Poetry by Marc Olmsted

                katie chao and ben muessig CC




PROPHECIES OF NULL

Off his meds
Goes North won’t listen
Messages from Facebook asylum
‘What’s up?”
slept in his car
getting advice
from the falling leaves




SECOND REASON

My new driver’s license
Has old man’s eyes
The photo man at the DMV
Asked why I left California
“Too expensive.”
“Your second reason?”
“It’s on fire.”




Saw him dying in a North Beach bar
(For B. Kaufman)

Tombstone granite laughter
and dirt, dust in the sea from an urn
a mouth that announces fragments of teeth & bone
spelling poems among the plastic bottles
& emptied sewers of the deep




LIVE MASK

John with Parkinson’s
now gains weight
electricity in his head
a crescent scar
Shiva’s moon or Frankenstein’s
mark of Cain
during this virus world
we live masked
Halloween surgery
in the sickness age
​
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Marc Olmsted has appeared in City Lights Journal, New Directions in Prose & Poetry, New York Quarterly, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and a variety of small presses.  He is the author of five collections of poetry, including What Use Am I a Hungry Ghost?, which has an introduction by Allen Ginsberg.   Olmsted's 25 year relationship with Ginsberg is chronicled in his  Beatdom Books memoir Don't Hesitate: Knowing Allen Ginsberg 1972-1997 - Letters and Recollections, available on Amazon.  For more of his work, http://www.marcolmsted.com

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