James Dog Run (Madison Square Park, 1995)
In Seattle, the Belltown neighborhood used to be a warehouse-y, industrial district also inhabited by artists. There, the Penny University coffeehouse occupied a storefront on 2nd Avenue on the front edge of the first wave of gentrification before the Millennium. Sunday was avant garde jazz night; another night was open mic for musicians, and on Tuesday nights open mic for poets. Smoking wasn’t outlawed yet and so the room was a smoke-filled snow globe with sidewalk access; at the appointed hour it got shook up. Everyone gripped their leafy notebooks and—before cell phone culture—actually listened.
Fresh from a year away in New York City, I brought this piece, while Cat O'Sullivan emceed the circus and John Dempsey and his piano-playing partner whose name I forget howled with delight and asked for more... they themselves were like a couple of canines and all of us a pack of wild hounds running around in the poetic dog park before the first bubble came and then almost everyone got jobs and the storefronts were knocked down and grunge completely succumbed to heroin and nothing was fun anymore.
But at the time, we all roared.
JAMES DOG RUN
Madison Square Park, NYC [1995]
You crazy randy dogs!
You happy running
ecstasy hounds!
You crotch-sniffing
laffers, you
galloping gimcrack
hoofers!
You stop-on-a-dime
dawdlers, you posers,
you antsy mimes,
busking for your bread,
dance across the dusky gray
parade like elephants
galloping and go!
Or squat and claw the cobbles
like a fakir with a tin mug
howl among stones and graves
pointing there, no there
fling your shadow
ahead and chase it down
breathless hunger lovers;
go, dogs, you run!
Prance and pirouette,
garbage can brawler!
Dig, hipster, dig!
Trash the nasty ghetto
growling and blind yourself
with tears for breakneck
cities, tears for wind, tears
for cacophony
and hairy freedom!
And with your tongue lolling,
huff your tired bones along the rest
making like sunset come to quell
the cabbies' honking lullaby.
Now slump towards the flophouse,
flunkies, in a sordid corner
are you shining your horns
for an after-hours jam?
Do you smack your lips
and think of the sack?
You sexpot dandies, you
candy-toothed cheeky town hacks!
Lie then, wily mannequins!
Grin, sly-browed workers, you,
having a ball, ball that jack
you cake-eating queens!
You smiling dessert lappers!
You hilarious sphinxes!
You're not tired at all!
You're chomping the bit!
Breaking the stick!
Stomping the bricks!
You're up and gone!
Go on, then,
you know what to do
with the loose end
of a leash--
ignore the fences
and run
you wild-at-hearts,
you go-go
dogs, you go.
Image above via Adobe stock photos.