BOB HOLMAN

Bern Porter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bern_Porter) woulda been 100 years old today. I mean is. Here’s what I wrote him some 14 years ago. Happy Valentine’s, Everybody!

More Birthdays for Bern and Bob!

Bern & me, we’s free

Nekkid jaybirds runnin cross sands of poetry

Just Bern & me up a tree

Wonderin who’s the audience to be

We agree — the audience is me

Cept when I’m on — then Bern does the The

Cause we know

Doin the Thing is not the thingie

Watchin it “progress” while internally singing

That’s what the thinging is thinking

“Bern,” I start, when all’s said and all’s done

Back when the Madhattan Project had begun

Why’d ya hafta go and use my nose for the nosecone

It’s sadly simple Bob Let me pick up the nose cone

Bern Porter wordscomefast!

It will last

He’s magic band of poetry

We just make it up so’s yr ears can see

That’s it. Word. Afterword, the crossed-out cursers

The parsimonious pursed-lip, pure-purse, purposefullers

We break ‘em poem free from meaning’s strangulationary

Archisects of love, angels of oversight

Showering sparks under bulbous headlights of Eden

Forever cranking out the messages bleeding

Morse codes of O negative to the ships at sea

Our wolverines, our fractals, our imaginary beings

Dear Bern,

can you

cross goat

with boat?

How our ages now collide — I’ 50, you’re 85

Or 6 I lost count on account of your personal physics

An exercise, a passport, a new A-Bomb where A stands

for Anonymous Archdetriomphetype. Now get in tune, ol Graybird,

Tweet for the Birthday Boy dressed in scarlet.

One old spruce rises like a parade of giant puppets above the coastal shoal

The Young Sap speaks to Old  Blue, says, I’m 500 years old

Eat yogurt! Smoke cigars! And Masturbate! sputter sputter

The young arborite being sets itself aflame to protest the learning disorder

So it won’t be passed on, but the needles

fall

like letters to the poem-scorched loam

Finally, to you,

My Pope,

I bow and do the scrapey dance on the last piece of concrete in Maine

It’s been long time, Codger

Your influence rocks the planet off orbit,

         Makes the sphere a pear

I don’t mind you on my back, Ol Snaggletooth

Your books provide adequate protection against the elements

No more no way no q’est-ce que c’est

As you turn blue I tell em he’s experimentiungsten with a radium hue

Outta the way outta the way

Bern Porter’s coming through,

         He’s never through

                  Coming through

                                                               Bob Holman