Saturday, March 19, 2005

Gossip Carpet
Smooth be the mood for answers

Always crying, the thick gossip carpet
Being rather than perceiving
The brunt of emotion landing flat ina lap, legs unfolding.
Tailored for just this minuteR

inds littered on the alphabet promenade
Lotions make the hands look years apart
From wear and wrinkles that worry the flesh,
What a wonderful remark
About liver stainsthat allowed us discordance and beauty.
From here’ we see Ron reciting

Boy, did he ring the wrong number
I thought it was blue, but the water’s azure
There are many trains to Tarzana‘
Though has the couplet that rocked the boat
Ted would never be intimidated
By people staring as he hammers,
Bleeding into the font on the page,
That shirt from India.
Tailored from her see the carpet’ promenade

Ron wonderful and beauty
Many trains to azure Ted remarking
Lotions in Tarzana discordant’
Wrong number and the ring on her finger

Don’t just starnmer, litter alphabet couplets
Cover your wagonsAnd wash your decks...
I am not moved by the Tarzan yellAs might be vines divining in

Dining rooms or from diving boardsAnd see judge holding up wrong numbers
Called on account of alphabets placedOn the wrong buttons on each phone
In the House of Cards decked with
Bounds of Holly Stevens who
Cuts a rug and calls me to the carpet
To insure her father’s idea of
Palm trees limning the last edge of earth.

Thursday, February 24, 2005

a cannon shot for Hunter S. Thompson

aim my ashes
to the mountains
and the cold, clear springs
pouring over polished stone
down to the towns
where my name
is on shelves
with other histories
of a peculiar species,

tell me i'm fired up
and ready to go boom
again in the night,
hold your hands
and interlace your fingers
as i cover the land
with the dark, dry essentials
that remain when
the baptism is over,
i will be the smear on
the stones, the soot
on the trees
as it rains
and i return to the
ground in converted joy,

remember me as a shriek
in the night
when alarms went off
and there was only
a rattling of typewriter
keys and ice clinking in a glass,
the deadline has been
reached at last,
i am here at last
under the wire,
son of a gun,
i made it.


Saturday, February 19, 2005

Well, Yes

Native speakers are not the light
that brings the room it's glow,

going somewhere in time other than yesterday
will not make the mailman go away,

all your lovers have found something to do
with the lives you left them with,

well, no, I don't fancy a boot on my throat,
but would mind if I blew up one of your tanks?

As hard as I squint, shower curtains remain shower curtains
and somewhere a few thousand city worker vests are missing,

All anyone wants to do is walk with pride at some point in their
life time, which we pray is long and filled only with the routine
bad luck,

Yes, she says to me, this is another day that you haven't screwed up, have a hot slice of pie.

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Warped Cassette at a Garage Sale

There are hours of old music
that needs to be heard again
that only decays into static
as the wound reel warps and writhes
around the plastic reels,
the longer these tapes lay
in the sun, in Tupperware bins,
priced four for a buck
the longer the drum solos
get in time signatures that
would baffle the sensors of Alien invaders,
Russians in missile bunkers at the fair edge
of the Ukraine would stop dreaming
of snow and vodka and rise themselves
searching for a red telephone,
Washington would shut down
as anguished saxophone improvisations
hobbled over the three legged race
of "Giant Steps" poured over the
radios and each broadcasting outlet,
mothers handed children toys and
told them to go to sleep,
ugliness such as this horrible screech
meant something was coming for us all,
there were naked people on the corners
reaching their arms to the sky
as if to grab a line, a ladder,
hitch a ride on a beam of light
that would come from cloud
you could not look into,
deliver you from static and screech, scorns,
the evidence of bad breath when reed players
don't ge their teeth cleaned,
the planet shuts down as
ruinous scraping of stiff Afro Combs on asphalt
continues until there is only quiet
save for moaning
and the odd car horn blasting in the distance,
the skronk has halted,
everyone rises their head, takes a breath,
goes back to work
as they take their seat with a notice
that no missiles for mercenary angels
are anywhere to be seen,
the cassette machine snaps off,
warp music ceases,
"Man , that is some funky stuff" my neighbor says
and I take his quarter
for the ruined Santana tape,
he says he can't wait to
play again
real loud.

Friday, January 28, 2005

4th of July

My love knows no spending limits,
the matter was always academic,
the lots from which fireworks were seen
could be viewed as check marks against
a scorecard that is invisible, behind the clouds,
the wind blows toward the land
you'd never get for a birthday.

Even if we stood here all night
the wind would taste the same as
it did last year as we light our fuses
with old Zippo lights, there were sparks
in the dark and flinty remarks
as the sulfur caught fire and the
curvature of the caved-in moon
gave us white, chalky light
to search for our eyes in the dirt
under the leaves and the blanket
we brought from home, the
threshold we carry ourselves over
like weight that shifts in assignments
of motion , water displaced and rising
as the moon leans to the shoreline
for a kiss and a sip of what we're drinking.

She rose a leg as though to dance,
he played a song the same as always,
you sang those words with those strange notes
that rustle the highest limbs of California fronds,
I am writing a novel with every pause in the chatter,
in my mind I'm at my desk laughing again as
all the words fill the monitor and fall off the screen
and onto the floor.

It was clear, this dream
I had, we stood here with our
friends with our sparkler
and glasses of wine
cheering the American Night
as rockets screamed across the sky,
risking our homes or at least car keys
that might fall from our pockets,
but there is only empty night
in front of us, a moon shining light
that ripples over the water
that moves toward land in
serpentine movements,
as I was saying,
"…if we stood here all night,
if we made a big, tall wish,
if we're good with ourselves
and our words we put into the world
that goes to sleep trusting
the rime of light to creep over
the horizon come dawn,
we can see where we might
live in futures where we all have our keys
and we all get to drive home
from the fireworks at the beach…"

Monday, January 17, 2005

In favor of steady work

Icing on the cake
was all it takes
to get me to follow
a rule rather than bend it
to what my moment of need
might happen to have been
if I were with a friend
who chided me
on losing my gravitas
in this tight circle
of rules and cash value,

just make it sweet
and neat
as a treat and
as if it were were
a cocktail at the end of a shift
of shuffling orders
and rubber stamping
receipts in big red ink,
rules as they are
are fine if there's a kiss
or at least a nod
at the end of days
when the light darkens
through our office
and retail windows,

pals sans skills
on pills
and copious quantities
of smoke and coke
can stand their corners
and thumb their nose
while they leave
their trail of
running hard luck stories
about how it
was a bit of bad luck,
misunderstanding,
a bad break
they couldn't shake
nor bake as truth fully cooked up
like it were a scheme
that was their dream of becoming,
it's numbing to think all this,
what's remiss in the speech
and dress and the place
where they stand
in a pride that guards
cracks in the sidewalk
as heads nod in sleep,
a respect for weather
that forgives them not
at all
because weather knows them
not all This Fall,

I argue at times
not a wit
nor a flick of
the wrist that
twists every bad note
like it were some
malformed melody
someone else wrote and played,
how long have
I stayed
above water
like an an adult
oughta,
it's a voice, a cash register sense
of the world,
a sales floor
flooded with creme filled donuts
oozing underfoot,
zoo animals charge past
the register stands,
bosses and their assistants
asleep in the front seats
of company cars,

none of this makes
me star or delivers from the Devil
but I am above sea level
and have reveled in
the music of screams of joy
and been blinded by the
coin of the realm
as it it glittered and glinted
while all of us
squinted
and made plans to
go to movies
plays and
dinners our wives and husbands hinted
were the places
to let the evening's big hands
crawl steadily to
another calendar day
spent parsing
the history of
every rotating mystery
and solving this problem,
right now,
big or smaller fork,
fish or pasta,
Coltrane or Satriani,

benefits easier to take
than
nonconforming
myself to oblivion
on a corner where
i would be the boldest
among the coldest.