center and trust under God
A viral pandemic judgement to shake the nation awake
Her people are comatose in a false liberty
How long can this last
This hard fall toward collapse
The financial imbalance is extreme bordering on obscene
We are back to the days of King Louie and the guillotine
Pointing the finger of blame on our national shame
The weak and poor endure most of the attack
Protests on the streets leave fires burning
While capitalist hyenas exploit this financial flatline
Capitalism on its deathbed
The storm up ahead for the rest of us to deal with
When it is not even gone yet the vultures already feasting
Corporate capitalism cannibalizing the red, white and blue
Lady liberty has lost her democratic moorings
The violent history of the stars and stripes is in our blood
Through genocide, slavery and myth
She will reach her terrible end
The racial dam is broken
Leaking for years and unattended
Her cracks have surged with willful neglect
Her hardened heart against some of her people is sinful
America reflect and turn back to founding principles
Exclusion must be erased from our national soul
We can move forward and breathe free
Finally realizing our greatness with no ties to political pompousness
No hollow trumpets sound
No fear mongering to divide the people
Discovering once again our evolved common ground
Ronald G. Carrillo is a native Lincoln Hts Angelino, living in Eagle Rock and a retired LAUSD educator and influencer. He writes of his passion and rebirth into the golden age of living. He has been writing since high school and was initially influenced from the songwriters, Keith Reid, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Neil Young.
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With great hope for our future
Love,
Linda Kaye
Please submit your written work to:lindakayepoetry@icloud.com and include a short bio.
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