Apocalyptic Vision: Poems by Ronnie Burk
I first heard of Ronnie Burk in the late 90s through Philip Lamantia, who had one of the younger poet’s collages hanging in his study. Ronnie’s work as a poet and as a collagist has always seemed of a piece to me, related manifestations of his identity as a surrealist. He was not a literary artist in the sense that his work doesn’t seem to wrestle with questions of form; he’s not attempting to reinvent the surrealist modes at his disposal but rather making use of them as vehicles for his insurgent imagination and apocalyptic vision, the fury of which elevates his writing above and beyond the mere assemblage of irrational word combinations. This is, I imagine, one reason his work remains outside the wider poetry world. He interacted with that world, but I wouldn’t say he was of it. His life had a more activist edge to it, and he was much more at home on the outlaw fringes of poetry.
One of the difficulties of writing about Ronnie’s life and work is the lack of a body of consistent, agreed-upon biographical facts. His friends describe him as compartmentalized in his relationships, only sharing certain things with certain people, which has inevitably led to diverging views among them. According to a 2017 article by British academic Victoria Carroll, his life as an activist began with his participation “in Chicano grassroots movements for social change as part of the Texas-based Raza Unida party” as a young man, information that she found in the entry on Ronnie in volume one of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Literature (2008) but that was unknown to his close San Francisco friends. He began as a poet of the Chicano literary movement of the 1970s, which had an inherently activist bent to it, but he didn’t truly emerge as the provocateur he became known as until the mid-1990s, when he joined the dissident AIDS direct action group ACT UP/San Francisco. He’s much better known for his various provocations against the Executive Director of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, Pat Christen — including dumping 25 lbs. of used cat litter on her at a 1996 event — than he is as a poet, though his collage of her wielding AZT in the form of a dildo to pleasure herself may have made an even greater impression when ACT UP/SF posted it on the group’s website in 2000.
I only got to meet Ronnie once, by chance, on the street near City Lights in North Beach, where I was walking with Philip, so I can’t say I knew him, though I was always impressed by what I knew of his work and thought he should be better known as a poet. He was born in Sinton, TX, in 1955 and identified as an indigenous Mexican American. According to his friend and fellow ACT UP member Todd Swindell, Ronnie may have had to flee Sinton due to complications from an affair. Whatever the case, he definitely became one of the earliest students at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO, studying poetry and Buddhism with Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Diane di Prima. His poems were first published in the stapled monthly Chicano arts and politics journal Caracol in 1977, and Lorna Dee Cervantes’s Mango Publications would issue his chapbook En el Jardín de los Nopales (In the Garden of Prickly Pear Trees) in 1979. This was the first of many, often self-published editions of his poems. “In the early 1980s,” according to a 2015 appreciation by Todd Swindell, “Ronnie lived in New York City where he became friends with Surrealist poet Charles Henri Ford and photographer, filmmaker and poet Ira Cohen. He was also involved with many of the then-young filmmakers of the Lower East Side including Richard Kern, David Wojnarowicz, and Ronnie’s close friend Tommy Turner. He participated in the Nuyorican Poets Café with Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero and attended performances by the Living Theater.”
After this period in NYC, Ronnie spent a brief time living in Maui before moving to San Francisco in the early 1990s. Around this time, he received his HIV positive diagnosis. During this period, he reconnected with Diane di Prima and he also met Philip Lamantia, who probably had the most pronounced influence on Ronnie’s work among his various poetic mentors. I can’t help hearing an intriguing echo of Lamantia in a poem like “1996,” which begins:
The White Buffalo has left for the moon
The missing arms of Venus de Milo
Sweep up a shiny nickel
Amongst the marble trees
The seals of the earth covered in quicklime
The ancestral pit of bones broken
Open this grave we, somehow, live in
Chinese sparklers clear the way
Fountains from which I can see you
“Waltzing Matilda” of the hereafter
There’s nothing to do
Vegetable curses
Vampire nurses
Madame Blavatsky puts on her shark fin corset
Televangelical
Apparition of Jesus & The Sewage Trust Fund
It’s all a mirage
Poems like this remind me of the Lamantia of Becoming Visible (1981) and Meadowlark West (1986), dense with luminous reference to historical personages and pop cultural items, and if Ronnie’s references aren’t as erudite or esoteric as Philip’s, no one’s are. Philip was one of a kind, a dangerous inspiration, even for a lesser poet, but Ronnie was able to adapt some of his mentor’s techniques to his own ends. This is by no means to reduce Ronnie’s work to Philip’s influence, however, and he was certainly exposed to a wide variety of surrealists through this connection, particularly Will Alexander, to whom Ronnie dedicated his ambitious poem “Sky*Boat.” Similarly, Ronnie’s collage work seems rooted in Max Ernst’s engraving collages, but doesn’t stop there, and he eventually develops agit-prop and color photo-collage modes quite removed from this origin.
My impression is that Ronnie had a hard life. He lived a marginal, impoverished existence, yet he knew how to be poor and jobless, and managed to live a very peripatetic Beat lifestyle. He was the type of guy who sought out people he admired and had no qualms about simply showing up at their doors. Beginning in 1996, his work with ACT UP disputing the causation between HIV and AIDS made him a controversial figure — see, for example, this sneering GQ article from September 2001 — and, after various arrests and charges, he moved back to NYC for most of the last two years of his life. Following a stroke, however, he returned to San Francisco, where he would die in 2003, refusing to take the pharmaceuticals that his doctors felt might have prolonged his life. It might seem easy to dismiss him as delusional, but he had witnessed the decline and death of many friends during the era of AZT treatments, and his critiques of the pharmaceutical industry and the charity industry making money from AIDS were ahead of their time. Certainly the current COVID-19 pandemic adds more nuance to this picture, given the ongoing denial that has gripped huge swathes of mainstream American society, from senators and governors and even the ex-President on down.
There has yet to be a full reckoning of Ronnie’s life and work. As I understand it, he left behind a considerable amount of material, including journals, art, letters, and political writings about the AIDS crisis. In 2011, I published a manuscript of his poems called Sky*Boat, prepared by him but shepherded to fruition by his editor and close friend, Mia Kirsi Stageberg, who first championed his work in the 1970s in Caracol. The book is available again as a print on demand title. There’s also an album, Man of Letters (2016), put together by Todd Swindell’s brother Tate Swindell and featuring audio of Ronnie alongside readings of his work by friends, including Diane di Prima. The Swindell brothers have also been accumulating an archive of his papers, gathering or copying various items in the possession of his friends, with the hope of eventually making the entire collection accessible to scholars through a university library. I hope more of this oeuvre will emerge in the years to come.
Ronnie Burk in Montauk in the late 1990s. Photo by Indra Tamang.
IN PRAISE OF SUN RA
SATURN RULES IN THE BLACK COLORS OF THE RAINBOW SUN RA YOUR HAWK’S BEAK DEVOURING THE SILENCE SUN RA WHAT IS THIS SOUND? IS IT THE LOVE SONGS OF HOMOSEXUAL BLUE WHALES FUCKING IN THE GREAT PACIFIC OCEAN? IS IT FESTIVE TOADSTOOLS IN EMERALD-FEATHERED MITRES OF THE PRIESTS OF TLALOC? IS IT A FRACTAL IN THE PYTHAGOREAN EQUATION? SUN RA THE TATTOOED MASKS OF POLYNESIA SWINGING THE TEMPLE GONGS PAST FLOTATION BLARING THE MANTRA OF EQUILIBRIUM (TIMBRE OF THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE AS DEFINED BY THE WAVY LINES OF OLD FATHER TIME) EXCORIATING THE BLACK OOZE OF ORIGINAL MATTER CONDUCTING A CHAOS OF ORDER INSTIGATING OUR MUTUAL DEPARTURE ON THE GOLD WINGS OF A SCARAB THEREBY UNDOING THE SAMSARIC SPELL CAST UPON US FROM THE PLANET OF KARMA
//
SOL Y LUNA
sol
Blue sky what thoughts are you holding for me today?
Thousands of envelopes blow down the city streets
Each one crisp, clean, apparently brand new
My hand reaches down to pick one up
Inside is a tiny red heart
Can I create the feeling this is love?
luna
Feeding. Feeding the air blue moonlight. Feeding
the navel of the ocean wisdom. Feeding the earth
manure of human frailty.
Terra Firma. Before any earthquake: On a planet
full of craters we go digging for diamonds
in the black sands.
//
ADVENT OF THE REAL
On oceans of black milk
across airwaves of telepathic bliss
I have seen your other face
nimbus of nothing shining in the dark
pistil of your necromantic shadow
enigmatic to my sphinxian glow
You’ve made me delirious with your presence
honey of your belly smeared with coconut oil
your genitals taste of sea salt & pasta fruit salad
In a moment of utter despondency
I mistook you for Jesus Christ
levitating above the nonbelievers
ten thousand feet in the air
draped in cane smoke I declare you
fortress of the enormous orchid flower
wilting to rice paper
//
Collage by Ronnie Burk.
1996
The White Buffalo has left for the moon
The missing arms of Venus de Milo
Sweep up a shiny nickel
Amongst the marble trees
The seals of the earth covered in quicklime
The ancestral pit of bones broken
Open this grave we, somehow, live in
Chinese sparklers clear the way
Fountains from which I can see you
“Waltzing Matilda” of the hereafter
There’s nothing to do
Vegetable curses
Vampire nurses
Madame Blavatsky puts on her shark fin corset
Televangelical
Apparition of Jesus & The Sewage Trust Fund
It’s all a mirage
Green lions at their battle stations
Bes the dwarf embossed on a cornice of jade
Molten dragons the golden city born from a cupboard
full of shabtis
The Corn Maidens have left their sky compartments
White doe moccasins
doing somersaults on a high wire
salt serpent
rose is the diagram
I am looking for the crystal point
the world revolves on
That snake of feathers
rainbowed
in a hoop of dew
Mr. Fixit’s typewritten a coded message
O’ahu’s The Land of Adam Kadmon
Auntie Brake Lock on the beltway in Zodiac City
Metal detecting ice blue snow
In a coconut grove
A gamelan orchestra
On an intricately carved barge of teakwood
Sinks a hairline fracture into you my alabaster freezer
Window box gardening fluid star growth
Joseph lives! in the spherical dreams of a little girl’s
soap commercial
King Kamehameha in Moctezuma’s headdress
His face fading on a wet slab of obsidian
Dracula administering injections of frozen buddhas
Mirroring the sky’s own discarded backbone
wet from rosewater
Frida’s diary opens on Nosferatu’s head
in The Crystal Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Hawking snake oil at the Money Hole Brewery
Kamakura riding the light-switchback to Hell
//
photo
Photo-Mantic
I was born
bonsai-ed
in a Texas Tavern
fifty years
before The Great War
burnt holes
in the ceiling of
the World
Old Man Fishhead has a graybeard infested with termites
The Turtle People will have their revenge!
Spiderman up from the cement steps of Manhattan’s underground
His myth falls upon my Aztec profile
Climbing out from behind the astral curtains of
Crab-latitude-hemisphere
Hernan’s a strange bird!
Wearing the helmet of a man-sawed-in-half
The zebra coiled pump fuse pillow
framing his Greco-Roman head
at an abandoned train station
circa 1910. His best friend
Moses Brushfire’s aspirin tablet crumbling to red dust oblivion.
In his gold inlaid cartouche a set of crocodile tears
Saturn’s clock on the table, cup & ball, child & saucer
in a marble tub taking a milk bath
//
Sirens in a glass bell float down rivers of
ayurvedic hair
The swan at battle for the diamond-spoked
color wheel
Flower labels a stick on body for Imenhotep
The Fool in the position of The Hanged Man
dissolving in acetone
The white owl lying face down is not my grandmother in a lei
//
The gargoyle at the bar just had a stiff drink
Wine soaked the scorpion fish baking
Your hind leg potato
That’s why they call the Pope’s nose
a turkey butt
Shipwreck on a glass tower
The city draped in furs
Pig snout in a nun’s habit
as only Hieronymus could paint it
Ambrosial palette of the hermetic rose pill
Scrying the abalone shell of water
Three crowns crash into a mirror
Forecasts The Black Hole Traveler
of Nineteen ninety-nine
The circle of demons bound by a red thread
Serving platters of toasted manta rays
Despite a belly full of birds-in-a-nest
Old Gringo’s handcuffed
My Brother’s Skeleton Key
Lono’s hole of magma smoking rock
//
ENTOMBED
Unfurling a banner for
“A Butcher’s Holiday”
a tin of laminated sardines
arrives
Begging for more potash
Bela Lugosi’s armpit scratches dead air
Powahatan smoking old fires in the streets
aquatic steroids
All these corrosions beneath the shell of
my reckless heart
my heart of sliced throats
my heart of Aztec tendons
my syphilitic heart of lily-headed serpents
ready to attack the creators of
The Poison Milk Factory
demon in a dressing gown
the sugar seals
a satin slipper
sputtering the fragrance
Piss Angel
It is at this point we step into the cyclone
to embrace here and there
Moments of the sixth dawn
Crocodile banks of the Nile float on Tenochtitlán Highway
as polluted cities sink beneath the horizon of crazed Empire
Ancient castles wash up on the foreheads of black-rock mountains
Pulling the tip of your beard with the hand of a leprechaun
Your deerhunter’s cap brings a scene from a movie
& I am reminded it is The Saturn Return of The Chicano Movement
Having cracked the egg of hard-boiled reason
fever
light
People gather in the courtyard to watch the cobra
marry the hawk on my head
Fat baby Caduceus, I’m through!
//
BLACK TULIP
Mating in Elysian Fields horned lions are tearing at each other. The meat of angels sliced to little orange poison pills. Your head blossoming the steel conjunction of Mars. Heavenly centaur, your job is to draw the star from the flower. In Siberia Iron Planet Jesus walks on water. Instamatic Jesus of the last two thousand years burnt to a crisp. Beneath the boiling waters lobsters scream for their terrified lives. A crayfish draws a diagram of a dissected human. All the organs labeled with a number and a planet. In a glass furnace dolls are melting—hair, teeth and eyes. Yahweh’s mind evaporating a thin-out coating of high octane [viral loads] the image of Shiva on a couch of tiger skins. The Orishas in the celestial vault working overtime.
//
TELEGRAM
THE HAIRBRAINED BIRD RESTS ITS FEATHER-BRUSH SKELETON ON THE AERIAL MAPS OF ALLUVIAL DEW. EVEN IF THE POOL CUE FOUGHT THE CRAB THE ROUTE TO THE WATERCRESS CHAMBER WOULD BE ABOUT THE SAME DISTANCE AS THE INTESTINES OF A TRANSPARENT BIRD.
THE GULLIES WORRY ABOUT THE RIVERS, THE RIVERS WORRY ABOUT THE FORESTS, THE FORESTS WORRY ABOUT THE MOUNTAINS. BUT THE LAKES! THOSE TURQUOISE LAKES OF GREEN SNOW HAD BETTER FORGET ABOUT EVER JOINING THE HATPIN MOUSTACHE FOR LUNCH.
COCKATOO BIRD SNAKE. QUETZALCOATL. BONE DRILL.
THE SCALPEL LEFT THE SWITCHBLADE BEHIND TO DISSECT THE RED BIRD ORGAN WHILE THE DRAINPIPE RAN OFF THE WATER TABLE TO SHORT-CIRCUIT THE PLANKTON-FISH-SPINE ELECTRODE UNIT.
//
MEDUSA
I have shrunk to a twig watching
your beautiful face covered with ivy & sunlight
What can I say?
I have fallen into the hole of your galaxy
wanting passage into the entranceway of your heart
I snuck past the guard at checkpoint
opening a valise I gave you
razors,
toothpaste,
shaving cream
Red jade grasshoppers came to haunt my garden
Yes! I even tried to humor you with love
Seeing my body as an opportunity for joy
I ran into the surf holding your severed head above the sea
the pleasure was all mine
//
CARTE BLANCHE
NEW YORK HAS A WAY OF PICKING THE LICE OUT OF
THE HAIR OF A FAULTLESS WOMAN
SHUCKING THE CORNHUSKS OF CATHEDRAL WINDOWS
A FALCON HIDES BETWEEN THE PAGES
HAVING BENT THE ACROBAT BACK INTO A BOX
INSIDE A PHONE BOOTH
AUNT MATILDA INSTRUCTS LITTLE AMY
ON THE SKILLS OF RUBY CUTTING
SNAKING HIS WAY TO LEFT FIELD
A WEREWOLF PICKS HIS TEETH
LOOSING A PYTHON ONTO A STEAMSHIP TO ICELAND
HUMAN MEAT CAN BE QUITE APPETIZING
//
Collage by Ronnie Burk.
CRYSTAL
On crystal you can really see
the paranoid visions of America
Pilgrims in their automobiles
maneuvering the endless
clutches and stick shifts
to mutually measured destruction.
For safety measures
I require poetic license
with nuclear dust.
Phantom Indians in cemeteries
remove the cruel hearts
of certain whitemen.
They say,
Don’t forget Sitting Bull
Crazy Horse, Geronimo
Your grandfather Cuauhtemoc
too!
//
1999
to Mumia Abu-Jamal
slaveship America your mutiny held back with a radium pin.
Electrocution short-circuits the amphibious arms merchant.
up from the subterranean caverns of prehistoric water
The History of America is written in pig’s blood. Human hair entangles the story. George Washington salutes the dollar sinking into the shit holes of time. Meltdown of the chrome-plated people. Lead-encased pellets, uranium bullets, the steamy earth rumbles volcanic stones thrown into the face of Pele’s fury.
cracked visage of light
America your torn-down houses have festered long enough! Fog takes the shapes of my ancestors massacred in the purple night flowers—henbane, belladonna, and mandrake. If nectar is nightshade I curse you with mandrake spears daubed in the earwax of Betsy Ross’ vaginal membrane.
666 emblazons a bust of Helen. Her veiled appearance on all your warships heading for conquest makes clear your Empire is destined for burnt-out Plutonic nightmare.
//
Collage by Ronnie Burk.
SKY*BOAT
to Will Alexander
In the Horned Kingdom Cernunnos traces the veins of Jerusalem
To a cracked cistern in a field of poppy flowers
My kabalistic egg hatching the Sephiroth of the Lost Planetary System
Iron plumes of the ten thousand eyes of Ezekiel’s Beast
Swirling a cyclone of black coronas
His vajra of coffin nails and colored threads
Tied with burnt cherub medallions
In the apparition zone having set fire to water
Rabid dogs dance in a fusion of tungsten light
Inflorescence of that Little Man in the bottle
Separating the salt from the ash
The Tormented Mermaid searches for her children
Abandoned in the sewers of the world
Density of carbon auroras fishing for a pearl
In the tributaries of a majestic keyhole
Manta rays return to the lake of blood
My mother in her lunar costume beating Hydra’s wing
//
Uruborus of my third eye curled up in a mollusk
Hekate’s gallery sails over the storm
Extracting rays from a nugget in a lead box
She knows nothing about the somnolent
Footsteps of the Philosopher’s Widow
At the doorway to the dungeons of chaos
Pericles on a razor blade incubating quicksilver
Distilling filigree of disintegrating planet
Extinguishing Mars
//
When the peacock in the blue bottle attacks its mate
The crippled farmer knows it’s time to water his silver trees
Holding a lantern of fireflies
A washerwoman pierces the diamondback salamander
Smoldering beneath the rocks
The royal couple poured into a gelatin cube
In the radium mines a necklace of thorns
Strangles the cross-eyed Gemini
Always the sun & moon in one face
//
In a moment Toussaint l’Ouverture will enter the turquoise morning of Nezahualcoyotl’s calligraphy room
And place a lei upon Queen Lili’uokalani
Marking the ve’ve’ of the Ruby Queen
On his left shoulder covered with epaulets
He will proclaim the sovereign rights for
The Constitution of The Garden of Earthly Delights
Heraldic star of Neptune’s ray black jade insignia of the eagle-serpent
on a column of nopal smoke
Demon-slayer of purified ore His child in the red suit is Chango
Guiding Erzulie’s spangled boat in, to the face of Tlaloc in Aquarius
Ogun! Of the red squares chasing tigers in a black mirror
Always Taurus! Your mangled star in the chalkyard
Boiling the leper’s cloth nursing the Century back to sleep
To keep disease from overriding the emaciated devi of the dried-up rice paddy
Uranium swallows the rats scurrying about the graves of suicide kings
//
SELF PORTRAIT, 2001
Scratched walls of asylums
drunken rhinos in churchyards
dustbins of flesh
lunatics of enraged ink
hanging pictures of zombies at deadbeat hotels
fissures of cracked china
stenciled horror of gas chambers
outmoded paranoia of faceless Buddhas
blown up to archaic smiles
//
VEINED FLOWER
The disaster that greets us between
The sky & the sea
Is a face in flames
Wanting out of the world’s torpor
Boarding a flight machine
We take off like gods
Able & fucking with new flesh
Fairies rot inside a soggy patch of bog
Bulbous & awkward
My hands reach down toward
Infernal regions
Here at the bathroom sink washing your sperm
Out of my hair
I am not born yet
Hold me
//
