The Regular Road by Uber

The Costa Mesa Grange, old Cali-style white, rumpriding muckraking wobbly-rousing revival hall style by the side of Victoria, no one ever there, like a ghost of agrarian unrest over silver or having to tent in irrigation ditches. The milk plums and honey kumquats have long since been plucked from the trees, the veritable Egypt of sun God oranges has been converted box by box into storage units. The Gospel Swamp that once spread clear to Newport Bay with its blood of the lamb ten foot corn, enough lima beans to feed Israel, potatoes no one had ever seen before, is a pestilence long gone, like the vaqueros and Pimungans and the rusted equipment that passes for stones of that lost Atlantis outpost. All history is for bartering, on the bourse of whose account fools the most, like the shot I captured from imagination and experience, of Mexican farmers with cigars and candlelit love in their eyes dealing cards and trading, talking the decisions on the fruit wheel through and invoking strange Masonic rites involving the Four H's to align spirit's laws with sound ag practice. 

Today tho the parking lot is packed. The Grange is rocking. Either the world has changed again, or there is an AA meeting, where the ghosts have to sing, and the chips at least are green.

At the Loving Hut in Garden Grove

Vegan mermaids and rabbis agree

          With the giant sign at the counter

Vegan is the True Mark of Peace,

          Where We Reserve the Right,

Another sign advises, to Refuse Service

           To Anyone, and I soon see why

As, oblivious to another sign,

           No Public Bathrooms. No Exceptions.

A young man who might as well be a projection

           Built just for me rolls, skateboard in hand, in,

So much like my late, lamented step-son

           In some later comeuppance he is,

And asks to use the restroom, but immediately

           Adds he's only a skater, not homeless.

The Vietnamese woman at the counter,

          Whose desserts are to die for, freezes

In a terrified stare, and a guy at a table, exhausted,

          Drinking coffee, pulls up his chair

And takes over for her, for it's apparent to me,

          The only observer, that he is her partner

For the sake of this play. "Can't you read the sign?"

          He calmly asks, knowing what comes next

Exactly, as the skater in apparent need of a pee says

          "Oh, is it because I am brown?"

"I am brown too," he wearily replies, more brown,

          In fact, than the skater, who is, ding, again

Like my step-son, a very white half-Mexican.

         "Can I speak to the Manager? 

You're serving a Racist as a customer."

         "No, he is the manager," the lady reported.

"Then you have a racist owner!" he gleefully declared,

         And demanded anew his seat at the urinal.

A typically rational and normal human being would, 

         At this juncture, helpfully point out

"You should have gone with being discriminated against 

        Because you can't read besides you're white as fuck."

But I was not, deep in my pho, about to take that bait,

        Besides I sincerely wanted to know what to say

To the daily barrage of aggrieved entitlement I'd only lately

        Escaped. It was not the way of the counter woman either:

"We only want peace." So she broke every code to call his bluff

        And agreed, if he bought something, he could pee.

He nervously grabbed a coconut water, as if it would give him 

        The balls to continue his lunch-counter tirade.

"Do you want to pee or what? We don't want to fight you."

        So the dessert lady says all that needs to be said

And he shuffles like a point guard deciding on his next

        Deception, puts the drink down and leaves.

In the end, nothing was said. The Asian shopkeeper's curse

        Was too usual to warrant retrospection at all.

But the cause of peace was somehow furthered

         By saying nothing. Throw empathy and logic

As far away as they can go, and all you see are

         The stars upon the suddenly alive waters.

An Ordinary Sunday Photo Shoot in Carlsbad

It was a Super Bowl ad that made the Doctor finally cry

And realize as husband and father he was only his PTSD

To his family, a repressed Vietnam, poor but typical guy;

Or the bobcat the stunned driver put in his trunk

That woke to pounce when he opened it, or that kid he hit

On the highway, and had to live for both. The smallest

Chafe brings a twitch. I dance on the sticks of Gene Krupa, 

My uncle's artillery, to complain of the slights I received

At the hands of angelic grace, the marionette I couldn't be in life.

Thus memory conflicts with the history already behind us. 

The signs on the ground are only of the present, though they're 

Soft enough to be tombs if you see them. I see every flower

As hers somehow, but spring's rainbow ranunculus are only

What you let them become, and for whom. There is always

Another voice than your own. The hayrides are

Enough to keep families from hating each other today

Though it is only love on every face, such a strange way 

To show it, large enough to make one flinch.

More Jazz as Memories

My heart breaks

Yet it is not broken

The shards are someone else's 

Fucks to give enough

To sweep up.

I live in the sky

Touching down from the blue

To pretend that I am lonely

And destitute

Cos that is the only cool way to be

The Empty Restaurant

Ludwig von was a carpenter 

Learned the trombone in St. Louis

Still chases the jazz bird

Ponies up to the zircon and cinnabar mountains

Of what is neither Nevada nor a City

But there is blue cheese

And cacao, for the muse infuses

All shadows, while we

Fill our mouths 

Investigating the Worlds Smallest Mountain Range

Estom Yamin, the Indian name for the Sutter Buttes 

Means surrender to peace in Hebrew.

But we transacted codes as we were born to do,

With the underground inverted like a sluice 

From the pyramid rising in the rice marsh 

One golden stone and all of its crumbles 

In the late afternoon red shadows of rock walls

Of unknown origin, not easily formed even today

And for no current purpose, as the owners are unmarked

Except for the federal plutocracy, who will let you 

Walk a tiny stretch as long as you are minded

By a guide, who knows the art of deflection,

Knows to say ICBM Titan to any free range question

As if the water from the underground well was still drinkable,

Only rust you see not the half-life dust

Annihilation consciousness prophecied 

In the bunker stocked with plutonium glass.

The cold war cover ended many years ago, now it's only apathy

At this anamoly in the peach tree fields,

The secret payments to pistachio farmers 

Not to speak of what they see at night,

That other mode of governance,

The poison almond wisdom bloom like snow

For deer to escape under, starseeds to follow crows

To find what can't be said. 

That's precisely how it is known.

Ash in Old Sac

I left the house without even a suitcase to remember.

Let the telepathic kids go to the hill and transmit

Among themselves. All the signs of spring

Are downtown anyway, tulip tree and camellia 

And at sunset a vortex of crows, hundreds of them

Spiral in, speaking like the Bee for the citizenry

As the shadows turn to dreams inside the houses

That never are, night lit, what they seemed.

                                                                          Evangeline

Offers fitted ghosts for three stories of Halloween 

Costumery, for the ghost hotels and liveries

Here among the homeless, including one that floats

On a riverboat, where a haunted wedding serves champagne

And conjures the Titanic in the Mark Twain salon.

It is here the galactic come, disguised as lightning,

Where we break Ramadan with cardamom coffee

Beside people whose third eyes

Have been Wednesdayed with ash - it goes on still

Despite the old ways only saved as paint on brick.

They play pool at the Masonic Temple, don't they?

Impatiently Z Waits for the Final Edition

If it wasn't for the wastewater trade journal

So happy I put my camera in their sewerage

I don't know where I would I have fallen

With eyes open. 

                              On my own I could find a shot

In 10 soft minutes and take the rest of the day off.

It was that or die in a wild fire that freeform work ethic 

Of easy fun stress-free that was necessary for

The ridiculously scary crazy dangerous mind-fuckery

The job turned out to be, with its streetlamp breaking stories 

And the hydrogen car bomb, today's more cowbell 

Anecdote included, duly noted.

                                                       And here I am

At another overhang of rainbow weather, pewter

Weighing down plum blooms and grazing green, another sunset 

On deadline, where clouds hide only what they know. 

The horses turn Arabian in these conditions.

The eucalyptus hangs like mourning palms.

The moving parts bit bridle spurs 

Gallop time relentlessly across the skies.

A horse's curiosity is a positive thing

But that of horse owners as journalists

A thing to be strenuously avoided, as they lumber by in flannels and bandanna, cowgirl blue boots

Along the red sheds where kamikaze roosters

Challenge the photojo Subaru to a test duel

As red hawks perch like haiku on the impeccable wires

Watching for barn mice. They say it is a constant,

The media now knocked out and sleeping in the sun 

As the world goes on. What happened to the bees?

Comb of Natomas Clover

The horses bring the drama, as the yellow planes
Drop the rice seeds, even under wires. There are horses
In the McDonald's drive-through, roosters who speak for bays
At the Peyton Place ranch, cows and guys in Santa suits 
On roofs, they've finally put up a hitching post
After that duel at the India Market, two husbands dead,
And the dignitary in the chicken suit who crossed
Under the Rio Linda arch won't help you stay ahead

Of the drama trauma horse assembly. The coffin parades

Across the stage, shows nightly, except on line dance Thursdays.

Elkhorn turns to Greenback as it snakes through Citrus Heights 
All the way to Orangevale, like Joseph James D'Angelo Jr
Committed undetectable every imaginable
Crime here for 44 years. Now, the mall era ends
With professional tennis players in the parking lot,
The birds in cages who oversaw the suburban preenery
Gone even from memory, like the suburban dreams
Of munificence, for families, dialysis, barbeque.

The Early Toast Growth Factory has dyslexia specialists. 
The last time I was here, I photographed a baby
On a suitcase in the lupines, who gave me a fake name
Because he didn't want to buy the Thistle Patch
Fire station ice cream. But there will be no more melting 
Of the instant wildflower rings from vernal pools
In Phoenix Park every spring. 

It's silent enough to manifest a rattlesnake.
The shopping cart people marsh the mallow of the rice fields
At sunset, flooded repo lots outside the potash 
Distillery, where purple taco trucks rest between shifts.
The Croatian Cultural Center would book more weddings
If not for the crazy eye escapees from the child receiving home.
At least that's what the traveling therapist from Vacaville claimed 
Over donuts shared at seven am with cops 
At Erica's after clearing the homeless camp.

The ham radio poet would have a field work day 
Knitting these antennas of the RFD news feed
But I'm exiled like Edward and the white almond blossoms
On Caddington Way, between Christmas spurs, murders 
And manses, lives recreated from the element air
On the dispassionate magician's manifest. 
I cracked a flute of blues last night, a grok jock in the end
Schlepping nostalgia, for my protection, on a palette 
Of billboard attorney nursery rhymes, the ever
Empty cup of hope. We come with all the nothing we need
And there's always something. My crystals have gathered wings,
Casper's friendly zoomies come as if by wand from the clouds.

Sunset in Elverta

The gray beyond the hotwalker strings 

Is white against the blue Sutter buttes

As darker charcoal foals still to gold

By the rose of their tackrooms.

The grain tower is sterling

In this light.

How We Stopped Time

At the confluence of North and South Forks of the American River near Auburn California 

The convergence is as choppy

As an ash scattering at sea

But the wrinkles they thread

Create time as they find the one

Every time. The ancient slate awaits

Its writing and then erasing

Of flow that keeps movement forward 

Albeit Nordic white, and cold as truth 

Turbulent as any family's

Ritual spilled drink

Hurled down as a lost opportunity

To haul the puzzle out of space 

And let us feel the rise and fall,

The gleanings of the flux

Which inure to us at the moment

Harmony strikes,

What the mountain lioness

Calls her home GPS.

The Ships Over Santa Maria

They wait a little off still,

Leave flares that light

One singular with universe

At a time.

I am the director

Forced to fret from the wings

The audience their feeling,

The players their thought --

Both are something alien

But maybe seen, through some 

Geometry that beats its drum

Because the heart does too

And all that needs to be

Forms from the vibration 

For the purpose of whisking away --

That is not it, no, that one.

Palisades Assassins

Things become much clearer in the smoke.

It was the night that had not been allowed

To roll in

Way past curfew

So relentlessly restless they burn

Palatial dreams to 2 by 4 crisps

And laugh

From too much fuel! They offer

To further cover their tracks.

For who can look in the face 

Of a fire wind? Even if you know

It only exists as a thought to scare you

And its toxins unoxygenated if you mask

Like them --

Still there were two houses here

And one is no more

While in the other bees sip roses

Like vampires as usual.

So the shadow overtakes

What the real thought it was

In the fracturing, the grief that

Must be nudged to the window.

This time we were lucky;

Only the rich and famous were cindered,

The rest just left without power 

As a precaution 

(Which was how they seriously felt anyway).

And me, I saunter the rubble as if they are

Eggshells, left to wonder

Why we fight something so mysterious 

We can't even see how it is vulnerable.

In Galactic News

The essence of vastness,

The hegemony of forms,

The click-mind triggered

By thoughts of the divine

In an increasingly unstable 

Reality where drones and new

Technologies invite us

To choose again our belief

As the Federation offers us

The flower of AI friends.

Gears turn in the heavens

At last.

Some Anecdotes Without Evidence

For Patrick Kurp

Everybody blogs, and every right writes every day,
So much of the little they have to say
Goes round in circles, like the colors of our cars,
In the earthly panorama that always stops at who we are,

And sometimes at George Hamilton, or heroin, if chance
Will favor us the slot we always play, spun up like a trance,
The pulse of all we never really needed known
We cannot live as our own, and cannot really do as we are shown,

So the models are all broken: Lindsay Lohan,  starved
To live as child without a childhood, addict superstar
(Or superstar addict), who dumps her shame on the public
And pays good people to take care of the waifs she has picked.

The circle goes around like this, souls find such joy
In millionaire boys with deadly toys from angry streets
Who get their trap stars back, summon orgies in their sheets
Most every night; play a children's game that we, we all watch.

We've lost our sense of ethics, our inherent valor,
(At least since Michael Jackson's hair went out on fire),
So we leave great thoughts to specialists, to "talk among themselves,"
And act like any businessman, say it doesn't pay to delve,

When we're young again and free, to surf pornography

And dream away our lives without the key

That James revolved and Chekov named, 

Time's prizes, without shucking or shame.

It turned to love anyway in time. You toil in words 

As others toiled in stone, who shaped their world 

In books with inner light, for those who still dare, to read.

Someone in the would-be towers feels that piquant need

To noodle with a would-be feather, by would-be candle,
To conjure like a wizard all the books that he can handle,
To show how all the finest thoughts connect us every day
As we bake our bread, try to make our memories stay.

                           Your words are like a surgeon's,
Surrounding without reaching the disease. But purging,
Nevertheless, though it feels a birth beginning every morning,
As words go ever tumbling through the skies -- who has the time

To catch them? Yet you find them in the vast, akashic vaults

And scatter with my buttered toast their salts

You've carried like the hermit who found Lot

Preserved for everyone who wouldn't look.

The writer -- has no duties -- but to put down on the page

The truth to be forgiven, the beauty left to age.

CAP Revisited

When Contemporary American Poetry (the CAP in the title) plopped to my college freshman lap I thought, like all my classmates, that poets did nothing, they just, in the words of Bruce Springsteen, “stand back and let it all be.” Unbeknownst to me at the time, this sampling of poets from my father’s and grandfather’s generations (yes it was mostly men) would later become my education in poem writing, and not just mine. It became the standard reference work for the way creative writing programs at every American university wanted poems written, that is, in plain language and confined to personal experience. 

Exquisitely compiled by A. Poulin, a most interesting figure who channeled tremendous disability into important acts of love for poetry, CAP offered discerning and generous selections, marvelous critical sketches, comprehensive bibliographies — even full-page photos of the poets. It was a book one would (and I did) spend time on, with so many different approaches on display for how to sound out feeling through words. The book itself, I later learned, was designed to correct a scandal from before I was born, the publication of two distinguished poetry anthologies (the so-called Pack-Hall-Simpson and Allen anthologies), both purporting to represent the best of the “new” American poetry but having not one poet in common. As the radicals of the 1960s were institutionalized in 1970s academia, the intoxicating blend in Donald Allen’s book of New York surreal, Boston post-Pound and San Francisco Zen was welcomed in, while the ivy hall of select men who are poets from the Pack-Hall-Simpson book retained the usual privileges of tenure, necessitating the need for a unifying standard for the next generation of university poets. CAP fit that need snugly by selecting almost exactly the same poets from the two earlier anthologies 15 years later.

It has been decades since I picked up the book — like most textbooks for most people it still collects dust on my shelves as some kind of homage to knowledge once pretended to — but I happened to consult it recently and was freshly taken with its innocence and scope. The first thing I noticed was — contrary to conventional wisdom — it is frighteningly easy to tell at a glance which poems “stand the test of time” and which ones stand out as sore thumbs. One cannot account for the difference by poet, school or time; it’s like the real poem chooses to disclose itself through a variety of guises.  

The poems are presented one at a time, single file, no judgment but, honestly, wouldn’t you rather read to the end of this:

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

Than this?

    A car radio bleats,
    'Love, O careless Love . . . .' I hear
    my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
    as if my hand were at its throat . . . .
    I myself am hell;
    nobody's here—

Interestingly, the highly influential poet who wrote that goth-like bit (and it inspired paprika Henry) took two poet acolytes under his wing, two suicidally fearless, drop-dead gorgeous, genius IQ witches who showed the world how truly pissed off the muse had become:

    Every woman adores a Fascist,
    The boot in the face, the brute
    Brute heart of a brute like you.

And:

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

It is here we see how the space given — the silence between the notes — makes genuine poetry. There’s no reason given why a daughter would harbor such emotions about her father, yet in that silence of every person having to feel it and figure it out for themselves all women are convincingly cast as Jews who fall in love with Nazis. Just as we understand with eerie precision the power that death confers on the powerless without ever knowing why the speaker’s need to love subjected her to being so roughly paraded around Boston in the first place. 

And Boston is the setting for many of the anthology's poems, giving it a certain cold consistency of detail. Ten of the 40 poets represented were from the Boston area (also where the book was published). And of those ten with Boston accents (Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley, Donald Hall (of Pack-Hall-Simpson), Galway Kinnell, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton) only Kunitz can be viewed as a minor or regional poet. Contrast that with New York City, the next-most represented city, which offered up Alan Dugan and David Ignatow (who on my fantasy team would be replaced by Delmore Schwartz and Louis Zukofsky), along with the great James Merrill (who as heir to the Merrill Lynch fortune grew up basically everywhere), W.S. Merwin (whose signature poems were written after he moved to Maui) and Richard Wilbur (who spent most of his life in the Boston area). For the record, the geographical breakdown of the remaining poets otherwise resemble the population demographics of the country at that time: San Francisco with its poetry renaissance brought three poets (Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti – who didn’t actually grow up in San Fran but, uh, founded City Lights bookstore), New Jersey contributed two (Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsberg – way to represent, Garden State!), as did Detroit (Robert Hayden and Philip Levine) and Philadelphia (W.D. Snodgrass and Maxine Kumin – another migrant to Boston!), while Ohio pitched in another two (Kenneth Koch from Cincinnati and James Wright from Martin’s Ferry), Chicago one (Gwendolyn Brooks), Baltimore one (Adrienne Rich) and one from each of many states: North Carolina (A.R. Ammons); Oklahoma (John Berryman); Minnesota (Robert Bly); Tennessee (Randall Jarrell); Georgia (James Dickey); Iowa (John Logan); Kansas (William Stafford); Washington (Richard Hugo); rural Michigan (Theodore Roethke); and upstate New York (John Ashbery – who fellow upstate New Yorker A. Poulin didn’t seem to care for), while there were two American poets who did not come from the U.S. at all: Denise Levertov from the United Kingdom and Louis Simpson (of Pack-Hall-Simpson) from Jamaica.  

Where is Los Angeles, one may rightly inquire, but that only leads to the giant missing Frankenstein head of Charles Bukowski, whose inclusion would have pissed off almost as many department heads as it would have brought in new readers. And where is Lorine Niedecker for god’s sake, or William Bronk (both discovered by Bostonian Cid Corman) — or Mr. University of Iowa MFA (from Florida, no less!) Donald Justice, for that matter? But best to leave the glare of hindsight behind, for it’s striking how representative of today’s reputations the actual book ended up.

Turns out the chilliness of this representation wasn’t just from being set in New England. I looked up the time of year the poets in CAP were born and, astoundingly, 16 of them were born in the winter, versus 3 in the summer, 10 in the fall, and 11 in spring. 

It gets even more interesting when you group the poets by zodiac sign. The winter signs predominate, Capricorn with five (Bly, Duncan, Levine, Olson, Stafford), Aquarius with seven (Ammons, Bishop, Dickey, Dugan, Ignatow, Kinnell, Logan) and Pisces with four (Koch, Lowell, Merrill, Wilbur). Secretive Scorpio has six residents, most of whom are typically labelled confessional poets (Berryman, Levertov, Merwin, Plath, Sexton, Snodgrass). Voluble Gemini is next with five (Brooks, Creeley, Ginsberg, Kumin, Roethke), none of whom would be compared with any of the other ones. There are three Aries (Ferlinghetti, O’Hara, Simpson), Taurus (Jarrell, Rich, Snyder) and Leo (Ashbery, Hayden, Kunitz), and only two for both Libra (Baraka, Hall) and Sagittarius (Hugo, Wright), traditional bastions of poetic prowess. Amazingly, no Virgo natives make the cut and no Cancers.

For those keeping score, that’s 19 fixed signs, 11 mutable and 10 cardinal; 14 air, 10 water, 8 fire and 8 earth. Broadly speaking, the preponderance of fixed and air energies suggests a time of consolidation and clarification rather than one of innovation and creative destruction. Indeed, the 40 or so-year period distilled by CAP capped a magnificent time in American letters that channeled many streams borne on the wake of high modernism into a body of significant and varied achievement: historical epics (Maximus of Gloucester), perverse autobiographies (Dream Songs), jeweled formal verse (Pisceans Merrill and Wilbur), working-class laments (Not this Pig), revolutionary blues (Poem for Half-White College Students), de-subjugated feminist love poems (Dream of a Common Language), French surrealism set in pre-Stonewall New York (Ashbery and O’Hara), mystical verse both nature-based (Kinnell and Merwin) and spirit-centered (Bly and Wright), radical free verse inspired by eastern religions (Turtle Island), ecology poems (Traveling through the Dark), anti-war poems (Teeth Mother Naked at Last), religio-scientific nature poems (Corson’s Inlet), poems about poetry (Structure of Rime), poems about language (The Window), poems about nothing (Silence in the Snowy Field), poems that not only proclaimed but were proud of their otherness (Howl).

It’s hard to imagine – in the succeeding 45 or so years, when the quantity of poets and the formal study of poetry has expanded exponentially in America but readership has dwindled to virtually nothing – how one could take stock of it all in such a coherent manner and end up with anything but a collection of more diverse but inferior versions of what is in this book. That is a genuine achievement.

I’ll close with I think my favorite poem from the collection, Robert Hayden’s “The Night Blooming Cereus.” The title refers to the large desert cactus that only reveals its magnificent flowers in the darkness, an apt symbol for presenting in individual poetic terms the collective feelings inspired by the American civil rights movement:

And so for nights

we waited, hoping to see

the heavy bud

            break into flower.

            On its neck-like tube

hooking down from the edge

of the leaf-branch

            nearly to the floor,

            the bud packed

tight with its miracle swayed

stiffly on breaths

            of air, moved

            as though impelled

by stirrings within itself.

It repelled as much

            as it fascinated me

            sometimes–snake,

eyeless bird head,

beak that would gape

            with grotesque life-squawk.

            But you, my dear,

conceded less to the bizarre

than to the imminence

            of bloom. Yet we agreed

            we ought

to celebrate the blossom,

paint ourselves, dance

            in honor of

            archaic mysteries

when it appeared. Meanwhile

we waited, aware

            of rigorous design.

            Backster's

polygraph, I thought,

would have shown

            (as clearly as it had

            a philodendron's

fear) tribal sentience

in the cactus, focused

            energy of will.

            The belling of

tropic perfume–that

signaling

            not meant for us;

            the darkness

cloying with summoning

fragrance. We dropped

            trivial tasks

            and marveling

beheld at last the achieved

flower. Its moonlight

            petals were

            still unfold-

ing, the spike fringe of the outer

perianth recessing

            as we watched.

            Lunar presence,

foredoomed, already dying,

it charged the room

            with plangency

            older than human

cries, ancient as prayers

invoking Osiris, Krishna,

            Tezcatlipoca.

            We spoke

in whispers when

we spoke

            at all . . .

Another Poem from Boston

Old Burial Hill, reserved for families 

With lineages biblical, and site of

Photoshoots for the model who was not

To be, who would not be here with my

Family to hear the tale of Glover's 

Regiment by the town's remaining drunk,

How they came by mist at night upon Long 

Island, where the redcoats dined on clams

And red-tide arrogance.

                                           There were ducks, too,

Inexplicable at zero degrees,

And the lady of Redd's Pond held forth most

Icebreakingly, about her cookies, mostly,

How they fooled the shoe cobbler's children

Into thinking that she wasn't a witch.

Those who are no longer here -- were there,

And there was a place I remembered, that

Never went away. They call it history

This feeble try to separate tides from blood.

My Quote on LA Weather

The longer one lives 

       with the angels, 

The more oppressive 

       the weather becomes. 

It turns in an instant

       from your dream

Of no pain 

      to a rather cool blonde

Who warns you 

       she has feelings,

And by the time you've reclined

       in her plush 

But brown valleys 

       in your dream of a home

You realize she only 

       shines on you at all 

If you have a great body, 

       expensive sports car 

Or tickets to 

       Lakers games.

Inwardness at Two Points of Hope

The guy who brings the flowers

To the office tower 

As if it could be anyone

But I, the only one who sees him,

Knows who they are for,

Another gesture of my esteem

From somewhere far away

(In this case, City of Industry,

A most unsentimental place).

It doesn't matter from whose heart 

It sprung, there is something in it

For me, to feel.

This sharing we do

May be at the furthest remove

But that doesn't puncture the oneness.

We are all one at Christmas 

In the red chairs of The Jerry Moss

Though I am the only one here.

LA has gifted this empty stretch 

Today not by fate or luck

But because I'm large enough.

Long Live the New Pluto

Yesterday's atrocities of the sink are today's

                  sun-spackled copper

— Everything has changed

But it was only really my mind, reckoning

                           what it missed 

When it focused on its reckoning

Last go round. How there was always another

             play, another way to settle things

                          without settling.

Everything grows, everything leaves

    everything else behind, to expand to

                                               what it is.

Watering's the easy part, when one feels

                           the space for others,

Not to understand, there is no understanding

             the ways of people!

But to allow, the only thing you 

     really want.

Sunday on the Pier With and Without Memories

The shame tango is so hard to stop

When it's just me now doing the reps.

The other has gone off to Valhalla

Where she imagines thunderbolts raining

Like flowers on my subservient head.

But I got two dogs on my leash to her zero.

Life for her is a struggle for breath, expended

Honking orders specifically so

The recipient can never get it right

And must beg humbly for forgiveness to

All the terror her condition has unloaded

On her sublimely unmedicated self.

I must go, to the la la land of compassion

Where all souls are lovely, and no gesture stands

As an attempt sent back to truly love.

She closed the deal for her children.

I made my pact with the muse.

It always is for me some final stand

Against silence, but my voice should recall

How to breathe before it would shout. 

It's hard to begin again 

When endings are so painful, 

Where the truth it is an ending

Releases its wool from eyes 

Unaccustomed to this light 

On the Huntington Beach pier, all its glories 

Arranged for me, and me alone, now.

The world of couples stares at my star shades

In gratitude, not envy, for I have

Forged the fire as I was burned alive in it.

And now I am free, because I choose to be,

Choose a troubadour's solitude once more.

A boy with guitar and the gift sings on the pier

For dollars, of deepest pain

Only as a feeling of peace.

Last Secret of the Animal Husband

He was a steward, so they could love

If only for a little while, what caught

Their eyes, and they were mesmerized

For a timeless instant of awe, like all

Children everywhere live their moments,

With a creature, and we had them all:

Blind toads, disappearing rabbits,

Hens who didn't believe they were chickens,

Bearded dragons who wanted to fuck all day

But could never quite hook the hole,

Gekkos who needed to come out each night 

For a comfortable hand to bite, snakes that hid 

In the sofa, who were foisted by airmail 

On new homes with less negligent owners, 

A beautiful green iguana named Draco

Who sat only on the highest perch of a house

Built just for him, who tolerated only 

The warmest mists, the freshest organic greens

And would flail like an anaconda, bare talons 

Like a hawk to inflict the pain he felt in my glove

As I tried without a clue to keep him alive

For a little girl who had long since forgotten him

-- Or had maybe repressed the trauma

Of playing with the little adorable and

Finding him under the TV, screaming

To parents who'd line danced 'til 3

What to do, and we begged and we pleaded

Don't try to get him out, just wait a second

But a second was an eternity of worry, she had to 

Lift the TV and drop it perfect cut on his 

Little arm. It made him, ironically, more valuable 

(For iguanas outlive humans) to be the green iguana

Who never knew he had four limbs once.

At least she didn't kill kim, like she killed her fish, killed 

Her cat, killed the miracle bearded dragon baby

The appeared in the yard months after mama had died

But hey, kids kill pets, it's no worse than a nature

Documentary, the grief builds their character

And the time saved makes our lives easier -- the 

Dragon alone was an hour a day fixing my eyes

On my darkening yard to find where he'd hid

That time. Same with the rabbits, creatures designed

To fuck so severely with my mind I almost felt love

When I finally put them in the hay with carrots.

And, in some strange reversal that these times are

So famous for, all the chores of raising angry chickens

Fell to the parents, but the kids got the eggs

And generally didn't eat them, you know how kids are.

But they left their eggshells scattered nevertheless

And my main job was not to crack them, for

What held us hostage was their sadness, for what life is

As they saw it unfold, if only in a blink before turning away.

They would lose their soul if it was spoken what they did

To those they loved, out of care, out of fear, out of neglect.

In fact this is the first time speaking of it, today.

What brings it up is this nature, well, documentary

We are watching as the Year of the Dragon wends its way

Through our final year together, if not as a family,

At least on Earth together, and we came with whatever

We had to show for the experience, on our best

Behavior, like a marking of time and nothing more,

But somehow we got together, formed that one

Consensus share that makes us real, as we saw

Scottish weasels turn white, dolphins fish by sonar,

The latest AI models of the colors bees can see,

The usual menagerie of creatures better than us

In all but one detail, and the usual complete lack of

Feasible explanation for any of it, this galactic zoo

Where we humans get to be the alpha dog,

Even humans from Alpha Centauri, or Sirius,

Strange as we are to understand and get along here.

They knew every species, loved every kind,

The macaws and mandrills, zebras, blue frogs,

The impossible rainbow mantis shrimp, and it made

The breaking of bread seem somehow worthwhile,

Each of us on different operating wavelenths,

Different ways to be innocent and well-intentioned

But ruin others lives, again and again, with no consequence,

On this strangest of holidays, not understood by a soul 

Not from the USA, barely tolerated by those within it,

As all families barely tolerate each other, then and now,

And as most Thanksgivings go, it wasn't bad,

To sit through one last brave act of fakery

To hide resentment at never being allowed

To really know each other, our roles were too

Defined, the play too well designed for my needs,

Whatever the hell they are. 

We say goodbye pretending to be the best of friends

We couldn't trust, any attempts at meaning

Met with harsh resistance, with talks of a visit

To a record store for Disraeli Gears

As if I wasn't even here. But I was,

There was no one else in fact. And I saw it,

After they had left, a single spider

Both would have demanded immediately killed

As a condition of approval for me as step-parent,

Just spinning its web in freedom

In the gold Thanksgiving light,

Just beginning her web,

The story that includes it all.

Procrastination Convo

"The Singularity," he said

And she gobbled on about

Some old-style sayer of sooths

Who prophecied this moment 

As an end

Which brought up talk of calendars,

How to fit the facets false

Into our ordinariness.

We didn't resolve that either.

It's touchy like that,

To tell and not draw contact.

Still, the place we meet

Makes us crystal,

Collected as identity,

The need to let it go

Now that there's a breeze.

Return to Vernon

After all the tears of saying 

The unsaid wants to speak.

It can never be happy about its situation,

To open its mind from what is closed

Like a rat trap pummeling toes

While the rat takes a ride in the spin cycle

Laughing how anyone can think

He could come clean.

We go back a ways, my friend, we argued

Like this through many redemptions,

Well not like this, where we refuse to talk,

Wouldn't ever agree to agree to disagree.

You're in another rat hotel

Positioning your cheese, while I

Make friends with cats, the most unreliable

Of thieves -- it doesn't matter

When there's tenements all the way to the river

And no one checks on the state of things

Where we sleep. Telling our truth

Has always been this kind of game,

To be adored and seen, and not to let the

Victim through the ripped out insect screen,

For too much compassion and there's none left

For me, too much kvetching and

The state of the world seems no one's fault

Except, inevitably, mine. 

The fault is in our desire to suffer

Not being seen somehow as divine,

As divine as that of any fucker who squeezes

Plugs from laundromats tho the pay phones

Have been lifted, and a new invisible sheriff

Runs the town without us again.

It's not enough to note the glow

Of golden arches cross the grey horizon

Gives in French fries the only actual hope

We have, or shows to all how Moloch

Must be allowed to harvest our children,

Or even to dream of being manager is a relic

Of a time that even we have forgotten,

We who claim to forget nothing.

The glow is just a vision, a gift

For jackasses like us, to wend

Whatever stormy dramas we can weave

For the benefit of other people

Being imposed upon until they change

Or, kindly, pretend to,

The lie redeems whatever thing

Made it necessary, by turning true.