Two Poems for Richard Brautigan

Number One

A perverse mystery...
in the afternoon of my life
I see the road ahead...

I don’t want to take it
but I have no choice...
it is my fate.

the end


Number Two

I stopped breathing the other day
It seemed the right thing to do;
My taxes are paid,
only death remains providing...
that the IRS doesn’t
come after me.

I would have to return because...
litigation outside a courtroom is
not allowed: it infringes upon a lawyer’s
right to their fees.
Not even death will prevail.

Brautigan is writing another book:
In Watermelon Sugar II or...
Trout Fishing in America II;
He won’t tell me.

In an age of clones
I’m not sure if it’s Brautigan’s Ghost or...
Brautigan’s Ghost II.

the end too

By:  Homeless with a Laptop, That is my Name

My Spirit

O memory of the heart! You are stronger
than the sad memories of reason.
And often from a far-off country,
you bewitch me with your sweetness.
I remember the loved voice sounding.
I remember the eyes of azure.
I remember the careless
curling strands of golden hair.
My shepherdess, without a rival,
I remember her simplicity of dress,
the unforgotten, the dear image
that stays beside me everywhere.
My guardian spirit – granted me by love
to bring me solace in separation:
do I sleep? Bending over my pillow,
it will ease my saddened rest.

Composed by:  Konstantin Batyushkov
Copied, pasted and loved by:  Homeless with a Laptop, That is my Name

How Few Hairs a Man Must Have to be Bald?

As I exited a local mall, where I had been shopping for widgets, i.e., nothing of significance, I noticed a man standing on the corner. He was looking at the sky, but I didn’t look.

Rather, what captivated my attention was his lack of hair: he was bald. Big deal you say. I would have thought the same except that he had a few strands of long hair carefully plastered in a forward direction; towards his forehead. Was he a bald guy? A guy going bald? Or a bald guy with some hairs plastered on his head?

It seemed that because he once had blond hair, he was likely considered bald. If his hair had been dark brown for example, he might not have been considered bald but rather going bald or perhaps having a bouffant hairdo—a crucial distinction.

On the other hand, it’s clear that from his point of view that he wasn’t. If he was, he wouldn’t have carefully plastered the few strands of hair on his head and combed them forward.

I walked up to him and said really loud, “Excuse me, but how few hairs must a man have to be bald?” He looked at me with surprise then anger. The other people walking frowned at me, except for two young black kids who were laughing.

As I combed my deep brown hair on the store window, I reflected, “Which grain makes the noise when corn is tipped from a container?”

Just a thought... by:  Homeless with a Laptop, That is my Name

My Name

I guess you are kind of curious as to who I am, but I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.


If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.
That is my name.

Perhaps it was raining very hard.
That is my name.

Or somebody wanted you to do something. You did it. Then they told you what you did was wrong—“Sorry for the mistake,”—and you had to do something else.
That is my name.

Perhaps it was a game that you played when you were a child or something that came idly into your mind when you were old and sitting in a chair near the window.
That is my name.

Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around.
That is my name.

Perhaps you stared into a river. There was somebody near you who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before it happened. Then it happened.
That is my name.

Or you heard someone calling from a great distance. Their voice was almost an echo.
That is my name.

Perhaps you were lying in bed, almost ready to go to sleep and you laughed at something, a joke unto yourself, a good way to end the day.
That is my name.

Or you were eating something good and for a second forgot what you were eating, but still went on, knowing it was good.
That is my name.

Perhaps it was around midnight and the fire tolled like a bell inside the stove
That is my name.

Or you felt bad when she said that thing to you. She could have told it to someone else: Somebody who was more familiar with her problems.
That is my name.

Perhaps the trout swam in the pool but the river was only eight inches wide and the moon shone on IDEATH and the watermelon fields glowed out of proportion, dark and the moon seemed to rise from every plant.
That is my name.

And I wish Margaret would leave me alone.

Composed by:  Richard Brautigan
Copied and pasted by:  Homeless with a Laptop, That is my Name

Sign of the Times

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven,
we were all going direct the other way--
in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of
its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for
evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

From "Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens
Always remembered and loved by Homeless with a Laptop, That is my Name

I would like

I would like

to be born

in every country,

have a passport,

for them all

to throw

all foreign offices

into panic,

be every fish

in every ocean

and every dog

in the streets of the world.

I don’t want to bow down

before any idols

or play at being

a Russian Orthodox church hippie,

but I would like to plunge

deep into Lake Baikal

and surface snorting

somewhere,

why not in the Mississippi?

In my damned beloved universe

I would like

to be a lonely weed,

but not a delicate Narcissus

kissing his own mug

in the mirror.

I would like to be

any of God’s creatures

right down to the last mangy hyena--

but never a tyrant

or even the cat of a tyrant.

I would like to be

reincarnated as a man

in any image:

a victim of prison tortures,

a homeless child in the slums of Hong Kong,

a living skeleton in Bangladesh,

a holy beggar in Tibet,

a black in Cape Town,

but never

in the image of Rambo.

The only people whom I hate

are the hypocrites--

pickled hyenas

in heavy syrup.

I would like to lie

under the knives of all the surgeons in the world,

be hunchbacked, blind,

suffer all kinds of diseases,

wounds and scars,

be a victim of war,

or a sweeper of cigarette butts,

just so a filthy microbe of superiority

doesn’t creep inside.

I would not like to be in the elite,

nor, of course,

in the cowardly herd,

nor be a guard dog of that herd,

nor a shepherd,

sheltered by that herd.

And I would like happiness,

but not at the expense of the unhappy,

and I would like freedom,

but not at the expense of the unfree.

I would like to love

all the women in the world,

and I would like to be a woman, too--

just once...

Men have been diminished

by Mother Nature.

Why couldn’t we give motherhood

to men?

If an innocent child

stirred

below his heart,

man would probably

not be so cruel.

I would like to be man’s daily bread--

say,

a cup of rice

for a Vietnamese woman in mourning,

cheap wine

in a Neapolitan workers’ trattoria,

or a tiny tube of cheese

in orbit round the moon.

Let them eat me,

let them drink me,

only let my death

be of some use.

I would like to belong to all times,

shock all history so much

that it would be amazed

what a smart aleck I was.

I would like to bring Nefertiti

to Pushkin in a troika.

I would like to increase

the space of a moment

a hundredfold,

so that in the same moment

I could drink vodka with fishermen in Siberia

and sit together with Homer,

Dante,

Shakespeare,

and Tolstoy,

drinking anything,

except, of course,

Coca-Cola,

--dance to the tom-toms in the Congo,

--strike at Renault,

--chase a ball with Brazilian boys

at Copacabana Beach.

I would like to know every language,

like the secret waters under the earth,

and do all kinds of work at once.

I would make sure

that one Yevtushenko was merely a poet,

the second--an underground fighter

somewhere,

I couldn’t say where

for security reasons,

the third--a student at Berkeley,

the fourth--a jolly Georgian drinker,

and the fifth--

maybe a teacher of Eskimo children in Alaska,

the sixth--

a young president,

somewhere, say, modestly speaking, in Sierra Leone,

the seventh--

would still be shaking a rattle in his stroller,

and the tenth...

the hundredth...

the millionth...

For me it’s not enough to be myself,

let me be everyone!

Every creature

usually has a double,

but God was stingy

with the carbon paper,

and in his Paradise Publishing Corporation

made a unique copy of me.

But I shall muddle up

all God’s cards--

I shall confound God!

I shall be in a thousand copies to the end of my days,

so that the earth buzzes with me,

and computers go berserk

in the world census of me.

I would like to fight on all your barricades,

humanity,

dying each night

like an exhausted moon,

and resurrecting each morning

like a newborn sun,

with an immortal soft spot--fontanel--

on my head.

And when I die,

a smart-aleck Siberian Francois Villon,

do not lay me in the earth

of France

or Italy,

but in our Russian, Siberian earth,

on a still-green hill,

where I first felt

that I was

everyone.

Composed and translated from the Russian by Yevgenny Yevtushenko

Loved, copied and pasted by Homeless with a Laptop, That is my Name

"Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Steve Jobs