Bill Rode Sunlight’s Stream
He stood unbound, brilliant booming pitch
Daring fame’s too short a lease to tire
An overworked Queen and a burst poet’s appendix orphaned
Crazy uncles, old world advice, newspaper boy in Café’s
Circulating telegraph messages on windy roads
While genocide visited the Armenian Night
He discovered San Francisco and New York
Flustered wasps, street walkers, huddled denizens
Gamblers, dancers, poor and burning Arabs, American foundation
All the way up and down the Malaga vines
He made Paris and Fresno come and go speaking brittle reflection
Rivers of lust and untaxed piping pride, stories in starring flight
He hung his hat tipped to the East
Witty wicked waste, soaked in passionate delight
Vye, Vye, Vye, he would intone, smiling like an onion’s scrape
By a mortal bite of life foretold to insipid academigaudy scorn
I once heard him confess Shaw was his inspiration, not the rest
Hello out there! He said to whomever I myself will inspire
While Miller, Kerouac and Albee tool their queues
To burst through the gates and wound the engenues
He was Saroyan to the end. A farmer’s boy,
A poet’s son, an observant crier of Our Town
Highlands and merchants pranced in his glare
Striking a portable typewriter, a machine gunner’s flare
Channeling Whitman, funneling impressionist colors
Like butterflies captured on a punctured canvas
The daring young man, endless cartwheels in the sand
(Happy 100th Birthday William Saroyan:
Thanks for the chiseled world of words
that keep singing in my ears)
Bedros Afeyan
8-9-2008
San Diego, CA
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