Poet Tree
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Exit Ramp on the Van Allen Beltway
Monday, March 11, 2024
Death Doula Villanelle
Saturday, March 9, 2024
Checking in on Cleo and Briscone
Thursday, March 7, 2024
The Oldest Chinese Restaurant in California
It can no longer dance.
The main vein has been unreined
To memories fallen like mirrors.
The pillaging pillow bends like a willow
As the crisper fills with remedial rain.
The pea flower blue forbidden rice frog
Has many paddies to cross.
The lilies are the only things blooming
In the pea soup, blue velvet fog
That refuses to smoke out in a blaze of entitlement
Like flair-haired Jimmy the red-headed step head,
Roller of doobs for pubes
But to evolve with each resolve,
To see the master's hand as my own
Pulling the black and blue down into the sky.
Wednesday, March 6, 2024
Bus 69
My forlorn lonesome burn
For what's locked away in Folsom,
Your fulsome bosom blues
and their foregone conclusions.
Yet they somehow found their way
To the Ukrainian pray for rain party
At Open Heaven that went on all night
Keeping vigil like a light house,
A sigil for the ages where the buzzers and alarms
Go off instead of on
And Caspar the Jumping Ghost is on the struggle bus
But thankfully not thrown under
Like at the Mesmer school of Mnemesyne
When the Chicago School of lab rats and coats took over
And asked, famous artists style, "can you draw this blank?"
Oh my wing woman
For the sweet adelines
Swedes on treble cliffs
Wailing love language for dummies
From open source on the light web
Open all night
Wherever love is forbidden
Which interplanetary love always is
Everywhere but heaven
Open all night
Like the pickup truck that rides the LA River
Blaring Staying Alive with no way to disco duck it.
The doctors just say fuck it, face the hypnotist and dance.
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
Whisperings of the Way
Sunday, February 11, 2024
The Space it Takes to Be Nothing
Thursday, February 8, 2024
The Fear Leaves
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
The Kings of Hollywood
Sunrise Train after Rain
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
Fire Horse
Sunday, February 4, 2024
Ox and Goat in Rabbit Time
Saturday, February 3, 2024
1940
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Signal after the Storm
Tuesday, December 5, 2023
Song of the Wheelchair
Friday, November 17, 2023
Incident in Norwalk
The lost angels have gone off the rails, Off tumbleweed reservations, one tweaker Kept 7 trains, 1000s of people, stranded For hours, all up the line to Bakersfield And everyone watches the system collapse, The inexplicable malfunctions In the way people love and understand As we watch our beliefs on the board go down. I’m a lucky one. I escaped the good fortune Of commuter rail suicides on either side of the drive And the bridge dive suicides. The 10 freeway Has fallen through! The hills are angry with smoke As we wait expectant but senseless, accepting But numb, the stoic SoCal cool where there would be Homicides in Gotham, third rail replies To the no explanations, not even, really, lies. It’s a party, in fact, a copa cabana in the club car, A conga line where everyone can sing Of their endless love and get hitched in, Laughing like the moon at jackals. The anonymous station we were deposited With only hope left in our pockets was once The scene of a town’s, any American town’s, joy As the freight rumbled through with a shudder. And when we finally move, it feels somehow historic, This epic fail, to withstand all the traps of time Placed in our way for us, and still be standing, as, At the end of the endless, you’re still there, intact.
Saturday, October 28, 2023
Mother For The Sky
Saturday, August 26, 2023
del vino e delle rose
Friday, August 18, 2023
Ode to Skip's Garage
Thursday, August 10, 2023
Moon
Has already shown us
The black broken hulk
Of a once-proud starship
Decimated by war
And put in orbit
To save a planet
That looks on it fondly,
Its sick light
Projected like a movie,
As source of all mystery,
All feminine lunacy,
As it makes birth regular
Instead of free,
The Van Allen tidal trance
Demagnetizes women,
Keeps them from control
Of the earth, her body,
Source of everything.
Monday, July 31, 2023
The Zucchini Unraveling
Sunday, July 2, 2023
Catullus 16
Tongue and throat your noble boy toy Furius,
Until you say what you think of my poetry,
A little soft, a little sheathed?
For a pious poet ought to be clean,
When there's fleur de sel and rabbits on the grass;
Let the lines purr gentle and a little chaste
And if the hairs stiffen for an itch
It's for those whose loins are never moved.
You, who cover all the bases,
Did you read me wrong?
Do you think I am a male?
I will prick you, Aurelius.
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
Retro
in Hawaii,
The first one proposed, as the place
to end all place
And a few more were offered
to the agil-e divinities:
only by boat,
The Pismo barefoot lifestyle,
the sofa
Where the children were read to ...
Until the last one saw her home,
Walpole, abode
Of the prison, the orangeade farm,
the one road to the den
pitching razor blades.
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
Afternoon TV
Of get involved with me
Rubs the entanglement ropes
The wrong way
And the puppet strings break
To free-fall flying through
What used to not be illusions
But palpable beads
Of crystal, the world
With somnolent echo
To efface the frack congress
Of slack lackey flacks
On your behalf,
The ludicrous madhouse
Of plaints real
And remembered
In your vast entitlement writ
Of complaint
To steal everything outside
Into the hole you had to climb
Into, unrecognizable
To yourself
Just in time for a fade
Into a sunset no one sees
Or doesn't want to,
Your suffering neglected
Because it is taken on
For the collective, so they can
Look away
Or look so closely
They can't see what you
Don't want them to see,
What you can't,
Librarian caught
In a classification scheme
Fit for priests
Where emotion was spared,
Now needed
A river of tears
As the sea recedes
Thursday, February 16, 2023
Carmel Mission
I break the silence
With these words of love
As I broke the bread
Of silence
So long ago
In these echoing halls
When we were one heart
In all but name,
Touch, kiss,
The sacred word
Flowed between us
Beyond words, beyond God,
The place we knew
But could never land
So we landed here
Our pure white wings
In service to suds
And feathers and lace
And each other,
The look of learning
In each eye,
A key to who we were
And will always be.
Books of symbols compromised
By the lack of proximity
To us,
Lace all that is left
Of our hands
That should have touched,
Our silence that was wasted
On no kiss.
But that is the way
Of the pilgrim,
To find in absence
What would be too much ...
What you are right now
A hundred miles away
In my very core.
So we continue
Where we broke off,
Waves that never stop
Reaching the shore.
Monday, January 30, 2023
Another Carmel Apartment
Where our Penelope
Awaits her invisible,
Does he stand on the gangplank longing?
Or does he know all this
Will end
Only when the knot is tied
To dock
And not a moment before,
No matter how tremulous the waves
Or uncanny the shore.
There are houses, now,
Encased in mist,
Lost in their views
From the hill,
The love inside
Too vulnerable
To be spied even with
The drapes flung wide,
Would-be widows at windows
With eyes that only mirror
What they see,
Eternal grey
To pierce again from sky
Another rainbow.
It only appears
When you least expect it,
Like the ghost horizon ship
That stays away from port
Dredging and dumping
In menial breath
Some black stuff that holds
All its value
In arm hurl and sinew
Tightening
To serve it
At a reach
From where hearts are open
To receive,
By hearths that make quick work
Of it
In the name of things to burn
And share
And never run out
Of the need to share
It all.
Becomes whole
That no one rides
Its scales,
The heart is always
Somewhere else,
Frozen like an ice chunk
Under glass
Waiting for its maiden
Who will claim it
When the tide returns
What treasures the sea
Disgorges:
Some rope, some kelp,
A handful of shell,
The things that stay
In sitting rooms
Forever,
Memories of loss
And distance.
Wednesday, January 25, 2023
Trine
Saturday, December 17, 2022
Grief Trading Eights
Sunday, December 11, 2022
The Jazz Baby
Friday, December 9, 2022
Elegy for Jesse
Monday, November 28, 2022
The Only Tears Allowed are Tears of Joy
Jesse McCulloch Sigler, 8/23/91 - 11/27/22
Sunday, November 27, 2022
Contrast of Light and Boysenberry Vine
Wednesday, November 23, 2022
Variations at Sunset
Gift of the Balsamic Moon
Sunday, November 20, 2022
Old Playbills and User Manuals
Thursday, November 17, 2022
Chill After the Show
Wednesday, November 16, 2022
Confessions of a Short Attention Span
Tuesday, November 15, 2022
Balance Exercise
Monday, November 14, 2022
Alienations of the Free
Friday, November 11, 2022
Senator Fetterman*
* Refers to John Fetterman, an android replicant of the type immortalized in the "Minions" cartoon series, who cannot form coherent thoughts yet is claimed by mainstream narratives to be Pennsylvania's newest US Senator, having beaten a beloved celebrity heart surgeon in the 2022 midterm elections.
Wednesday, November 9, 2022
The Taste of Sour Grapes
Monday, November 7, 2022
Dinner on the Princess
Friday, November 4, 2022
Elon as the Good Reptillian
Tuesday, November 1, 2022
The Apartment in Carmel
Saturday, October 29, 2022
Another One for Sylvia
birds still aligned in flight,