Life Sentence
By: David Lerner
I am an angry man no longer young my dreams have been out in all the weather I used to make up highway exits as I went along and rattle my fever at strangers I am an angry man no longer young who turned out to be a genius after all what a moron sometimes I get so tired of so many different things at once I panic I am an angry man no longer young the wire gets higher each day and I know the gun is loaded sentenced to the sky preaching a desperate kind of arithmetic which won't be gathered until the clouds are full of hungry prisoners
You can find David Lerner’s hard-hitting published works of poetry at Zeitgeist Press.
“Lerner was a broken-down saint if there ever was one. He was an eloquent screamer, a soft-spoken rageoholic, a madman with a great manuscript. His poetry will always be a reminder of a time when poetry in the Mission was spontaneous, magical, and more than a little bit dangerous.” — Bucky Sinister, San Francisco Bay Guardian
Some poets live forever on the edge; their lives seem like some impossible high-wire act in which they push the limits to see what they are capable of:
I am an angry young man
no longer young
the wire gets higher each day
and the gun is loaded
David Lerner died too young (not from a bullet, but from a drug overdose). Did he believe that poetry would save him? At one point he believed it would save the world - that it would reawaken the soul in modern life, where so often it seemed so absent. Thanks to Poetic Outlaws for publishing this, for keeping his angry soul alive.
Whenever you post David's poems I get a bunch of different feelings. One is just the passage of time, how thirty-five years is both yesterday and centuries ago. I didn't know David long or well, he was in SF and me in LA, but we were tight; linked by poetry, addiction, and family, his aunt and uncle dear, dear friends of mine. But now, when I read him with all that time in rear-view I am able to appreciate the poetry separate from the person. He was difficult, boorish, needy-- his rage and hurt flying both out at the world and in at himself. He wanted to be famous and despised himself for it. The cat was A LOT to deal with and all of this was attached to the work! But when I read the poems on here (with him long gone), I always think the same thing-- Motherfucker, that was a real poet!