#al young

[lagaleriapopurri]

Al Young -- Oil Painting

[poetrymotherfckr]

Realism

Socialist Realism & Capitalist Realism

are the same thing

I am thinking this way &

walking down Shattuck with my wife

when I catch the sign in

Woolworth’s window

                 Lifelike

              PLASTIC

             FLOWERS

                   with

             built-in-bloom

               washable

               nonallergic

                  prices

                as marked

     Satisfaction Guaranteed

                      or

            money refunded

So knowing a good poem

when I see one I copy it down

on the back of the brown envelope

from the Telephone Company that says --

EXTENSION PHONES take the run

out of RUNNING A HOME!

- Al Young, Geography of the Near Past

[xjmlm]

Myself When I am Real

By Al Young

For Charles Mingus

The sun is shining in my backdoor

right now.

I picture myself thru jewels

the outer brittleness gone as I

fold within always. Melting.

Love of life is love of God

sustaining all life,

sustaining me

when wrong or un-self-righteous

in drunkenness & in peace.

He who loves me

is me. I shall return to Him always,

my heart is rain, my brain earth,

but there is only one sun & forever

it shines forth one endless poem

of which my ranting, my whole life

is but breath.

I long to fade back

into this door of sun forever

[infiniterichesinalittleroom]

“Long before the printed word and stuffy ideas about literature turned up in my life, and certainly long before I became the willing ward of schoolteachers, I was sleeping with words. I fondled and sniffed and placed my ear to their secret meanings. I soaked up the silences between syllables, tested them, tasted the saltiness or sweetness of them, and stared off into their bottomless eyes and down their dark, rosy throats. In a world innocent of ABCs, I dreamed in word-pictures and word-objects and word-feelings. And, like most children who live poetry all day long, I disappeared in between the spaces words made. It is this early enchantment with electrifying speech that abides with me still, in spite of the literature industry, in spite of poet-careerists and their ambitions, and quite in spite of the poetry scene itself.”

Breaking The Lightning Bug Code by Al Young • 19 New American Poets of the Golden Gate

[cutiewithawakenedheart]

"Way up here, where sky comes close

to calling all the shots."

----Al Young

[1605001]

Poem by Al Young

[manwalksintobar]

One West Coast  // Al Young

for Gordon Lapides Green is the color of everything that isn’t brown, the tones ranging like mountains, the colors changing.

You look up toward the hills & fog— the familiarity of it after so many years a resident tourist.

A young man walks toward you in vague streetcrossing denims & pronounced boots. From the pallor of his gait, the orange splotch twin gobs of sunset in his shades, from the way he vibrates his surrounding air, you can tell, you can tell he’s friendly, circulating,

he’s a Californian: comes to visit, stays for years, marries, moves a wife in, kids, wears out TV sets, get stranded on loneliness, afternoon pharmaceutica, so that the sky’s got moon in it by 3 o’clock, is blooo, is blown—

The girls: theyre all winners reared by grandmothers & CBS.

Luckier ones get in a few dances with mom, a few hours, before dad goes back in the slam, before “G’bye I’m off to be a singer!” & another runaway Miss American future drifts over the mountain & into the clouds.

Still there’s a beautifulness about California. It’s based on the way each eyeblink toward the palms & into the orange grove leads backstage into the onionfields.

Unreachable, winter happens inside you.

Your unshaded eyes dilate at the spectacle.

You take trips to contain the mystery.

[specialink]

Al Young