Stellar Conditions

Stellar Conditions
Under west coast umbrellas
you rain on parades
that don't float your fleet
of boats whose hulls bulge
with your endlessly paired desires,
your presence lets the air of my tires
and calls my mother on the phone
to say that I've beena bad boy
with the lunch money
and the guest houseyonder back,
just beyond the golf course.

Why do I love you so much
that every day of
my fifty plus yearsis gone
like vapor escaping
a covered pot of boiling water,
my resume is shredded,
my works are undone,
every line in my faceand ache
in my bones means nothing
when I'm in the center of the street
or alone in the house
as you walk away,
a teen age boygassed
up on hormones
and jack rabbit guitar solos,
grinding my teethand yelling your name
from a hurt that
is deep and full
of colors turned inside out,

There are lines of menand womenup
and down each side of the main
street drenched from a constant rain,
ashen under lunar light
in the middle of the night when
all should be having dreams of their plans
for the next day's obligations,
but your negations change that,
fisher of men,
collector of women,seducer of secrets,
black scarab love,we glow under neon signs
for Budweiser and One Hour Photo,
muttering your nameas streetcars spark past on their rails,
we chant your nameas you open a magazinewhen the plane turns
over the ocean,we call your nameas
you order headphones for the in flight movie
that you'll watch under stellar conditionsas long as there is fuel
and credit cardsto cross the county line with.

A Fearful Tale

A Fearful Tale

Strange as the rain they didn’t predict I was there staring across the when the phone rang.
The phone was black as arrest warrant ink, a quality that was more ominous by the sound of the bell, which was shrill like the cry of man bobbing on the line where the sky meets the lake.
Mary turned her head from the mirror where she was watching herself undo a ribbon around her neck as I stood in the middle of the room, counting the rings with the tap of ay big left toe.
“Silly” she said, walking to the phone, two strands of ribbon blowing over her shoulder in what seemed like a wind, “your games amuse me, but really, someone might be trying to get through to us.”
She stopped just short of the n1.ght table the phone rested on and picked up the receiver from the cradle with an arch of the back and a swoop of the arm that seemed professional, very profess
The phone seemed to leap into her hand through attractions unspoken of in the city. though by some natural attraction, L paper clips soaring to the north and south poles of a horse—shoe magnet.
Mary said a few words, nodding, cradling the phone between her Mar and shoulder as she finished untying the knot around her neck.
The ribbon floated to the floor as Mary took the phone from her ear and pointed it my direction,
“It’s for you” she said, “it’s Andy
The walk across the room took along time.
“Hi Ted, this is Andy. I wanted to see if you’d gotten those poems I dropped off?”
His breathing was a gurgling, grating rustle of congestion and worse. The black holes of the receiver appeared to vibrate, pulse in time to his rasping. The receiver felt clammy felt clammy, and the wallpaper, which I hadn’t noticed before, was suddenly bright and screaming with reds, yellows, pinks, and punishes blacks. This was all wrong. My scalp felt as though my hairline had been stapled into position as a guard against a long and blustering wind from the desert.

“Well?” asked Andy, “Whattaya think of the poems”.
“Yer poetry sucks and yer mama dresses you funny, Andy…”
“I see…”
“Kerouac was a weenie and you gotta leave that shit alone”.
“Gotcha. What else?”
“You spell like a muthafuckah!”
“Oh yeah? Well, you suck”.
“Fair enough” I said, “Lunch tomorrow?”
“I’m there” said Andy, “My treat this time…”
“You’re on…”
“Fuck off. Later.”

And the phone went dead. And then the sun exploded.
In heaven I was seated on a café on a cloud over looking planet debris. Monkeys were at every table, tossing silver ware and plates across an endless expanse.

Waking up is hard to do

The depth of sleep
digs its nails into the wall
that separates you from
a planet that is awake
from the tallest peak to the
smallest crack in the concrete,
slumber pulls you deeper
into the lake where
nothing moves.

Waking up is hard to do.

You’re forever confused
about the change to leave
on the table after coffee,
and who’s smiling and why any
of it should matter.

There are so many time
I wanted to say
I love you ‘though
I didn’t sleep at all last night.

Lets just say that
the art of evasion
is the occasion to rise to
when the drinks get honest
and nothing else seemed to matter.

We shall find our places
and assume our positions
of surrender and on waking
shower and dress and comment
on the drive to work that
there seem to be more and more
mattresses tossed out of homes,
leaning against dumpsters
like working girls reclining
against streetlights and payphones.





1•

Talking about the weather

Talking about the weather

So little time left
in a day that's already done with
by the time the sun
rises in the East
over the warm water oceans,

Microphones and men
with expensive hair
scream into camera lenses
to where the world is dark again
and ready for strong drinks
and toasts to sorry bastards everywhere
they don't happen to be,
unless, of course,
the water in their drink
is brown from the tap
and reeks of limitless amounts
of DNA recombined and
recycled in every form fit
for a natural disaster,
it's then time to drop the drinks
and microphones and head for
high ground, the tops of buildings
that no longer seem so tall,

Bad news travels fast
with the best seats
on the plane
as cities full of lost citizens
ask their politicians
what just happened
when the storm clouds gathered
and squeezed out the light
that shone over the land,

Politicians scratching their
heads until their
fingernails are encrusted with
dandruff and blood
as they look up to the sky
with their mouths awed and gaping,
waiting for God to answer their
demands about
what just happened
all while it rains,
and they drown where they stand,
dumb as turkeys
around a rain barrel.

spin cycle

she was hours ahead of schedule
so she sat down while the clothes
did their spin cycle thing and in an instant
was in the backseat of a limousine
that moved up a long black avenue
to where the skyline became a spire
like hands pressed together in prayer
under lights of the night that makes the
windows of the soul fall sad expressions
down to where the holes in the street
are deep with where the rain
gathers in songs about closing time
as drinks stick to coasters on bars
burned with matches and gouged with
penknives where names are carved over names
called from payphones one checks
for returned coins as they walk with baskets
full of socks which she collects and mends
and sells between shifts at the Woolworths
where she stands at a register under a cardboard
poster of orphans with wide eyes who look as cute
as they starve themselves
to becomecreatures so beautifully
taut on their boney frame
that they cease to breathe
but now her watch beeps
just as a buzzer sounds
and clothes stop rotating
and all the dreaming stops
suddenly, suddenly,
hard like brakes
screaming in the distance
just as you drift into a sleep
that is now stolen from you.

Half the world has ceased to be

A Map of the World

Every piece of the puzzle
hasn’t found a fitting contour
eventually falls to the floor
as we make room for cups of coffee
and places to rest our elbows,

This map of the world has
holes in the cardboard ozone,
lakes where there should be
mountain ranges across the
severest edges of Asia,
gaping oceans of nothingness
where neither land nor sea
define the tides or the shape of
the wind blowing over flatlands
and highest peaks,

Quite a world, you would think,
coming into being without
all its parts present in the roll call,
and even the curved and islet shaved
bits finding peace as they are pressed
into place, forced to make nice
with border cuttings that make no sense
nor which force the wrong populations
into the same small area,

And even now things get worse
with desert, which comes on a tray
that’s set on the table, we make remove
our cups and saucers,
take away our magazines and ashtrays,
the tray is moved onto the table top,
and the puzzle moves forward, to the edge,
and by the time the first slice of pie is
served on a dish with small forks
wrapped daintily in thin paper napkins
half the puzzle goes over the table’s edge,
off into the brief outer space between
surface and floor, half the map of the world
has ceased to be,

Irregular bits of the former world
resting in dissociated shards
on the worn wooden floor,
and it’s not over yet,

Dear brother drops his
desert dish
and now
what used to be the
half of the planet
I dreamed about in a romance of travel
is completely, thoroughly
devastated
and covered in cake
and sticky, runny icing.

FORMERLY CONCERNED WITH HUNGR IN AMERICA

An outbreak of law and order,
cont'd on A-4, col. 3,
threatens livestock and poultry in
the middle of California,
precious things
wilting, withering,
dropping
     like
          zippers
on the cracked and caked floor of a
dead lake,
all without warning
as farmers, dry as basket straw,
wish they could muster a decent spit
for their cracked lips,
caked with
dried dust
hungry for water,
thirsty beyond repair.
mindless for a drink,
mindless as I am in front of this glass
on this table where
I sit
                                              STONED, daddy-Oh,
thinking that Muzak is the death of art and the reason to breathe or to go on eating
because it leeches the life from the simple chords
that made life
seem a chorus worth sitting through.

I 'm staring at the paper, the photographs and captions,
this
window to the world,
worried about cops at the end of the lunch counter feeding their faces with coffee and
cherry pie, I know they know something is horribly wrong with me,
they see me fight back insane
tears
for

all that dead cattle
that never made to
the bun.

The hills wash away

All of us
lucky sons of bitches
live on the hill tops
high over the fatal diseased
stew that the village has become,

And one of these days
it will stop raining,
the water will stop rising
and we'll be able to use
the roads down the hills again,

But in the mean time
we will gather our pots and pans
and not mourn over our terraces
that have collapsed with the onslaught
of water and wind
that howls and whistles through
loose joints in the wood.

New Orleans

New Orleans


Waters are black with
what this city used to be
before the levee broke
in those places,

And yet no sins are washed away
and every streetlight goes dark
as the lights go out in
the eyes of every face
staring up from the bottom of the pool,

Three coins in a fountain
and God blesses no one
who hasn’t a car with the gas
to drive to the high ground,

There’s nothing spicy
on the Latin menu,
this is not Holy Water
coming up the avenues
and rising to the pitch
of the wooden roofs,

It’s a jazz funeral,
it’s the worse
of all opening sentences,

It’s a little man
in a pilot’s costume
staring at the screen
wondering why every station
have the same pictures
of bodies floating
where a city used to be,
angry that his lips
are chapped from kissing
those photos of John Wayne.

radio waves

song is always
the saddest
when it reaches the
high note
on a chord
that is torture to try for,
bones ache
and the voice breaks,
the world shatters again
on the half hour
just before some smoky,
faceless voice
reads off the call letters
that lead up
to news at the top
and half past the hour,

it's a headline that
everyone knows
yet no one reads aloud,

"hearts broken at midnight",

"another boyfriend screams
at passing cars"

"girlfriends sob into sweaters
that defies weather on weeknights"

all the news as the
drums gallop forward
guitar solo cuts
through a room of
subdued colors
and rattles its separate notes
like jar full of bees
who can't wait 'til
they break free,


it's a song with s name
that has a buzz
no amount of drink
or smoke can whisk away
as if it were a stain
that would fade away
as the song fades out
on the endless
lapping choruses
on the rocks of
all expectation,

number one with a bullet
that makes each heart
that bleed into
every river of tears.

CAREER JERK

there is no one left to jump
this fence with not enough
upper body strength to
haul the boxesafter
I cut through the pad lock,all
that good shit just going southt
to people who have money,

so I got a real
job to rob,

I showed up in
my paper hatand a piece
under my shirt,said gimmee all that cashand

I was goneup the street
and around a corner and up againsome
flight of stairs to
a door at the end
of the flightwhere some clown
busted my actionabout sorry mofos
and traction winders,shit,
he grabbed my piece and my money
and popped me three times like a tattoo,
telegraph and the next thingI remember
was thinking here I goto
some dark monkey palacewhere there's
no money either.