Charles Plymell: A Video Introduction

Neal Cassady by Charles Plymell

An ego pressed onward
Like a tight skirt in the night

Popeye and Olive Oyl
Swaggering down the street
Jumping parking meters
doing exercise gyrations

Expectations surrounded him
in crowds and beach boy cronies
Tarot card sharks and wood shooters
The Fastest Gun in the West.

I showed him pictures
Of Butch and the wild bunch
“Neal, Was he your father?”
That worried orphaned-look
I’ll not forget.

He lived fast, his beds, death rows
to blow genius away, like The Doors,
A race over rails from time’s windowpane
sun hot on the Mexican landscape–the
Railroad tracks chromed with cocaine.

(Picture-Neal & Ann)

Charles Plymell: Selected Poems from Eat Not Thy Mind

Click on Selected Poems

Then click on fullscreen at the left
wait for arrow on right to turn pages

Ferlinghetti, Goodrow, Ginsberg, Plymell, Whalen– August 1963

SONG FOR NEAL CASSADY by Charles Plymell

–For John Cassady

Oh really really Neal
his first love was the automobile

Drove a ‘34 Ford with suicide doors
and stick shift on the floor
Draggin’ down main to Colfax Avenue

Jumpin’ in the back seat boulevard
kicked back watching asses in the rearview
cruising past the high school

Clock on the dash reading 10:18
past the neon diner
last stop for Benzedrine
and onward to another scene

Chicks would rob a joint
just to buy him food

One hand on the wheel
the other in her mood

The blue-eyed kid and the wild-eyed bobby soxer
California surfers Tarot card sharks and word shooters

Found Ann-Marie in Frisco like a hurricane cock
didn’t need  the Sexual Freedom League

Driving with white pills and pot
but was really addicted to the wheel

Came back to Old San Francisco
Flower children all over the streets

Carried star struck Ann-Marie in his arms
the Denver Kid he never returns

Traded her Chevrolet coupé
for an old Pontiac

Up the hills, down the curves
gear it down, pump the brakes
Old mother Ginsberg’s back seat drivin’
turning toward the Avalon

Driving
down Van Ness jumping parking meters

One hand on the gearshift
the other copping a feel

One hand up her dress
the other on the wheel

Stole a car in Denver just to hear it peel
just like drivin’ in the races

Stole a car in Denver just to hear it squeal

He moved so fast
he had one foot in Cincinnati the other in Kalamazoo

Women knew just what to do
and all wanted him to be true

Parked in front of Gough Street
in a 50’s red and white Plymouth Fury

Just back from seeing Kerouac, in a hurry
patrol car in the mirror
the old white and blacks

Drove past someone with some little white pills
heading into town

He jumped in the driver’s seat
and spun that Fury around.

The roads were paved with powder all the way to Mexico
and train tracks shined in the moon

Did hard time for two reefers
and came out smokin’ some boo

First Road Warrior
never knew what he did wrong

______________________

(from Some Mother’s Son
available at Amazon)

–pictures: Neal Cassady And Charles Plymell, 1963
Neal, Ann & the Plymouth Fury

In London by Charles Plymell

In London in a very neat
and sensible flat,
lives the one true genius
of contemporary American prose.

More like a poet
he veers and speaks both
naturally and subliminally,
Or more like a medium
he chats pleasantly
from a space apart,
or from a chamber
of spirits disguised
in a everyday world.

A tall man, slightly stooped
from the weight of all
the combinations and formulas
of all possible plots,

Mr. Burroughs rises
and leans against the window ledge
…could have been a St. Louis
merchant or farmer
about to speculate on the weather.

“Those birds,” he says, gesturing out
the window to a flock that caught his fancy,
“in mornings they fly one way
and in the evenings they
fly back the other way.”

And with that he reached for his hat
and we went to the local pub for brandy.

–June 1968

(from Neon Poems, 1970)

Charles Plymell–reads Bennies From Heaven poem at the Wichita Art Museum

The Book of Jack

Art by F.N. Wright

Click on Jack–for best viewing go to fullscreen and use arrow that appears on the right to turn pages.

Two Poems by Charles P. Ries

BLESS ME FATHER FOR I HAVE SINNED

I was restless with the weight of
ideas that flooded me and awaited
their release in the red rain of my
journal.

I stacked five stones on a farmer’s
fence post to create a monument to
my existence that only cows and
plow jockeys would see.

I flung myself off a quarry ledge
high above a deep blue pool and
imagined it was a concrete street,
wishing for the end.

I drove my Ford pick up over a gila
monster that peeled its pancaked
corpse off Texas asphalt and chased
after me spitting curses in Spanish.

I dropped acid and thought a thin
curtain separated me from a world
that glittered with diamonds, and
angels, and joy, and that my manual
Smith Corona type writer was an
oracle who revealed ancient truths
with the touches of my finger tips.

For all this Father, I ask you forgive me.

__________________________________
ODD

They can’t hear it.
They don’t listen to leaves
in the moon light. The mystical
whisper of branches rubbing.

Funny what happens to a life
when trees start talking to you.
When you hear the voices of your
garden.

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REVIEW: SODOMY is a CITY in NEW JERSEY by George Wallace

John Dorsey (Grievous Jones Press, 2009)
Sodomy is a City In New Jersey

America needs poets of witness as never before — but more than that, poets who are unafraid to remain tender to the human condition while getting their point across.

Some don’t bother at all — they’re content to rant in anger or self-righteousness. Others are able to use their wit, stoking the fire of irony and satire to win their point.

And there are those rare few who are able to strike a balance between the awfulness of the ‘big picture’ they are trying to convey, with the humanity of the small people caught in it.

Fortunately we have poets like John Dorsey among us, who demonstrates in his new collection that he is capable of doing just that.