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The Beatlicks: Joe Speer and Pamela Hirst have permanently moved into their VW camper and are roaming the Southwest in search of poetry and adventure. Currently they are in Nashville to renovate the family  home and get it ready for a new renter. Here's the latest travel report:

Deep in Nash country the work continues. I still wonder at the fact I am here and with so much work ahead of me. Little did I suspect that the work would be so great or thatI would have thousands of insurance dollars to help me see it through. My little house has had a hysterectomy, the bathroom work continues. I didn't know to turn the hot water heater off when I shut off the water so I discovered yesterday that the hot water heater had been ruined. I casually mentioned it to my new old neighbor Joel who along with his wife has moved back into his house after eight years. It's hard to say who has the most work ahead of them, Joel or myself. His house was really trashed.

He was at my front door this morning to tell me he could fix my water heater. I didn't even know he was a heating and air conditioning technician. I just can't believe my luck. I bought two new elements for a few dollars and the system was back up and running within 24 hours.

My sister and brother-in-law brought the woman who is redoing the bathroom floor over this morning. Yes a female and she has got an enviable tool belt I'm here to tell you. My sister helped her out last month so she has ripped out the toilet and sink and redone the bathroom floor for NOTHING. Can you believe this stuff?

As we work on the house the van is parked FEMA trailer style in the driveway and that is where we sleep at night. Every time I walk down the hill to the store I retrace the steps that I walked to elementary school. Yesterday evening I stood at the very place where my father's body flew out of his car and hit the ground when he was struck and killed by a truck driver in 1956.

This is some kind of accounting for me, it's traumatic and sad to see the house in this shape. This little plot of ground is all I have except for my van and the burial plot next to mama out at the cemetery. So I am trying to make things right, make mama proud. LIke the bathroom. The problem there was that the big pipe where the toilet is supposed to be connected has been six inches too far below the floor, I guess for sixty years. Someone put something like a coffeecan on top of the pipe and stuffed old newspapers and plastic bags around it to prop it up and then they set the toilet on top of all that.

Poor work, crap work, no wonder it never worked right all those years. I also found up there are four layers of shingles on the roof. Three is the legal limit. Again somebody took advantage of mama, did a poor job. I can see mama now out in the yard complaining, "I'm just a poor old widow woman."

So it is a long haul to get it all right and it is stressful to wait all this out but I believe I am doing it with a small degree of grace. I have learned and continue to learn if I just stay calm and believe in the best it is all going to work out. I'm going through something here, a mourning for the past, i can harldy find any distinguishing landmarks around the old neighborhood anymore. I'm not young anymore and time has moved on. Proust says all those memories where just little slivers of time, moments now lost.

I have a wonderful new world on the road to get back too and I am eager to begin, but not yet, not yet.

Happy Trails
Beatlick Pamela

Beatlick TR: On the road again

In the last five days I have been through some right of passage in the tiny town of Bayou Vista, LA. I am never going to spend another moment frightened or worried about breaking down. I have fallen into loving arms here in this town and we are so humbled by our fortuitous experience and the obvious unforeseen forces which guide us.
 
My van broke down within five blocks of Randy Jenkins, who has traveled America as a mechanic on the monster truck circuit. He also works on Nitro Harley motorcycles and his son was one of the top "pilots" not racers in the country.
 
I needed a clutch cable and I decided to take the path of least resistance, allow Randy and his neighbors to take us under their wing, and just wait for Michael, my mechanic in Organ, NM, to send me a cable. As it turned out it would have taken just as long for O'Reilly's, an auto parts store next to Wal-Mart, to get me the part. As it turned out the auto parts store would have cost me $80 and I don't know if that included overnight air freight or not. Michael mailed me the cable for less that $30.
 
Randy set us up at his shop where we urban camped for five days. His neighbor Tim invited us to his house everyday to eat, shower, and pass the time. Last night we enjoyed a crawfish boil. Randy's girlfriend Wendy was one of the first female crane and big rig operators here around and about Morgan City. She was a real trailblazer in her day. She and I went blackberry picking along the RR tracks yesterday. They were our dessert last night after all the sausage, crawfish, corn, potatoes, and red onions.
 
Randy got us back on the road this morning and took NO MONEY. I just can't believe the warmth and generosity of these people. We insisted on at least providing them with one good meal, as we did. But they have given us so much more than we gave. From now on I will see breakdowns as opportunities.
 
It took less than two hours to get to NO. I am hooking up with my old girlfriend I used to live with down here. She drove down from Atlanta and I'm gonna call her cell as soon as I finish this report. We are urban camped at the Nix Library on Carrollton Ave. We parked here on our first VW tour right after my momma died. It's like coming home. Hope we can get away with it again. Looks good.
 
Happy Trails to all
Beatlick Pamela

Beatlick TR: Life without stress
 
The earth has shifted under my feet. People write these sojourn type of things like me, and one would expect a

denouement according to formula. And I can't say that I have really had one until this very week.
 
Randy said, "I have lived rich, I have lived poor; I have lived with stress, I have lived without stress; and the life without

stress is the way to go." I believe, I believe.
 
It's not easy to be on the road 24/7 and try to be stress free. But I have reached some kind of new level, a

consciousness, never before achieved by myself. My friend Dana says, "Well I'll read your blog in six months and see if

you are still feeling the same way."
 
But I think I will be feeling this way, further on down the road. I have arrived at some level of realization that is going to

allow me to relax, get into it. I feel this in my heart. In my bones.
 
Yes the earth has shifted. In my favor. I am smack dab in New Orleans in the middle of the Jazz Fest. I was already so

stuffed with crawdads by the time I got here that I went straight to the oysters.
 
Randy got me on the road by 1 p.m. on Thursday. I was at the Columns Hotel eating fried oyster salad by 5 p.m.

catching up with Dana. It has been miraculous. Somebody pinch me.

Happy Trails
Beatlick Pamela

Maple Leaf

We entered New Orleans petticoat level off of Highway 90 intent on seeing old friends at the Maple Leaf Bar open mic poetry readings, hosted by Nancy “Ape Woman” Harris. We have only the workings of our imaginations as to what has happened to those friends since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

I also want to check out Mazant & Burgundy, an address and the name of the mansion where I used to live and serve as a concierge when it was converted into a 14-bed hostel back in the 80s. My friend Dana Kemp owned the place. We had plans to reconvene in the Crescent City as well; we haven’t seen each other in seven years.

We pass intriguing towns with names like Houma, Boeuf, Chacahoula. Out the window of my van the ships,  the water, and the sky bridges let me know I’m drawing nearer. After living in the desert for seven years a return to the south has been a sensory overload.

The assault of green - slap, slap, slap - grass, trees, bushes, understory, upperstory, limbs and leaves amass into a canvas of chartreuse and emerald. The onslaught of rain - drown, drown, drown - we’ve seen more water in one week

than in the last seven years in the Chihuahuan Desert. “Welcome home, sucker!”

The honeysuckle vines, night blooming jasmine, and magnolia blossoms permeate the oxygen. It’s like being embraced in the ample bosom of some well-powdered old aunt. And I must have simply forgotten how loud New Orleans is: the lumbering trolleys, honking cars, music blasting all day and night, buses and trucks honking up the inevitably cracked and uneven pavement of the New Orleans streets.

The Café du Monde holds about half the number of people I remember from the past. The shops are all open on St. Peters street in the Quarter, but few people are shopping for masks and trinkets. Bourbon Street is packed as usual, Canal Street looks the same, and a cursory bus ride through the Bywater shows little damage on the side of the Ninth Ward where I lived.

But over the Industrial Bridge in the Lower Ninth Ward is where all the devastation is still so apparent. The St. Claude bus continues to runs out there, but not far. We ride past closed fast food franchises, block after block, then run into a lone

open barbershop. Six more blocks gets you to Rally’s Pit Stop. Then more blocks of emptiness.

This is the neighborhood where Brad Pitt set up his Make It Right Foundation and offers environmentally friendly, architecturally interesting housing to residents of the area. But according to a recent article in the Times-Picayune many residents who have survived and live there are being inundated with gawkers, international film crews, and folks wanting to see how their donated dollars are being used.  “Sometimes they come in and don’t even knock,” complained a local preacher.

The wheels of change grind exceeding slow here. It’s depressing. Back in the Bywater the old mansion has returned to a private residence. It’s beautiful, better than ever, and the neighborhood looks spruced up with all the fresh paint. I feel a lot better about that. Reconnecting with Dana was a lot of fun, too.

We met at the Columns Hotel on St. Charles. We were parked in the parking lot of the Nix Library on South Carrollton so all we had to do was hop the cable car and it took us right there. Dana was thin, beautiful, and elegant as ever. She’s a retired school teacher and professional photographer now based out of Atlanta. She commandeered the table for the small group of her friends to critique her new book of photography.  All of us, except Joe, were former members of the Institute for Self Actualization, an EST-like group out of the 80s.

My god the fried oyster salad was delicious. We had Heinekens, oysters, chocolate cake and the bill was under twenty dollars. I couldn’t believe it. Somebody must have made a mistake but I didn’t point it out.

For three days Joe and I roamed the Quarter, rode the trolleys, ate pralines, beignets, and French bread po’boys until we were stuffed. We passed on the $50 a day JazzFest activities and listened to them on the radio.

By Sunday I was ready for the poetry reading and the ride out of town. I saw a lot of familiar faces around the bar, it was comforting. These people have suffered so. They aren’t complaining though, they are getting back to the business of partying. A little knot of poets was out in the alley toking up on some good pot. Everyone was drunk and the bartender told me she couldn’t remember my name because she was too high.

They have a saying around here: Decadence - mother’s milk of New Orleans society. I used to fly down from Nashville to go to the Decadence Balls with Dana.

The feature for Sunday afternoon was Bob Goodman, a New Orleanean who now lives outside New York City. He was in town and brought another New York poet with him to share the bill. Two more Manhattanites in their poetry critique group flew down as well - poetry groupies. It was great. And the editor of the Maple Leaf Anthology invited Joe and I to submit to the next publication due out this year.

And the whole town is hustling and bustling to get back into party mode. But these folks have been kicked in the gut, then abandoned. I feel so bad for the way this government has left New Orleans stranded. Most of the recovery here has been done through dogged self-determination. Every neighborhood has an office storefront that does nothing but coordinate non-profits that have sprung up to set things right.

The Maple Leaf will be ground central for the Po’Boy Festival, a new initiative the neighborhood has come up with to help fund their restoration. I highly encourage everyone to make a trip to New Orleans and help this town get back on its feet.
 www.poboyfest.com.

The Trace

We pulled out of Louisiana so stuffed with crawfish, oysters, beignets, and pralines that I have serious doubt of being able to get into my blue jeans now. We made it to the Natchez Trace Parkway slogging through even more rain. The Trace is over four hundred miles long, a non commercial highway with a 50 mph speed limit and no trucks or billboards.

It began as a buffalo trail, then an Indian trading path, and finally in the 1800s a road for Northerners such as Kaintucks and Tennesseans to return home after poling their crops down the Mississippi on rafts. It stretches from Natchez, Mississippi, to Nashville, Tennessee, and its hardwood and bottomland forests were rife with robbers and murderers in the old days.

Even today the dense forest looks intimidating and it isn’t hard to imagine Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson, even Hernando de Soto riding their horses up the Trace. It is still a raw land unencumbered with modernity. Before we had hit mile 51 we saw the most incredible sight - an great American bald eagle. I have seen eagles before in Kodiak, Alaska, and out in the southwestern canyon lands, but nothing like this one. It was enormous with a white head and feet, or claws, I guess.

He was hunkered over a small carcass and swooped off majestically as we passed by gape-mouthed at the wing span.Buzzards are prevalent as well as there is no end to the fresh supply of road kill comprised of rabbits and oppossum.

Throughout the whole trace we encountered wild turkeys, blue heron, and best of all the red birds. I haven’t seen them in seven years out west. Guess they don’t get that far. My sister and I consider redbirds signs of our mother, who loved them so much. “They don’t mix with the other birds; they keep to themselves,” she always claimed.

So as reluctant as I am to return to Tennessee the little redbirds tell me, “It’s gonna be alright.” The trees, so tall, hard, and erect, remind me of the Church of Christ deacons, looking down on my 15-year-old self, judging me, criticizing. But before long the whole scene turned to a green French voile tapestry. The trees patterned until they became aristocrats with curly wigs piled high on their heads, toes extended, turned just right, pirouetting, bowing.

But I am intimidated a little bit to go home. The south did me no favors. Yes, it made me the woman I am, but I am forged from tears and pain, not joy. Forged from struggle not allowance. I honestly believe there is too much blood in the soil of the south. Too much pain has been gleaned from the backs of slaves, from downtrodden poor. Out west it is so clean, so open, so pure. Just pour your self out in the red sunset. I don’t look forward to this trip, but I will go. 

We camped about 100 miles south of Tupelo, Georgia, birthplace of Elvis. The bullfrogs are deafening out in the tupelo, bald-cypress swamp. It rains and rains. We are so pleased that our new van is water tight. We sleep uptop now regardless of the weather.

Next morning we just went for it and plowed on down the highway to Nashville. Last night we slept at Joe’s brother’s home. They haven’t seen each other in seven years.

--------------------------------------

71 Going On 72

I like wild women who drink straight shots
And lick their lips when flirting
I like demure women
Who look like librarians
And wear long dresses that touch the floor
But I've retired from the game
Although not entirely of my own choosing
Forced to sit on the sidelines
And eyeball the show
I watch a young woman walk by
With her jiggling ass
My cock rises to half-mast
A false promise lost in skipped heart beats
that plays tricks with my shadow
Trailing behind like an old junkyard dog
Walking behind his master
Hoping for table scraps

WORDS

There's still meat to these bones
Squeezed like pulp from a ripe orange
Steroid injection metaphors
Grow like a malignant tumor
Deep inside the gut where
No cancer can reach them
These words that scream out for
A necklace of poems
Like a street hawker transcending
A cold winter
No longer a hungry beggar
No longer a lost sailor
In a leaking life raft
Floating aimlessly at sea
Wed to these words
Like a nurse holding on to the hand
Of a dying man

LOVERS LAMENT

We walk hand in hand
Like giddy lovers laughing
After a roller coaster ride
Smelling the heady aroma coming
From Martha's Coffee Shop
Eyes feasting on the city landscape
An armada of images taking hold:
Saturday strollers
Dogs on leashes playing with the
Minds of their masters
Young mothers pushing baby carriages
Temporarily erasing your fears
Of our seventeen year age difference
Last night's passion stirring the juices
Inside me yet again
Your arm linked to mine
As my mind wanders wondering
If we can make it through untold tomorrows
Or will you disappear like a paper cup
Caught in the teeth of a winter storm

WINTER POEM

Chill of winter in the air
Misty fog giving way
To a light rain
Cars spewing deadly exhaust fumes
Windshield wipers flapping like the
Wings of birds in migration
Stone faces hidden behind steering wheels
Give no quarter yield only to the
Red traffic stoplights
Pedestrians looking like mannequins
Turn into penguins scurrying
Across the street
On there way to work
Boarding the morning bus
Pressed together like preserved butterflies
Between the pages of an old
And frayed book

EARLY MORNING POEM

Blue Jay chirps off-tune
Hip-hopping like rap-gangster
Learning life's rhythm

UN TITLED

At 71, death plays with me
Cases my apartment
Like a cat burglar
Sniffing at the four corners
Of my bedroom
Toys with me like a cat
Toys with a spool of thread
On good days he allows
Me a poem or two
Words of thunder
Then the melancholy sets in
Blackbirds flap their wings
Against the window panes
In the kitchen a spicy sauce
Simmers on the back-burner
An opera playing on the radio
Stills the winter chill
Leaves me feeling
Like a drifter walking through
A ghost town

A.D. Winans
San Francisco, CA

DRAGONFLY

dream of dragonfly
on a winter afternoon

me a summer child
at play in a boat
hear the older children jeer

darning needle
darning needle!
stitch up your eyes
fly far away, dragongly!

they were abundant
on our lake
I admired their quick swoop
the long hover over water

remember my grandmother
deft hands
mending our heel worn socks

how she held a darning egg
wove the threads
sewed shut the holes

think now I never saw
such an act of grace and skill
as hers

of course
I never did see
a dragonfly stitch

DALE HARRIS
ALBUQUERQUE, NM
(currently published in BEATLICK NEWS #40)

BEATLICK NEWS LINK HERE AT THE POETRY PAGE