Punk Rocking at the Skeleton Club in San Diego, 1979

White boys, girls, shake their heads,
leap like tall African warriors
(Sell out to the corporate structure),
bump, push, ricochet round
like street crowds in Berlin
(Sell out and get your pay).
Each song ends, and they fall,
startled statues in a sunless garden
(Sell out to the corporate structure).
Night fails, and the band skulks off
like passing through dimension
(Find a way to get your pay).
The young call from this side:
Blood! Hate! Fear! Death!
(Find a way to get your pay).
And the old answer from the other:
Dachau! Auschwitz! Belsen's breath!
(You'll find a way to get your pay).


(Ketzer, 1979; lyrics within parenthesis by The Dinettes)

Riding the Airlines after a Major Air Disaster

Through the window it occurred to me,
among the seated expectation,
briefcase's sad reflection,
that I'd rather be a sailor
sure to ride the rabid sea
than to let this life let go of me.
I've seen too much of Sagan
dropping feathers of the soul
into the weighted citizenship
of looking-glass black holes.
I don't feel a cosmic race
out there waltzing time away,
and since what we can see
is not enough to say
one way or the other,
I think I'd rather stay,
to drink my days
like scalding tea
and smile to think
God's watching me.


(Arkansas Magazine, Arkansas Democrat, 1985)

Getting Down

In this town, slow down, let down, back down,
anyway you want down, goddamn downtown,
what's going down, clown, show down,
get down, low down, kneel down,
blow me down, hands down,
this town, mows me down,
I'm down, going down,
crazy down.



(SKJ, 1983)

George Winston

The rustle of people arriving too late;
the dark silhouette of heads, professionals
surprised by the attendance of Bohemians,
and they equally surprised as if
either could claim ownership of a man's genius
that he would be reluctant to claim himself
knowing not from whence it came,
so he let it go to flow and mutate,
repetition being the death of creation.
I mean, it did not sound like the record, but
each autumn leaf fell unique as a snowflake,
and each mind painted it oak or birch,
aspen or maple, flat or curved,
crisp or pliable, pirouetting or gliding on a breeze,
the leaf's journey from stem to ground,
the ages, and back again, if it pleases you,
or not so much the leaf or leaves at all,
but a solitary figure strolling through a wood,
stopping, gazing, listening;
childhood seasons lost
in autonomic ways, the days thereof,
that gathered and gathered up,
turned liquid and ran through the fingers,
so that Winston, a moth dancing about his head,
not satisfied with the given keys,
reaches inside the piano
to softly tap the strings:
Footsteps leaving.


(Ketzer: Winston concert in Little Rock, May 1986)