PROUD GODS AND COMMODORES Volume II: Selected Poetry and Epic Tales

By James McMillan

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669871231

James McMillan

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Copyright © 2023 by James McMillan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 09/05/2023

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Dedication

This book is dedicated, first of all, to Dr. Minghelli Lieu, cardiovascular surgeon, without whom not only would there be no book, but no me as well. No bullshit, Dr. Lieu, no bullshit.

Also my deepest respect and heartfelt appreciation to all the nurses and all the staff of the cardiovascular intensive care unit at Doctors Hospital, Modesto, California. Each of you, for me, was like a hand of God.

My special thanks to John the nurse—big guy, 60 years old, gray beard—reminded me of Santa Claus who, when I awoke from that heart attack, no idea where I was or what had happened, what seemed a shotgun wound in my chest, tubes and ducts running in me and out of me, bags of liquids dangling over me like a chorus of told-you-so’s, John looked down on me and said, Doc, you were not on the train to oblivion, but you were sure standing on the platform. Thanks, John, from all my heart still beating and thumping because of you and the others, encouraging me and inspiring me even when I thought nothing was left in the tank.

Also, I want to give a special shout-out and grateful thanks to everyone at Cardiac Rehab in Downtown Modesto for helping me and encouraging me.

Wayne Cheung

Nicole Wilson

Samantha Samra

Felix Soto

Mikaela Delacruz

Every one of you is a saint to me and always will be to the end of my days.

God bless you all.

PROUD GODS

AND COMMODORES II

God is dead.

A phrase echoing today throughout the hallowed halls and corridors of Academia, a concept lifted from the works of the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche—he who also created the concept of the Superman, Ubermensch, an idea seized and exploited eagerly by Nazis and triggered unspeakable horror worldwide upon the earth. Is it possible concepts are like people—defined by the company they keep—and therefore to have one is surely to have the other?

But delights to him, who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, stands forth his own inexorable self—who condemns all sin, though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. And eternal delights shall be his who coming to lay him down can say, ‘Oh Father, mortal or immortal here I die. I’ve striven to be thine more than this world’s or mine own. Yet this is nothing. I leave eternity to thee, for what is man if he should live out the lifetime of his God.’

— Father Mapple (Moby Dick)

Author’s Note Volume One

When I was young I ran with San Francisco’s counterculture revolutionaries, wanting to burn it all down, even a trek to Cuba for a radical meeting with Fidel, cutting sugarcane with him, then at dinner all of us eagerly listening to his self-serving yet sometimes rhapsodic even humorous exhortations on El Pueblo and revolution, unleashing within us that Ubermensch Derangement Syndrome that your humanity has proved itself superior to others, therefore empowering you over them, including of course a lynch mob if necessary.

Later because of injury I virtually fell into Chiropractic college, a Damascus experience, Saul to Paul.

Though this book is not about chiropractic at all, it does reflect the profound change its holistic study and philosophy inspired in me.

What an adjustment is to the body, a good poem is to the soul.

A number of poems in this collection are what’s called maguffins, which is an old Alfred Hitchcock term for plot devices, the hinges upon which the plot swings but really they themselves are not essential to the story.

A classic example is the stolen money in Psycho, or the gold or whatever it is in the briefcase of Pulp Fiction, or even one could say the black bird itself in the movie Maltese Falcon or the Memphis Belle in Memphis Belle—all just devices to evolve the cast of characters and move the story yet in themselves are not really essential to the story or especially to character resolution, just devices to keep things moving along, as opposed to HAL in 2001, a villain at the time when society was paranoid about computers. But thirty years into it, the computer age, HAL redeems himself in 2010—itself a disappointing and pretentious film in which HAL’s redemption, courage, and self-sacrifice are the most interesting, most noble, and by far the most moving of all the human interactions of that film . . . just saying.

Several poems in this collection, especially the first, The Rape of Athena, and all of the tales are exactly that—maguffins—they’re ostensibly written by various characters in the two epic sagas I am currently writing, as well as the several excerpts in these volumes taken directly from those sagas:

The Journal of Taranis the Helvetian,

the Man Who Loves Wild Red cat Woman,

Kazhana the Akatani

and

HighPockets and the Blue Guitar,

Searching for the Face of God

I know, I know, those titles sound pretentious, but you’ll just have to thank my middle son for that. Besides, who of us is not pretentious whenever the moment is right? Not you, Mom!

So the maguffins in this collection are so marked and noted. The rest are all my own poems and gnarly haiku, pretty much in chronological order. I hope you find some you like.

At the end of both volumes I’m including the introduction and prefaces to both those two sagas I’m writing. My hope is that all this is a teaser to whet your appetite for them. We shall see.

Jim McMillan

Author’s Note Volume Two

This work was first published in one volume—a hefty tome to be, truthful, one that could hold down a stack of papers in a Category One hurricane. Carrying it in one hand demanded you counterbalance a weight in the other, no doubt about it.

Problem solved. Voilá! Not one overweight volume but now split into two volumes, and Volume II now in your hands, and also including two essays I’ve recently written.

As said in Author’s Note Volume I, a number of these poems are like Hitchcock maguffins (my spelling) —devices upon which the plot swings but are not themselves core to the mood or impact of the story or tale. The stolen money in Psycho, for example, or the letters of transit in Casablanca, or the Maltese falcon actually in The Maltese Falcon.

Recently on television is Downton Abbey, itself a maguffin, and especially so The Force in Star Wars upon which or within which or because of which characters do change big time and develop, but The Force itself essentially never changes—the greatest maguffin of all time.

A number of these poems are just that, maguffins, and are so marked and explained as if they were written by characters in my two ongoing sagas, and thus affect the flow of events around the characters of those sagas. Incidentally, I hope to have the first volume of each saga itself come out a bit later this year.

HighPockets and the Blue Guitar

Searching for the Face of God

and

The Journal of Taranis the Helvetian,

The Man Who Loves Wild RedCat Woman,

Kazhana the Akatani

My hope, my very presumptuous hope, is that the poems and tales you find here in these first two volumes not only whet your appetite for those two sagas but that you also find some here that reach out and touch you, whether mind or heart or maybe even spirit, even though spirit itself is an ongoing debate in both these sagas. We shall see.

Remember, I am a chiropractor of many years and still practicing, and as said in Volume 1—What an adjustment is to the body, a good poem is to the soul. I believe I’ve earned the right to say that.

James McMillan, February 2022

CONTENTS

Author’s Note Volume One

Author’s Note Volume Two

SELECTED POEMS

The Old Woman on Haight Street

Light

Blood Sun

Allen Ginsberg

Preface to Sometimes River

Kong

Alayne, Inside and Out

Springtime

Soldier’s Farewell to Lady Lear

Forbidden Passion, Purple Garden

Rescue

Marzipan Chocolate

Parameter/Axis

On the Beach in Shirt and Tie

Kojak Telly Savalas

Whatever Happened to Zeus and the Gang?

For Lois, with Respect

Harsh Noise/Bitch Slap

Driving by Every Day

Tsunami

Science And The Thing!

Poets Are Loss Leaders

Surprise Delight

La Bohéme Rebuked

Three-Bull Breakout

Old Lovers, Endless Rue

Existentialism

Blackout

Ancient Waters

Prime Directive

Prodigal

Pilar

Niobe’s Tears

Old Man By A Mirroring Pool

Abundance

Sick

Summer Day in San Francisco

Fortune Cookie

Being

Contrition

Méa Culpa

The Human Condition

Concern

For Miss Mary Madelin

Act of God

The Fleet Schooner Sarah Keyes

The Monsignor’s Version of the Lord’s Prayer

Eulogy of an Old Montana Farmer For His Wife Buried by Big Sky River

ESSAYS

The Periodic Table of Character

Who You Gonna Be

Barbarosa and Graykor/Bound Spirits

Preface to the Tales of Koji

EPIC TALES

Me and Mary

Tale Of The Skarn

The Warrior Kind

Last Chat With Serq

Shoogie And The Creole Girl

The Monster In the Closet

Old Man With Blue Guitar

The Scarlet Knight Meets The Whore Of Babylon

(This poem was originally begun, believe it or not, on the crowded streets of San Francisco during the Summer of Love in 1967, and influenced hugely by Allen Ginsberg and Howl, and my writing it then into some notebook that was later mislaid but its last lines have carried with me word for word here in my head all these years, demanding this last attempt at a recall.

She was an old woman who lived alone in a ground-floor flat on Haight Street. Rumor had it that she had been in her youth some kinda wild thing, as the phrase went then, a hell-raiser for sure, an ex-poker madam—now tired, slow, and all alone—and offended by so many of us rudely blocking Haight Street, and blocking as well her entryway—our even sitting right there on her ceramic stairway, smoking our dope, and telling each other dopey psychedelic myths and tales about Ken Kesey or Timothy Leary or Ginsberg or LSD and the CIA—and she had to work her way through us in a pain that we could never any of us then understand. Yet we thought ourselves so cool, so very cool; New Age cool, absolutely.

I remember little about her except her anger, not even her name, but I now dedicate this poem to her, so many years surely after her death, a strange kind of apology, it’s true, but sincere to her and to all the others like her who had to tolerate us and our bloated sense of self-worth. God go with.)

The Old Woman on Haight Street

I

They call me Stormi, the only name I ever answer to,

given to me as a child by my father

who I can feel today the embrace of his arms.

but try as I do, I cannot remember his face.

Firstborn am I of this century near Bangor, Maine.

12 AM say the doctors and the certificate—

a fact my father loved to tell all,

and my mother, the first person I ever killed.

Yet my father forgave me, never angry with me,

assuaging my grief always as I grew;

saying my mother gave her life for mine,

and now it was up to me,

a demand I never forgot, not ever, not once.

So inconvenient, my birthday, New Year’s Day;

a day of hangovers so close to Christmas,

so therefore no party for me nor many gifts;

usually just one, though once or twice two.

But every birthday my father gave me a special sleigh ride,

jingle bells through the woods then down Center Street—

me in his lap and both of us waving excitedly,

a New Year’s constant for all those town folks,

his pointing down to me as we waved and rode,

all those townspeople pointing back with hearty affection,

and no gift gotten ever greater than those sleigh rides,

me there riding and waving on my father’s lap.

No one gets this in July, he proudly told me,

us through the woods of those birdless trees,

our jingling them awake from their silent freezing snooze,

all of them stark against the clear blue sky,

their awakened a moment by our sleigh bells ringing,

the smell of ice and cold filling my nose and chilling my bones,

and then us downtown, the smell of burning pine and oak,

whether in wood stove or fireplace,

white smoke straight up or swirling;

the people dressed in colorful hats and heavy coats

and their waving happily and heartily back at me.

The men in their boots made crunch in the snow

whenever my father stopped that sled to chat,

my receiving grown-up affection and pats on my hooded head,

my name Stormi constantly repeated,

smiles abounding from all their faces,

saying me hardly big enough for such a name.

That gift each year was the greatest gift I ever received,

and Jingle Bells played on any Victrola always stopping me,

a moment to remember my father’s bearish embrace,

even if after all this time no longer remembered is his face.

For he was killed by wild men, a vicious bunch,

from clear across state one spring morning,

his hearty embrace and saying to me, A great new day, Stormi,

then by evening, me all alone in the world

and sleighless too because of debts.

II

Relations took me in out of kindness,

but even though short and slender me now a handful,

Your father named you right often said or shouted at me,

as they passed me from one to another,

and, finally desperate, into an institution—

all until I was old enough to run away for good,

seducing a boy named Harry for my needs and protection,

my sexual awakening not traumatic because of him

but a stark and weird combo of pain and pleasure,

always reminding me of life itself, that memory.

And that boy Harry soon endeared himself to me,

though he himself now part of a wild bunch,

and a vicious bunch were they, too—

all with muscular arms and powerful shoulders,

each one from logging in his youth;

logging until they realized that no such work,

no matter how hard, no matter how heavy,

no such work would ever satisfy their wants and needs.

Then after their learning themselves not opposed to violence,

and certainly not opposed to the booty it brings—

a stash of cash they called Mr. Green —

they found themselves becoming a wild bunch of thugs,

and their leader not above killing, once or twice,

killing someone very much like my father,

and Harry with them because of his older brother,

and me with Harry and ogled a bunch,

his brother not their leader but instead a man called Goose,

he the one did most of the ogling, and that concerned me,

and him not opposed to whacking with pistol barrel,

whacking some man they set upon and robbed at gunpoint,

whether store owner or a man alone on wagon and horse,

or especially someone waylaid in a Model T,

Goose loving to whack those last ones best.

Eventually, as always amongst such a violent bunch,

eventually comes always double-cross and murder;

an unexpected huge haul from a small farm bank,

and greed suddenly up and about.

They turned on Harry and his brother, did the other three,

killing his brother quickly—

bullet to the back of the head.

But Goose beat Harry to death slowly with his gloved fist

simply because Harry had protected me—

his holding my arm and hand to guide my drop,

three stories desperate escape roof down to snowbank.

He was saying, ‘Stormi, I love you. I’ll always love you,

then Goose hard for me going brutal on Harry on that roof,

my watching from hiding totally safe,

Goose hitting Harry again and again until his face gone goo,

my later seeing Harry’s body up close thrown from that roof,

the torture on his face tormenting me to hard tears,

bitter tears.

For nearly a year I chased their faces

but only found Goose in New York City,

and he paid for the rest with fire and screaming,

his coming to sprawled on the basement cement,

with both his hands chained hard to the furnace.

He screamed and kicked, frantic and desperate,

especially when I pitched the kerosene over him,

leaving a trail of it ten feet in front of him,

just so for a moment he could see the flames coming.

Then I pointed to all his hidden stash I had found,

to Mr. Green in a suitcase on the cement beside me.

That’s when I struck a wood match on the post,

his going frozen and silent.

This is for Harry, you asshole, I said, spitting at him,

and now your goose is cooked.

Not for a moment did I hesitate, not a single moment—

the memory of Harry’s face busted, bloody, and broken—

and I dropped that match and turned away with Mr. Green,

enjoying the screaming behind me up the basement stairs,

Goose banging his head against the furnace in his agony,

but all his screams were lost in the noise outside and racket,

horns blaring, people shouting, and factory whistles,

all excitedly announcing to everyone Armistice Day,

the war to end all wars now ended.

Never again was I ever again even nearly the same.

Harry, oh, Harry, like my own father had been,

loved, scorned, and reborn again,

my torrent of tears at your bloody murder,

matched now by this screaming revenge.

III

The ’20s roared, of course, with booze and bravado

and even more violence than before,

as if war over there had been brought over here,

and I ran for a year with a man called Solly—

a good enough lover and provider

but always a bit of a disappointment,

his finally shot dead when his beer truck was hijacked,

me not crying many tears over him.

Then came Jake, decent enough, who loved me to drooling,

and got so hot he sometimes bounced off the bed,

maybe a little push on my part, enjoying his passion,

but him way too quick in his business decisions,

not thinking it through nor listening to warnings.

We had worked up to four trucks moving gin and beer,

plus other hooch and sometimes swag and guns,

but us staying too small for Lucky or Dutch’s concern,

our paying off the local cops and a couple of times arrested,

but nothing stuck, evidence lost, or memories failing.

Then six months before Prohibition repealed came a fatal mistake—

Jake’s trusting a cop big time on a caper.

everyone knowing Prohibition’s easy cash coming to end,

and always that cop before a standup guy,

but this huge haul he promised us made no sense.

That cop shot Jake dead getting down from his truck,

claiming Jake resisted arrest and had pulled a gun,

but only one truck taken in that police raid,

the other three disappearing as if never existed,

and the news of it quickly to me by an informer,

me then disappearing just like those other three trucks

before that cop or his pals could find me and whack me.

That cop’s only mistake—a deadly mistake—a whorehouse he

frequented,

my knowing the madam from a haul she once had bankrolled,

and she admitted that cop shaking her down ‘for money and broads,’

but her owing me for protecting her son from a rival gang,

her then making it easy for me to poison his bourbon,

and then watch him writhe and die on the floor, choking and puking,

my spitting many times in his face as he croaked.

our then stripping his clothes and dressing her son as a lookalike,

driving the cop’s car away, his body in the trunk,

his buddies then certain he had left for home;

but his car quickly sold and on a ship to Argentina,

his body in the trunk dumped off the coast of Florida,

a pint of blood spilled all over him, just to be certain,

certain the sharks got to him.

All that cost me, but it was worth it,

especially my spitting in his face as he writhed and died,

but still I had to light out for Chicago.

That’s when Prohibition bit the dust and came Depression,

my making my way mostly conning would-be chiselers,

using counterfeit dough as the swag,

chiselers mostly morons and the absolute easiest to con,

phony dough and the promise of hot sex,

our easily getting them wild and stupid.

us then off with the score and them gladly holding that dough,

and then very quickly the cops by our snitch upon them,

counterfeit bringing T-men out of the woodwork.

‘Dough and a Roll’ was how we named that grift,

me and a beautiful lezzie who loved me—

a sweet thing and really hot for me—

and went well for us a long time until her snatched up by the cops,

a previous heist but never her ratting me out,

and her then shipped off to Dwight and out of my life.

Still, ‘Dough and a Roll’ was easy pickens,

small-timers new to the city with giant hard-ons

just never knew what hit them,

holding dough they thought worth twice their score,

plus me with a good fence always delivered,

her having heard of my history with crossers,

and that carried me through the Depression up until the war.

IV

Running low on dough and counterfeit now impossible to come by,

plus most of the good men disappearing into the draft,

I was forced to take a job—

a boon of them now open and available for women,

and Rosie the Riveter I became at an L.A. factory, my first real job,

and soon me, with a coworker, running dice and poker.

some working women eager as their men to gamble their money,

and equal as their men in their doing so poorly.

The mood of the war encouraged outrageous behavior,

a no-tomorrow attitude, everyone knowing somebody killed,

and I had the know-how to make it happen, the games,

my seeing myself more and more in the women I worked with,

not my becoming them but them becoming me,

more and more of them told much of my story,

except for the killings of course,

and them not ashamed of anything I admitted to.

One of my friends was a librarian, if you can believe it.

a sweet girl needed someone teach her about sex,

who to have it with, and especially where and when,

but she dared too much and got herself whacked around,

some guy phony 4F saying he didn’t want his balls shot off,

blowhard and totally unafraid of me confronting him in a bar,

him so much bigger than me and muscular for sure.

He called to his friends to watch him handle me

and came at me to slap me around,

and the bartender not too happy about that.

But I pulled a lead pipe from under my coat

and whacked his jaw, and down he went,

and then I smacked his kneecap, busting it,

my jumping up from his howling to face his buddies,

lead pipe and the know-how to use it on those gutless wonders

far better than pistol or blade in that bar,

their eyes into my eyes and none of them deadly,

and they backed right off after I banged a collarbone,

and stopped also were they by a stranger there,

his saying This asshole got what he deserved,

and "Watch out, you guys, don’t be joining him—

this one here knows what she’s doing."

I then leaned over that fallen guy with threat on my face,

telling him if he hurt any of my friends again

his other knee then becomes my piñata,

and they all held back from me, none of them ballsy;

not like the guy standing there beside me.

He then walked me out of there, that guy,

shaking his head and laughing, impressed.

You’re quite the spitfire, he said,

taking me to a different bar and my letting him,

his first taking that pipe and chucking it down an alley

after a couple of mock swings, imitating mine.

They don’t call me Stormi for nothing, I told him.

His name was Jonathan and he was a torpedoed