Sunday, July 18, 2010

Blackberry Motorist

If you look hard enough, you can find anything on the web. These are two of my favorite Richard Brautigan poems:
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Blackberry Motorist

The blackberry vines grew all around and climbed like green dragon tails the sides of some old abandoned warehouses in an industrial area that had seen its day. The vines were so huge that people laid planks across them like bridges to get at the good berries in the centre of them.
There were many bridges reaching into the vines. Some of them were five or six planks long and it took careful balancing to get back in there because if you fell off, there were nothing but blackberry vines for fifteen feet or so beneath you, and you could really hurt yourself on their thorns.
This was not a place you went casually to gather a few blackberries for a pie or to eat with some milk and sugar on them. You went there because you were getting blackberries for the winter's jam or to sell them because you needed more money than the price of a movie.
There were so many blackberries back in there that it was hard to believe. They were huge like black diamonds but it took a lot of medieval blackberry engineering, chopping entrances and laying bridges, to be successful like the siege of a castle.
'The castle has fallen !'
Sometimes when I got bored with picking blackberries I used to look in the vines. You could see things that you couldn't make out down there and shapes that seemed to change like phantoms.
Once I was so curious that I crouched down on the fifth plank of a bridge that I had put together way out there in the vines and stared hard into the depths where thorns were like the spikes on a wicked mace until my eyes got used to the darkness and I saw a Model A sedan directly underneath me.
I crouched on that plank for a long time staring down at the car until I noticed my legs were cramped. It took me about two hours to tunnel my way with ripped clothes and many bleeding scratches into the front seat of that car with my hands on the steering wheel, a foot on the gas pedal, a foot on the brake, surrounded by the smell of castle-like upholstery and staring from twilight darkness through the windshield up into green sunny shadows.
Some other blackberry pokers came along and started picking blackberries on the planks above me. They were very excited. I think it was the first time they had ever been there and seen blackberries like that. I sat there in the car underneath them and listened to them talk.
'Hey, look at this blackberry !'
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Richard Brautigan - San Francisco
This poem was found written on a paper bag by Richard
Brautigan in a laundromat in San Francisco. The author is unknown.

By accident, you put
Your money in my
Machine (#4)
By accident, I put
My money in another
Machine (#6)
On purpose, I put
Your clothes in the
Empty machine full
Of water and no
Clothes

It was lonely.

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