Bill Rode Sunlight's Stream

He stood unbound, brilliant booming pitch

Daring fame’s too short a lease to tire

An overworked Queen and a burst poet’s appendix orphaned

Crazy uncles, old world advice, newspaper boy in Café’s

Circulating telegraph messages on windy roads

While genocide visited the Armenian Night

He discovered San Francisco and New York

Flustered wasps, street walkers, huddled denizens

Gamblers, dancers, poor and burning Arabs, American foundation

All the way up and down the Malaga vines

He made Paris and Fresno come and go speaking brittle reflection

Rivers of lust and untaxed piping pride, stories in starring flight

He hung his hat tipped to the East

Witty wicked waste, soaked in passionate delight

Vye, Vye, Vye, he would intone, smiling like an onion’s scrape

By a mortal bite of life foretold to insipid academigaudy scorn

I once heard him confess Shaw was his inspiration, not the rest

Hello out there! He said to whomever I myself will inspire

While Miller, Kerouac and Albee tool their queues

To burst through the gates and wound the engenues

He was Saroyan to the end. A farmer’s boy,

A poet’s son, an observant crier of Our Town

Highlands and merchants pranced in his glare

Striking a portable typewriter, a machine gunner’s flare

Channeling Whitman, funneling impressionist colors

Like butterflies captured on a punctured canvas

The daring young man, endless cartwheels in the sand

(Happy 100th Birthday William Saroyan:

Thanks for the chiseled world of words

that keep singing in my ears)

Bedros Afeyan

8-9-2008

San Diego, CA