Frank wrote this poem about/for Kenneth Atchley (K.A.) right before the “Voices from the Underground” event on June 27, 1997 at Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco. It was read as K.A.’s introduction before his performance. From the poster:
THE CHEROTIC (r)EVOLUTIONARY, a zine of all possibilities, presents VOICES FROM THE UNDERGROUND, an evening of readings and music by a wide range of agents of cultural subversion … featuring Dorothy Jesse Beagle, Barbara Golden, Noni Howard, Jack & Adelle Foley, K. Atchley, Frank Moore … plus special surprise guests. If that is not enough, everyone will get an autographed xeroxed piece of art by LaBash!
Frank had published one of K.A.’s written pieces in his zine, The Cherotic (r)Evolutionary. K.A. also played with the Cherotic All-Stars several times and even travelled to Seattle to perform with Frank in 1996.
About K.A.
June 23, 1997
A southern gentleman, gentle being, creates a noise fountain, a gate to a dark erotic motel of razor blade cutting blonde white skin in love. Time going backwards into a shamanistic perverseness, floating back into a pipeline of a sustained note, a sexy machine whine, strangely human, strangely divine.
This gentleman puts pictures in my head too taboo.
This gentleman with his noises super real spray opens up caverns of possibilities like a knife ripping open a child’s belly.
And I always have wondered what is in southern comfort! A gentle spirit unbounded.
“Voices from the Underground” poster by LaBashPoster by LaBash for Seattle performances in 1996.
A poem by George Kauffman published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, Boonville, CA 95415, June 11, 1997.
Who Says?
-for Frank Moore
She took off all her clothes, then she took off her skin. I had never seen such bones! Her legs crushed me while her tongue darted out of her skull. I got out of my skin and we made love. Who says there’s no life after death? -George Kauffman
For Kirsten For her birthday by Frank Moore, Monday, July 21, 2003
Outside of town, Behind the field Where the carnivals And the traveling preachers Set up their tents, There is a woods, Deep & dark & dense… Nobody knows how far back it goes. Everybody knows to keep out of the woods That always threatens to swallow the town up. Everybody? Not quite! The crazies and the moonshiners , The forbidden lovers, And the lovers of the forbidden, And wild, untamed children, All find cover for their sacred crimes Within the hiding edges Of the woods. But not the sane, The respectable, The normal… We never go near the woods, With its saber-tooth tigers, Giant leather birds, Rabid wolves, Razor grasses, And the deep hidden pit traps With generations Of the bones of corpses. I’ve heard tales Children getting sucked Into the dark heart Of the cruel woods, Wandering out years later Naked, muttering gibberish, To spend the rest of their days In THE HOSPITAL OF MERCY.
Me… I never went near the woods…. Until now… Until I started talking to Indian Joe. People say he’s drunk and crazy. But his breath is sweet; His words are clear, Infecting my brain and heart With longings for new possibilities. He lives deep in the woods! He tells me stories of THE CREATURE KIRSTEN, The spirit/body dwelling Within, Just within!
So here I am, Walking into the woods, On a quest for the unlimited unknown. There’s a ball Of excited pleasure In my belly As I pass through the community of outcasts, And leave them behind On the edge. I just walk and walk, Deeper into experience, Smelling Live and Death All mixed up. Everything is melting into everything, Not staying within skin. Colors and sounds Intense, clear, But blending into me. My brush presses swirling Into the fleshy paint pot, Presses firmly into bright surreal Colors, Cool colors on the woods’ floor, Sunlight vibrates through the leaves, playing music with the birds & the water. Is it Kirsten? Is Kirsten in me? I’m walking in a joyful creek, Cool gentle on my feet, Alive finally! Enjoying the mud, The smooth yellow stones Enjoying walking, Exploring, Surrendering, Merging. I hear hearty laughing, From a sexy belly. Must have been me Because I don’t see anyone else. I hear sobbing Which sinks reality deeper. I hear “FUCK!” that explodes into my very being! Not my voice… Too much raw emotion. It’s her! I keep walking, Going to the source Of the creek. There are balls of mud clay, Maybe eggs Each with a unique design. I keep seeing more of these objects. Magical? Ain’t everything in these woods Magical? Was Kirsten born from one Of these mud eggs? Did a child play-make these mud realities, Or a primitive? Questions seems so silly Within this God! So do my clothes! I leave both behind. Keep walking, Exploring. Everything is fusing together. Every move causes warm pleasure. I can’t tell what is me anymore. Don’t need to anymore! Just keep walking to the source!
I’m now…. Mmmmmm! I’m indeed now! But I mean I’m now At the source of the creek, A spring of purity. Outside a crude comfort hut, A creature stirs a soup pot, With a keening wail, She climbs a tree! With a wild laugh, She right here with me, Sharing nude skin pleasure Rubbing herself into me, Taking me into her, Fusing bodies, Simply enjoying being together, Being enough! She keeps changing, Snorting at the sheer fun Of our dance/play. She keeps changing. An old hag Croaking sex hexes, A young girl Full of wonder, A lusty sexy seducer, Now she split into a whole tribe. We are home Sitting around the fire Cooking the soup… She keeps throwing red hot peppers in Along with other things she gathered. I stir the pot as she dances Beyond time with others in our tribe. All their voices and bodies are within me. I’m within their dances As I stir the pot. We grow old together As we wait for the soup To chill. We can wait Because we are in our tribal home Of being enough. Then she pours in the moonshine. This cold hot pepper moonshine soup Has such a kick!
Damn, Why didn’t I go into The woods of imagination Before? Well, I’m here now… With you!
I originally wrote the play to have something to do with a guy, who would direct it.
I wrote it as a prose poem. As a poem, it has been published in many magazines and books in both the U.S. and England. One of the most amazing stories around the poem version of OUT OF ISOLATION is…
A 40 year old woman somewhere in the Midwest read it in a zine and started thinking about her baby sister who she had loved. The doctors told the parents the baby sister would be a vegetable without an IQ…and they should put her in an institution, put her out of their minds/hearts, and went on with their lives. Unlike my parents, they followed the doctors’ advice. But after reading OUT OF ISOLATION, the woman hired a detective to find her sister, without telling her parents (because the guilt would be too much…and pointless). It turned out the sister only had a slight case of cp, was adopted and has a successful life. The sisters re established their relationship.
If this was the only effect of my work, my work and life would be successful.
Anyway, when we were ready to cast the play, the director just chose an actress from the very first audition because he didn’t think we could get what we needed, so he settled…even though I told him when I direct I usually spend months finding the willing person for a part. But he was the director. The actress made it very clear from the start she wouldn’t do nudity. So the director threw out the nudity, not realizing that the nudity was not the real problem. The woman had a hard time even touching me! But the kicker was the actress saw the play as the nurse getting JIM out of the institution and into “the real world”. She kept making Jim look out a window to motivate him. I finally suggested to the director that he should tell her there ain’t no window. She totally freaked out and wrote us a Dear John letter. At that point he gave up on the project.
It took me a year after that to cast it. Linda Sibio had been in several of my ritual performances in Los Angeles….and she is a great performance artist in her own right. When I couldn’t find anybody in the San Francisco Bay Area, I asked her. She is very picky about what she enters into, but once she commits, she will do anything. We went down to L.A. for a week to shoot it. I had planned the first day to rehearse the whole piece…but when we were on the mat…without my board or Linda Mac…Linda Sibio just took off her clothes and eroplayed with me for two hours…and of course I’m flexible! Afterwards she said it was what she needed to get into the space/role. So we just shot the piece straight through each day for four days. I just spent a half hour before each day’s shooting going over with her the needed changes. The rest was improv.
In 1974 Frank wrote a long poem called “DREAM TRAVELING IN TIME SEEDS … OR … MARX BROTHERS’ ZEN, VOL. 1”. He wrote it by shuffling the picture cards from Ram Dass’ book, BE HERE NOW, and writing a poem about each picture as they randomly appeared.
In February 1990 Frank met Ram Dass when Frank brought his small troupe of students to The Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, California to attend the “Psychedelics in the 1990s: Regulation or Prohibition” event which featured presentations by Timothy Leary, Laura Huxley and Ram Dass among others.
When we walked into the lobby, Timothy Leary came bounding over to Frank and gave him a big hug like they were old friends (they had never met before). The rest of the evening, this pattern of familiar and warm hugs and long-lost-friends’ greetings continued, including with Ram Dass and Laura Huxley.
Here are the first 2 poems …
DREAM TRAVELING IN TIME SEEDS or MARX BROTHERS’ ZEN VOL. 1
Here is an excerpt from The Combine Plot that seems particularly relevant today:
I took the word “combine” from the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. In the book, the combine is a fear machine network which secretly installed pacemakers of fear, doubt, and mistrust in almost everyone in childhood. This made people much easier to control. It isolates people into cells padded with fear and doubt, making the people part of the combine. There are some misfits whom the combine missed with its fear pacemakers. In others, the fear pacemakers blow their fuses. These people without the fear pacemakers are very dangerous to the combine because if they are not checked, destroyed, discredited, isolated, or enfolded into the combine, they can show others how to blow out their own fear pacemakers, can show others how to be free humans linked to other free humans. The combine rarely has to directly destroy the misfits itself. Just direct eliminations would reveal the existence of the combine. So such direct eliminations are kept to the minimum. The real tool of the combine is a vague sense of uncomfortableness, of inferiority, and of mistrust within the victims of the combine. The setting of the novel is a mental ward in which most of the patients are self‑committed. They believe themselves weak, unable to cope with the outside world. They believe the fear comes from themselves, not from the pacemakers. They just have to start believing in themselves, and they could pull out the pacemakers and walk out of the hospital. But every time they reach this threshold of freedom, the combine, by clever remote manipulation, turns up the vague uncomfortableness and mistrust. The victims themselves do the destroying of the misfit either in themselves or that con man pied piper who laughs at their fears and limits, who shows them the way to freedom. It is the victims who do most of the censoring.
………
There is a martial arts principle that when you are attacked, that is the point that you have most force potential. This is because you can combine the opposing force with your own, and reshape this new, more powerful force into your advantage. Helms has given us an opening to create a greater freedom. I refuse to defend my work from charges of obscenity. There is no such thing as sexual obscenity. It is an undefinable concept invented to limit freedom and to promote the established moral order. If I protest that my work is not obscene, I would be admitting the valid existence of sexual obscenity. There is nothing wrong with using sex, nudity, and all the bodily functions as art. It is time to do away with the legal concept of sexual obscenity once and for all…and for good. Dana and Jesse are just giving us artists an opening to accomplish this.
But sex is just the top layer of this attack. Sex is what Communism was in the McCarthy Era. In the ’50s, people thought those who were blacklisted for being Communists or fellow travelers somehow deserved to be blacklisted, were asking to be blacklisted by going too far. People thought it was O.K. to sign the loyalty oath, O.K. to not hire the blacklisted, O.K. to play along with the corrupt system…O.K. because they were not and never had been Reds.
But what they did not understand was that the real focus was not Communism, but controlling power. The same is true today.
People sometimes ask, “Where is your work heading? What do you want to do next?”
It is not my work. It is not my choice.
For me, it is not a question of a next thing. It is a growing, evolving vision. I am carried along in this vision of life, of art. A performance does not have a beginning or an end. It is just a tiny bit of the vision. The vision braids around itself, flowing on. I do not know where the vision is taking me. I have not been down this vision before.
One thing’s for sure. We humans are not the end of evolution.
“Sunset Rise”, digital painting, 2010 by Frank Moore
I have always had a rich full fun life. Everything comes easy to me. I don’t care about being Respectable or so “successful”, or acceptable beyond this inner flesh.
I surrender to play and to life. Everything comes so far into juicy bits of extraordinary supernatural modality of relationship dynamics upon my word.
I know this is not what to say if you want to be included in the addressing Fields of dazzling whiteness over oils of press and applause.
They want victims suffering against overwhelming odds of the temptation to editorialize defeat to survive barely, waiting to take possession of these annoying medical monsters of yokes of repression…
A special freak who came to replace the control box by profound attention and ordeal of extraordinary dimensions bearing upon big terms of keeping with heavy leaden gray deceptive dawn between the tempest and this dreadful nightmare of repression.
Of course you can’t do it, they say.
He [me] is special with courage, strength surmounted all obstacles being mauled by isolation resulting from between physical problems… And abilities of luck… All of which you and most people unhappy don’t have.
He [me] is special exception that proves the extreme point of hopelessness, helplessness appalling disaster which imprison everybody without any possible alternatives.
They push this shit!
I am always able to handle anything, having fun in the freedom of not knowing what is impossible.
My dreams are melting into juicy molten every day activities just as people who thought I was Jewish!
I surrender to play and to life.
Everything comes so easy!
Yes, it is hard work sometimes.
But I have come out
of the extreme edge of things in my wheelchair addressing similar circumstances.
Escape from whatever between us and fun!
They want you to think you got it better than me, somebody, anybody!
You ain’t got shit!
But at least you ain’t a victim of cerebral palsy for life, suffering with cerebral palsy.
At least you ain’t confined to a wheelchair!
At least you can walk, talk, feed yourself, wipe your own asshole in the way God tends you to do!
At least you can play football until you break your neck playing football! Then…
Oh, well…
At least you ain’t a nigger or a woman, or a fag!
Reporters scramble everything up.
They don’t use their souls, their formidable pricking eyes.
They see a wheelchair and they write suffering victim of cerebral palsy confined to a wheelchair and is ninety eight percent disabled with no body control…
Oh yes he saw a murder!
Reporters are brainwashed.
They have only filter tip eyes!
They see me dancing, playing piano smothering the piece of pounding lustily on the keys with vehemence and whatever else, painting those unknown sights in oils by Jackson Pollock physical ritualism of direct engagement with my whole body control of the paint with my head, seeing me feeling up right up her inner flesh with style and aim…
And they conclude and report I am paralyzed, stiffened under the bottom of no movements or control or bodily feelings and am ninety eight percent disabled, helpless, vulnerable, hopeless fizzle. And you depend upon them for the clear ultimate vision of direct experiencing of observation of objectivity!
I suppose I could even paint if I was Jewish paralyzed.
But I would have to come up with a difficult style and techniques which involve the necessity of deferring to explore my luck and whatever between physical touch and the one more reckless effort to free any particular color.
But the brainwashed plot is so complete that some playmates who had romp with me flexuosity and yum yum yum have then bought that empty press surrebuttal of my Body of Christ.
I told you so, folks.
I obviously wasn’t meant for the control of what is possible!
Poetry of truffles and Champagne and yum yum of philosophy, humor among various gangland serfs and behind the curtain of fog and romantic shit about how boring it was to build upon communicating even before speaking.
The margins exclude almost entirely most of everything which is noncommercial, uncensored, unconscious, unexpected original Files under the command of Bruni d’Entrecasteaux, ignoring such bestial-looking creatures like you and me.
Also he gave me shit about getting deeper into the ultimate midst of the arousing desire of magical colors disappeared from humanity and love with wide open legs thrust into bed after eating the contents of folly!
But wisdom which may be able to procure fresh meat for everybody here is what I am looking for!
