GOING TO MAKE POETRY AN INSTITUTION
Going to run for political office
On a pledge to make poetry an institution
Going to rattle the white mans power cage
Show them the meaning of real rage
The preacher man doubts evolution
The con man doesn’t believe in revolution
The priest has run out of absolution
No more autographs no more forced laughs
No more hanging around the zoo swapping
Stories with gurus
Going to smoke me some dope
With my good friend the Pope
Going to make love nice and slow
Read me some Edgar Allen Poe
Lose myself in the Jimmy Fallon show
Going to make a cameo appearance
On the late night show
Play me some John Lee Hooker blues
Going to penetrate a prerogative
Bugger the cosmos
Evolve evolution into a revolution
Put anarchy on the stock market
Nuke technology, outlaw e-mail
Declare Da Da the official
English language
Going to hang religion from a tree
Make John Brown the new National Anthem
Turn outlaws into in-laws
Landlords into donors
Going to pay homage to a whore
Put Bukowski’s face on Mount Rushmore
Going to name a bus after Rosa Park
Put a little nookie in every fortune cookie
Expose Saint Nick as a chick with
A twelve-inch dick
Going to invite Trump’s old lady
To ride through the streets of Chinatown
In a see-through nightgown
Going to sing a ballad with Lorca
And a band of gypsies
Stop off at the manager
Have a long talk with the Lone Ranger
Going to put an end to hemorrhoids
Outlaw humanoids
Going to offer a truce
Bring back Lenny Bruce
Make politicians ride the caboose
Going to go back to school
Erase the golden rule
Going to feed a vulture
Starve off mass culture
Going to turn evolution into a revolution
Make poetry an institution
BROKEN PROMISES
at eighty
years
the sun beats down on me
like the gleam in the eye
of
a butcher lowering a hammer
on the head of an unsuspecting
cow
being led to the slaughterhouse
the memories circle me
like
old time Indians circling
a wagon train
I walk
backwards into my birth
each new year like
a sharpened knife in
the hands
of a trembling surgeon
lost in insomnia like a
blind man
walking a dark road in
the dead of night
waking
like a shotgun blast
in a killing field
lost in a language
I
can not translate
the priest passes
the collection
plate
rejects my confession
my sins laid out like
a sea of
stars in
a far away constellation
all my poet friends take
sides
purity versus the hucksters
God’s choir plays
bagpipes
refuse to play referee
the creaking coasters
of
my grandfather’s rocking chair
sing in my one good ear
the
Holy Ghost devours
me like a python
my childhood like a bat
in
a dark cave waits for God
to come out of the closet
and deliver
the long
promised resurrection
At 80
You realize you’re not immortal
Parents long buried
Friends fallen by the wayside
Like spring leaves from an aging tree
Arthritic Bones that creak and moan
Mile walks turned to blocks
The years ace by like a track sprinter
Bring me to my mother’s grave
Her tombstone chipped
The words fading
No such fate for me
I’ll go the way of the Indian
My flesh given to flames
No dirt No worms
No suffocating box
Ashes and bone my fate
Monterey or San Francisco Bay
The sunset my head stone
My poems my marker
About the author:
A. D. Winans (1936), is an American poet, essayist, short story writer and publisher. Born in San Francisco, California, he returned home from Panama in 1958, after serving three years in the military. In 1962, he graduated from San Francisco State College.
He made his home away from home in North Beach where he became friends with Beat poets like Bob Kaufman and Jack Micheline.
He was the founder of Second Coming Press, a small press based in San Francisco that published books, poetry broadsides, a magazine, and anthologies. He edited Second Coming Magazine for seventeen years from 1972 to 1989. Winans became friends with Charles Bukowski, whose work he published. He also published Bukowski’s then-girlfriend, Linda King. Other writers he published included Jack Micheline, Bob Kaufman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Levine, Josephine Miles, David Meltzer, Charles Plymell. etc.
In 2002, he published his memoir, Holy Grail: Charles Bukowski & The Second Coming Revolution.
A.D. Winans has had poetry, book reviews, and short stories published in over 2,000 magazines and anthologies. He has written 63 books of poetry, and two books of prose.
A song poem of his was performed at Alice Tully Hall, New York City. In 2006, he was awarded a PEN National Josephine Miles Award for excellence in literature. In 2009 PEN Oakland presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was a recipient of a Kathy Acker Award in poetry and publishing.
His latest book, « San Francisco Poems » published by Little Red Tree Publishing, CT, includes an extended biography with many photographs, plus 99 poems, old and new.
In 2016 he appeared in a documentary movie on the life of poet Bob Kaufman. The movie was premiered in April 2016 at the San Francisco International Movie Festival.
PARIS POETRY 