Richard Beeman

Poet

Phone: 623-209-4972

Richard P. Beeman is a local poet who does coffee house and college readings. He is an active advocate in the mental health field and has helped to create three drop-in centers. He continues this work in Phoenix and is preparing work for a new chapbook collection. Beeman’s publications include chapbooks and an essay in The Realms of the Unreal, Edited by John G.H. Oakes with an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut (Four Walls Four Windows Press, NYC, 1991). Publisher’s Weekly called Realms “demanding but mind expanding.”

Brother William Did You Know Marilyn

Fleas in the furniture

Buzzing in the skull

Mr. Blake did he have a soul?

Did he bite her on the night

She wrote the Monroe doctrine

In a painful death rattle scrawl

Ain’t it funny, Mr. Blake doesn’t know Marilyn

Kennedy doesn’t talk about us

Yet we live through you, sometimes, somehow

In all this comical puzzle justice

Now we’re the soulless people with the fleas

Could you tell them brother William

Could you plead for our lives Mr. Blake

Will you shout from your private cell head

That we love, we create, we exist

In a world of fleas in a world of crying souls

We live we thrive half-alive brother William

Did you recognize the Dutchman, Mr. Blake

Did his vision create fleas did it create you.

Did the bright buzz of paint join our futures

Do so many of us see the dazzle buzz color

Brightness, can we touch it and see your pain

Feel our emptiness fight Marilyn’s legacy

Did Mr. Lincoln know Marilyn

Unlike other presidents he had a blood line

Brother Blake could you feel his pain

Could you follow Edgers path to the bar

That night, of shouting put away people

Can today’s throw aways talk to Mr. Kennedy

Mr. Lincoln where was your voice back then

Mr. Kennedy knows Marilyn but he’s quiet

Her/Your essence runs fluvial through

Our tangled relations, Brother William

Everything is so quiet on the front, Mr. Blake

Yes those damn fleas, Mr. Blake

They have a life

They are anything but quiet

They are mad

By Richard P. Beeman

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