Dear Bob Kaufman Poem by Bernhard Emil Bruhnke III

Dear Bob Kaufman,

Is it true you stapled the concrete ceiling
with your wicker hands?
Smoothly gallivanting with the unspoken dust,
I didn't believe you or your smuggled tongue
when you said
you wished to be anonymous.

Neither did the purist in the blood soaked mountains
that carried you into a
crowd of solitude.

Neither did those gunshots in Dallas…
(a man can’t hide when he lives on one side of the street)

…leaving you with a wounded dream,
…leaving you yearning to be forgotten.

I never forgot that meeting
outside the coffee shop;
your silent beard buried under
a midnight Akubra and eyes of Maple Ash.

You left chasing a street lamp
to a garden of saxophones,
while a Black-Eyed Susan rants about how you stole
her lily pad handkerchief and smuggled it
under your sun whipped poncho.

Desperate to make it back to your talks with Lorca by the Salamander river, you caught a ride on a flattened rain drop.

I asked you for change....
and you threw me a Golden Sardine,
who still sleeps in my unmarried pocket.

How does the Gorgon not stare into your
paper soul and not weep boulders?
Because even though you forgave America,
she still hung your coral skeleton from
a flagpole.

But they still drink you in San Francisco
by the fountain of matchsticks.
Waiting for the sparkled whirlwind of folded sorrows to
release the dawn you left braided in
chains of silence.


Until the Second April,
another child in the clarinet case

P.S.
I love you for your vow
I hate you for its consequence