2 Poems by A. D. Winans

BACK FROM AN MRI

Back from an MRI
Brain Scan
I listen to a Miles Davis album
Black Hawk San Francisco 1962
Where a young Latina and I
Grooved on the vibes

Here at home
Jazz in my head jazz in my bed
Jazz waking up the dead
Miles, Charlie Parker, and Lester Young
Serenade an army of poets
Sitting on my bookshelf

T.S. Eliot playing the banker
Walt Whitman walking the battlefields
Williams Carlos Williams suturing wounds

Kaufman walking the streets of New York
Juggling a “Golden Sardine”
Sings a duet with Billie Holiday

Blake playing cards with God
Lorca playing Russian Roulette
Micheline dancing with Mingus
Gary Snyder building word bridges
And suddenly I’m not alone anymore
The words falling like soft rain
In a winter green garden


DIGITAL AGE

I told you not to take a snapshot
I don’t photograph well
But you did nevertheless
And sent it to me by means of attachment
And there it was on the screen
In black and white
The only colors that matter
And it split into two parts on the screen
Neither of them doing me justice
An injustice I am sure not intended
This faceless face staring back at me
Smashed into a thousand lines
This snapshot like an empty face
Stuffed away in a shoebox
In the far corner of a closet
Like a series of quick winks lost
In cyber space


Bionote

A.D. Winans is an award winning native San Francisco poet and writer.  In 2006 he won a PEN Josephine Miles award for excellence in literature.  In 2009 PEN Oakland presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.  In 2015 he received a Kathy Acker award in poetry and publishing.  www.winansfansite.blogspot.com