PAUL CORMAN-ROBERTS

POEM FOR DIEGO

“Old man, take a look at my life

I’m a lot like you

I need someone to love me

The whole day through”

-       Neil Young

Most of the Earth

that has lived

has done so

in oceans

or tree tops

there has been more

than one fall from Grace.

All of this stopped being Eden

when we received the invitation.

Is there any beauty more terrible

and awesome to behold

than Democracy…

and I mean REAL Democracy

                     TRUE Democracy

real and true

majority rule?

Nothing upends the status quo faster

and that’s why the one percent

of the one percent

can never allow it.

Oh and the anger over all this,

Oh yes how the schools lied to us

and yes perhaps civilization

is an oversized delusion

to keep us docile

to keep us alive and soft and

so what?

You will still need to get over it.

You will still need to fall in love.

You will still need to be held.

You will still be a mammal,

baby.

WARM NOVEMBER RAIN

You know the drought is bad

by everyone’s fetishization of rain

from whiny rock stars

to the silent praying on the corner

for the mistress who abandoned

our bivouac Eden

Let all hypocrisy

from all quarters

convene in the hologram

of a tropical harbor

replete with an “out of this world”

feasting for the indigenous.

The sea will always claim us

if we flirt with him too much

because he cannot claim back

the moon his distant lover

lost so long ago

the surf his raging grief

the rhythmic lap lap lapping

a mournful sigh.

The world he created

was designed to lure her back

his lover now a satellite

but there is no harder mistress

than gravity.

The ocean is now the open wound

where the lovers were forced to part

as much by her own hand

as that of her other lover

stellar bodies passing in the light

everything after a vast

gorgeous limbo of broken mind soup.

This is the dream still prompting

you and I after all:

this is where it came from

and sure the dream is worthy and sturdy

but it takes hard work

to experiment it visceral.

Young people on psycho-actives

have their libidos exposed

jealousies unmasked

naked agendas spelled out

in sand drifts

around the ghost show bonfire.

We need a natural disaster

to make us relax a little

grow more comfortable

find emotional maturity

in each other’s orbit

but I promise you

someone in this circle

is a whispering traitor

and the length of the coastline

was doomed long before we got here

and will remain so long after we are gone.

                   ---Paul Corman-Roberts

Paul Corman-Roberts is an original core-founder of Oakland's Beast Crawl Literary Festival. His latest collection of poems is We Shoot Typewriters (Nomadic Press, 2015.)  He spent the night of the Rodney King riots barricaded inside a Circle K convenience store.