David Hilton

"Finding a Chet Baker Album in the Dimestore 2-for-$1 Pile" I His face not much older than mine in the class of '56 photo when I gave in borrowed my buddy's tie split the back of his one-button roll &said "Aw righty, jack, take your picture, I'm beautiful." Never bought a yearbook. So finding him in this stack of losers, flush against a JFK memorium & a Cleopatra soundtrack, looking innocent of smack- young-man-with-a-horn hair, blue eyes wiped blank like the "most creative" boy's whose photo doesn't show he hides fuckbooks under a railroad bridge & jacks off like crazy, never going home, as freight-cars couple overhead blackening his clench-eyed scream of pre-poetry finding his blurred face, called Polkadots and Moonbeams, is a shock of looking back into a mirror of lips that moaned to suck on big strong poems and blow the long tough sweet tone of that genius horn. II I was just too young, 17, to do it, to flee across the Bay to beat cellars where the wine, weed, jazz & poetry were free! & too dumb & scared, couldn't even grow a beard. Years pass. Alone as Adam: no choice but get cool on my own: chose, finally, women & words: folksingers with long brown hair, strong on racial justice, dialogue, meaningful relationships (I always had to piss- snuck 6-packs into the coffeehouse). III Years pass, delusions of happiness, bliss, as the Nation awoke to suicide slowly, because there was always we & the bed would rush like Mingus flow like Adderley & curl & drift away like the last lost breath of Miss Anita O'Day, and she would hold me preciously until I couldn't hear the bombs or smell the flesh & words returned like high white geese their honking falling lightly a pure snow of sound around our bed, around my head, and I thought it would never end. But she found out, inevitably, that it was true what Grandma told me what my father confirmed & mother declined to deny, that I was the Devil's child cursed with a wild need to find him, my real Pap, the Devil-and to see a sign, any clue, I'd rip my bones apart & drink my brain. Yes, she knew it was true: I was crazy. So, so long, poet. IV But now, fuck it, I'd do it- Go be a beatnik! "Big Daddy Dave" twining my lines up the stems of his music while graybeard angels & devils nod in the smoke, eyes shut forever, murmuring cool cool cool heavenly as if junk & Europe never happened to him nor her America to me. Back