FACELESS RIDERS there’s a print that hangs in the room where I live over my typewriter 30 years ago it hung in a room in my parents’ house I don’t know the author it’s a black and white drawing of 4 men riding horses all wearing cowboy hats you can’t see their faces when I was very young I’d ask my mother over and over “how fast are they going?” she explained that’s not something you can say about a picture but I couldn’t let it go because when I looked at it back then it seemed as if they were going very fast and I liked to go fast it looked like they could have been doing 50 or 80 or a million miles an hour hats tilted against the wind the horses straining to go faster for the men with no faces nowadays I look at the picture and wonder if the men on the horses are bandits or policemen why their faces are in darkness why the horses are so brave it looks like something is chasing them
David Lerner (November 23, 1951 – July 1(?) 1997) was an American renegade poet born in New York City. Lerner came from a family of Russian-Jewish renegades and grew up as a so-called "red-diaper baby". Lerner published numerous articles as a journalist, including material on the Russian singer and poet Vladimir Vysotsky. Lerner pursued a bohemian life and became involved in the notorious Cafe Babar in San Francisco about 1986, a group dubbed as the Babarians. Lerner and Bruce Isaacson co-founded Zeitgeist Press and have been referred to as 'the Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot of the underground.' Lerner's work has not yet been fully collected in an available edition. A considerable amount of Lerner's work is still unpublished, including poems, prose, and a large volume of letters. Lerner died of a drug overdose in 1997 and Zeitgeist published 'The Last Five Miles to Grace' posthumously. Bucky Sinister of the San Francisco Bay Guardian wrote: "Lerner was a broken-down saint if there ever was one. He was an eloquent screamer, a soft-spoken rageoholic, a madman with a great manuscript. His poetry will always be a reminder of a time when poetry in the Mission was spontaneous, magical, and more than a little bit dangerous."
SUGGESTED WRITING PROMPTS:
Write about a piece of art or music that captured your fascination as a child, why it captured your fascination, and how it has influenced you to this day.
Write about an experience you had going “very very fast” in your life.
In your life, are you more of a chaser or do you feel more chased? Why? Give examples.