Love At 19th & Guerrero

By Mel C. Thompson

These love poems were inspired by my admiration for three people who had been, in the early 1990s, regular performers in the Café Babar poetry scene, but have since passed on. The book was inspired by my profound sense of loss when the news came in from Michigan that Dominique Lowell had passed on in June of this year, 2017, just four years after Joie Cook. Eli Coppola had left us back in the year 2,000. Each of these women had something that was irreplaceable, a particular style of communicating, not just in their manner of speaking, but also in their manner of listening. My experience of them had one common thread, and that was my feeling, whenever I left their presence, that I had been deeply heard. And here I am not referring to the kind of technique-filled faux-humility that passes for good listening now. (In this Neo-Victorian age mere self-suppression and blandness are mistaken for good listening, and simple enthusiasm and expressiveness are counted as bad listening.) Instead, I'm talking about empathy. This is not to say that these listeners didn't all have their dark sides, but rather, it is to say that they were the kind of people I felt I could call and simply say what I was feeling, however frightened and lonely I might be. And, having opened my deepest self up to them, I walked away feeling known. Some of these relationships never went further than conversation, and some went a bit beyond that. The poems can speak to that matter for themselves. In any case, they were each, in their own way, quite obviously muses, and not just for me, but for many other men and women. Perhaps a hardbound volume could be filled if one were to gather all of the love-poems and tribute-verses written for them, whether publicly or privately. This short tract of poems, collected from several other books, letters and magazines, is a tribute to the vibrancy, the generosity, and the concern these fantastic people showed me. I miss them every day of my life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mel C. Thompson
• Release date: Sep 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370223756

Mel C. Thompson

Mel C. Thompson is a retired wage slave who survived by working through temp agencies and guard agencies. Unable to survive in the real world of full-time, permanent work, he migrated from building to building, going wherever his agencies sent him, doing any type of work he could feign competency in and staying as long as those fragile arrangements could last. He somehow managed to get a B.A in Philosophy from Cal-State Fullerton in spite of his learning disorders and health problems. Unable to sustain family life due to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, lack of transportation and lack of income, he lives alone in low-income housing and wanders around California on buses and trains. He began writing at the age of 14 and continues till the current day. (He turns 64 in June of 2023). In his early years he wrote pathetic love poetry until, in his thirties, he was engulfed by cynicism and fell in with a group of largely antisocial poets who wrote about the underground life of drugs, sex, alcohol, poverty, prostitution, heresy, isolation and alienation. In his fortes he turned to prose and began to write religious fiction with an emphasis on the comedic aspect of theology and philosophy. He now writes short novels focusing on the attempt to find meaning in a economic world beset with money laundering, unethical marketing, contraband smuggling, human trafficking, patent trolling, corrupt contracting and every manner of spiritual and psychological desperation and degradation. When he is not writing, he wanders from hospital to medical clinic to surgical room attempting to sustain what little health he has left after a lifetime of complications resulting from birth defects and genetic problems. When he is able, he engages in such hobbies as reading, walking, yoga and meditation; and whenever there is any money left over from his healthcare-related quests, he goes to wine tastings and searches for foodie-related bargains. Before the pandemic, he spent many years gaming various travel-points systems and wrangled many free trips to Europe. He is divorced and has no children, no pets, no real estate, no stocks nor any other assets beyond the $550 in his savings account. His career peaked in the early 2000s when he did comedy gags for a radio station and had about 10,000 listeners per week. However, currently, he may have as few as five active readers on any given day. He no longer has the stamina to promote his work and only finds new readers through ran...

Book preview

Love At 19th & Guerrero

Mel C. Thompson

Copyright © 2017

Mel C. Thompson Publishing

Mel C. Thompson

3559 Mount Diablo Boulevard, #112

Lafayette, CA 94549

[e-mail]

Table of Contents

Poems For Dominique

Carrying The Torch

19th & Valencia

Your Personal Chrisian Song Leader

One More Candle!

Your Real Name Is Janis

PM Letter

On The Search For God In Detroit

Poems For Joie

Always Eternally Joie

The Seeds We Planted

When She Moved To Polk Street

Higher Consciousness Through Coffee

Letter To Joie

To Joie As The World Moves On

Poems For Eli

1. Poems For A Woman Named Eli

2. Poems For A Woman Named Eli

Eli 2017

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Other Smashwords Ebooks by Mel C. Thompson

POEMS FOR DOMINIQUE

Carrying The Torch

Return To Table of Contents

I still love your plump, junkie ass,

How you keep almost dyin’ young,

Your scratchy, nervous whiskey talk.

I’m still hooked on the sober home

We never shared, the way cops

Leered at us, your calls from rehab,

Your battles with customs agents,

The creative creeps you slept with,