Ken Kakareka

William Taylor Jr. 

There’s a poet 
I admire, 
William Taylor Jr. 
He’s kind of like 
the underground voice 
of San Francisco. 
He’s not aware 
that he’s on 
my radar 
but maybe after 
this poem. 
If I get a chance 
to talk to him 
I’ll say 
listen, 
enough with 
the references 
to the old writers – 
Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, 
and Bukowski. 
I’m guilty of it, 
too – 
I know 
you miss them. 
But all this 
name-dropping 
isn’t going to 
bring them back. 
It’s up to 
you and me 
now 
to carry the torch. 
We both live and write 
in California. 
You cover the North 
and I’ll cover the South. 
We’ll be correspondents 
for the written word. 
And if you get 
a collection published 
with City Lights, 
would you mind 
name-dropping 
for me?

***

Originally published at The Beatnik Cowboy

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s