February Poet of the Month Clive Matson

Biography:

Clive Matson began his career as a poet among the Beats in 1960s Greenwich Village. He was mentored and influenced by Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, Diane di Prima, Alden Van Buskirk, Michael McClure, and Herbert Huncke. He is the author of nine volumes of poetry and the creative writing tutorial “Let The Crazy Child Write!” and has been a creative writing teacher for 40 years. Clive is the recipient of the Berkeley Lifetime Achievement in Poetry Award in 2012, was named the Best East Bay Writing Teacher in 2006, received a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles National Award in 2003, and was honored as a Lifetime Beat Laureate in 2023 by the National Beat Poetry Foundation. He also is founder of the online journal Wordswelljournal.org. To learn more, visit his web site.

Backstory:

What inspired me was noticing, in the first days of Covid 19, how dramatically my life and our lives changed. We were following the dictums of staying healthy and of keeping the virus from spreading. These were urgent, life-saving dictums. The question on my mind immediately was how long would the changes last, and what did the new territory look like? How long would the changes keep happening? The poem became a sort of template that many of us followed for several years, right up to the present.

Going to Market

in first corona days
of the sixth mass extinction.

White clouds and blue sky
shrink layer by layer
to the far horizon.

Side effect of the virus:
clean air and minor sound.
No particulates and no dioxides
from idle machines.

Walker approaches, danger! Danger!

Elastic bubbles project around
front to six feet. Avoiding collisions,
muggings, macking, small pox,

and now trillions
of colorful little spiked balls.

Maybe emanating from you.
Maybe emanating from me.

To mask? Or not to mask?

Open the market door
using wrestler techniques:
turn sideways,
elbow out, hook door handle,
push, slide, turn and walk in.

To glove? Or not to glove?

Grapes, dark chocolate, pistachios.
Examine bananas, dish soap
and the store’s first hand wipes
in ten days. Couldn’t find T.P.

What quantity, for two months?
Two days?
Drag my thoughts
through a sea of gluey tension.

No stress. No stress.

Clerk smiles and nods,
a gentle connection.
We handle the receipt with fingertips,
mine sanitized. His gloved.

If I could migrate
this foundation compassion
a half-step closer
my heart would rejoice.
A hundred steps closer.

Last dollar bill the clerk touched
might’ve carried fourteen poisons
ending with HIV, MERS, meth
and now Covid-19.
From nurse of patient on ventilator
and struggling to breathe.

Don’t touch! Don’t touch your face!

Tap four-digit PIN on keyboard,
spray sanitizer on fingers,
wrists, keyboard, receipt.

Wonder on the way out,
was I thorough enough?
Can I retrace my steps
one tentative foot in front of the other?

A pair of towhees
hop across the neighbors’ gray stairs,
peeping as usual.

No change. No change.

Forty-fourth Street residents
meet on porch and stoop,
loop “hellos!”
and arm waves and hip-hop steps
across two lanes of virus free air.
Or virus laden air.

To mask? Or not to mask?

Hummingbird flits in and out
tiny blue flowers in front yard.
Darts
up and perches on electric wire
exact size of its skinny legs.

Peers down. “Still here, these bipeds?
What happened to ‘Hurry-up disease’?
And where’s FOMO?”

I lost my Fear Of Missing Out.
There’s nothing out to miss.

One hot summer’s dehydration
could slay the virus,
invisible mist in invisible air.
Those miniscule clove oranges
ripen their ubiquitous corpses
for scavengers
in micro-micro worlds.

No stress. No stress.

Walker with dog approaches.
Danger! Danger!
Steps around parked car,
skirting
what I might, he might, they might carry.

Wave, smiling, “Hello. Nice day.”
Subtext: “Thanks for the consideration.”

Compassion and self-care link perfectly
in first corona days
of the sixth extinction.

Don’t touch your mouth.
Don’t touch your eye.

Are we looking at sky
for the last time?
Will we wake
again to another beautiful day
in the sixth mass extinction?

Backstory:

What inspired me was a shocking scientific article on pollutants, combined with a casual statement by a friend, who thought the stresses of this century caused people to give themselves “conscience-ectomies.” This poem, and the other poem, are both written with the same mind I used in Hello, Paradise. Paradise, Goodbye, a long epic to be published shortly by New Generation Beat Publications. The topic is this world, and when you step into your topic every day the world seems to talk to you, just as the pagans believed. And the poet pays attention to whatever it seems to be saying. The causal comment resonated with the article on pollutants, and together they gave birth to this poem. I am probably more the secretary to this poem than its originator.

Flak Back

God is love. If you’re drugged
or if you’re not drugged.
Ugh. Have another puff.

“When did you get out of hell?”
asks Patty’s mom.

Rosy cheeks smoothed
with petroleum products,
pock marks and liver spots
disguised and beautified.

Hanging by a thread
and the thread’s unraveling.

“Oh those! Awards and emblems
for the immune system.”
It works such a lot!
Overtime, double-time, twenty-four seven.

It is what it is.
Sun at midday zenith.

Huh? Take one hit of acid, okay?
Get the message. Hang up the phone.
Blows the filters away
and your sight’s restored.

“I never went to hell,” says Patty, outraged.

“Oh yeah! You’re right!
We built hell up around you.”

It is what it is.
Sun at midday zenith.

Chemical goop. Chemical soup.

Di-chloro-fluoro-methane
and polypropylene on top,
one level down: dioxin, nano-plastics,
carbon-eight chain forever molecules,
perchlorate and sodium glyphosate
somewhere under the paint,
leaking out their corroding cells.

It is what it is.
Sun at midday zenith.

Two hundred plus chemicals
and pesticides in our bloodstreams
not there before 1910.
Plus a few unidentified.

“You’re not feeling so good?”
Oh, they have a pill for that.
Another one for side effects.
One more for the second tier.

Ugh. Have another puff.

The Hippies were right.

Study of environment poisons
one year out of the Dark Ages.
Maybe two.
Eight mutations enough
to turn a healthy cell to cancer.
One atom plutonium is nice
and will suffice. Makes dozens.

No pill for that. Thanks, everyone:
U.S.A., Russia, France, China,
Pakistan, North Korea.

I’ve already got my plutonium quota,
stuck to my bones. Ten or fifteen atoms
from the several metric tons
you dumped into our atmosphere.

Have another puff. Ugh.

Plutonium in linoleum and petroleum.

The Hippies were right.

Natural poets of the uncertain bridge.
Natural poets of the chaos future.
Natural poets of the chaos today.

God is love. If you’re drugged
or if you’re not drugged.
Ugh. Have another puff.

Atonal dissonance in the twentieth century
noticed something’s wrong.
Then, no results.
Now, results.

“Conscience-ectomy” tops the list.
No end to the number of ills.

You’ll get no flak back on that.

Stumbling into the sixth mass extinction
rolling joints
and downing pills.