Harvey Goldner is a poet neglectorino in the classic sense, his poems rising up out of the fecund Seattle underground wisely irritated with the stupid Republicanized world but lucky enough to remember the 1950 Memphis dreams that Little Richard, Gandhi, and Elvis promised us all.



Lunch & Love at the Bardo
Sitting at the outdoor Bar & Grill of the Bardo
Hotel halfway down Baja California, eating
chicken enchiladas, we gaze. Our eyes graze out
over the round ocean, our ancestral homestead.

The vast blue turning Sky & Sea is on fire
and very small, and there's plenty of room
in her little brown eyes for more than
one sun, one sky, one Pacific Ocean.

Each enchilada contains a stadium of hushed fans.
Each enchilada contains a sellout crowd
of roaring faces. We each eat two and
then go for a long walk along the beach.

We walk the edge until the earth
turns us away from the churning
blue and-cuckoo clock sudden-
towards a deep black heaven pumping stars.

Hand in hand we barefoot back to the Bardo & Bed
for some happy happy boom boom.
And afterwards she says: "O Harvey,
we have everything, except money."

Harvey Goldner is that old guy who drives cab on Sundays in Seattle to keep body and soul together. To do this, he says, he must transform himself into a R.A.T. The rest of the week he is himself-underground poet and curmudgeon who is mapping out the narrow perilous road to immortality on the Internet. No luck so far.