Monday, February 18, 2013

One Eleven Bus




Florence Avenue

The one eleven bus slices through
the layers of Los Angeles
and lays bare the sinews
and marbled muscles of her thighs

City Bus Center
Inglewood Crenshaw
Western and Vermont
Normandy acid
of anger and hate
etched into the intersection
Broadway and Avalon
Central Avenue

Central Avenue
The black South
come to work the heavy metal
of the booming Southland
And live to sounds of
Big Joe Turner
Lionel Hampton
Central Avenue Breakdown
drifting from the
now quiet Dunbar Hotel

Alameda Santa Fe
Pacific Boulevard

an artery swelling
with the post war
white blue collar
California Dream
then collapsing with
the shuttered factories and
boarded up store fronts

to fill again with
vibrant multi colored
horns and guitarrons
spices and sweet language of
the fruit of the Americas

On through Downey
and finally Norwalk
as the tides of people
move around the globe
and beneath the asphalt
the earth shifts

Take the Metro Green Line
for the return trip

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Circling Venice

I am excited to announce the publication of my first collection of poems, "Circling Venice."


Here is the marketing blurb ...

A stunning first book from Frank Kearns. A private life revealed in quick snapshots that mirror adolescent America’s mythic migration westward in the 70’s. His long time west coast home differs from the places where he began, changed by one simple act of will: “Cars were the way out…I started the car.”

Kearns writes with a laconic Yankee directness of his journey, and in his orbiting perspective he gives us stops in time and stops in places. “Always the woods,” he says of his New England childhood, “hilly, laced with decaying stone walls, glades of sunshine, pockets of cool cool dark.” Once in the Venice of “the people’s parks and food co-ops,” the unexpected courtship of a muse illuminates his poems.

If you are curious, previews are available on Amazon.com ... but contact me and I will make sure you get a copy!