The Legend Fanniesson

(after reading Mike Fanniesson)

When I finished reading
the man’s poetry I began
to see the whole of legend
Fanniesson as it formed, fabled
and brassy as any that sprang
from the bucolic backstreets
of the Bronx, crazy as the friends
of Bukowski, down-town as
Kerouac & Ginsberg’s coterie
of beatific, rhythmic rhetoric.

And the man still won’t
waste words embellishing
what he doesn’t see, he
punches it straight and clean,
creating pictures in words
which we know to be
both his and our stable
and back-home truths.

Believe me, the poetry of the
street has a new youthful Jesus,
an evangelist who spreads his
words in the dialect of the bus stop,
subway and tram, whose
phrases will hop into use from
the street cars and drop-in bars,
radiate from the stadiums, be
shouted from billboards and
echoed along freeways.

Gather on the streets and hear
how his legend was born,
hear what is said by acolytes
sworn to tell it like it is.
Mike Fanniesson.
Renaissance man. And
you heard it from me.
© I.D. Carswell

You can read 420 poems by Mike at http://poemhunter.com/fanniesson/