Ptr Kozlowski


Jack Is The One Who Surfed

Robert Louis Stevenson got here before me,
story telling and gathering and chasing his shortened life.
He knew Princess Ka'iulani when she was growing up,
and inscribed some sweet verses in her little red-plush album
in the shade of the big banyon tree.
Not me. I've got a former Miss Hawaii doing
public service spots on the TV. She's pretty.
But when Mark Twain was here he hiked right out into Kilauea Caldera
up so close to the lake of lava, in the crater Hale Ma'u Ma'u,
that he could feel the ground he was walking on
start burning through his shoes.
And I'm leaning on the rail at a Park Service overlook,
checking my mobile device for the latest news.

Jack London checked it out. He found himself a leper to write about.
An archetypal symbol of his people's plight type leper no less.
Good work, Jack.
But you know, Hansen's Disease is treatable now.
And we've got something that isn't.
They say the terrain of the Big Island, viewed from above, facing West,
may resemble a female torso. But if so,
Mother Nature’s got a lump in her breast
at a spot called Pohakuloa.
They had to practice with that stuff somewhere,
before shooting it around over in Kosovo —
that Depleted Uranium weaponry, don't you know.
Rich in chemical toxicity - and with ionizing radiation to boot —
now scattered irretrievably on a dry altitude
in a place that the local folk still think is sacred.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Somerset Maugham.
You've got Footprints In The Jungle?
How about footprints in the tangle
of organic polymers down on Kamilo Beach.
That's where they used to catch logs floating over
from the Pacific Northwest,
and now it's a giant landing zone
for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Coffee cups from Puerta Vallarta, and old DVD cases from Vancouver,
plus the occasional toothbrush dropped from a cruise ship
passing in the night, and there's now more plastic sand on that beach
than there is the old fashioned kind.

Jack London's leper was right,
when he saw us coming, to run for the hills.
They say the plague came from Asia,
and the saints came from Europe,
and he'd rather have done without both.
Impassioned to climb up deep among
the fronds and stems and petals,
and bleed back into the earth that had given him birth,
his secreted death one last uncolonized act.
Ko'olau the leper's story was straight.
And Jack London is the one who got it.
He could feel it in his bones like the wind in the sails of his ketch.
And you know, out of all these several writers, myself included,
Jack’s the only one who learned to surf when he was here.
Jack is the one who surfed.



kiss to kiss

you know that
some people love from the waist up, and
some people like it with the top down, and
some people love you like you're someone that's above them,
some people call it love and then they treat you like dirt.
You know that Venus ain’t nothing but a fly trap sometimes, so
why don't we just start with the eye to eye, and
why don't we just start with the kiss to kiss.

I mean like sure I can kiss your whatever
at one time or another,
and you can bite whatever of mine,
but why don't we just start with the side by side,
with the beat, and in rhyme.

we could just start with the real to real,
and we could just start with the toe to toe,
with the arm in arm and hip to hip, with the
eye to eye and breath to breath.

some people make love like a weekend sport
they even have leagues, to hear them talk,
it's an anti-depressant, a gold mine for gossip,
a dietary supplement of sorts.

I want it to be more like person to person,
I want it to be more like somebody I know,
I want it to be more like
give to give, and take to take,
I want it to be more like face to face. So

why don't we just start with the strength to strength, and
why don't we just start with the risk for risk,
why don't we just start with the heart to heart,
and why don't we just start with the kiss to kiss.





Ptr Kozlowski has driven a lot of trucks and cars and cabs, set type in letterpress shops, and had to throw the drunks out when managing in a movie house. He was singing and songwriting and playing guitar in Folk Rock and New Wave configurations, and writing poems along the way. Now he lives in Brooklyn and reads and performs around the New York Area.

His poems have been published in Hobo Jungle, Stained Sheets and South Florida Poetry Journal, in anthologies of Brownstone Poets, Performance Poets Association and Great Weather for Media.
 
 
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