Brio Mows a Mountainside

Shadows run, and so does the sun.

Lhea is growing, feeding on hay,

Watching with eyes so open and gray

The place she has been given

To exist, free inside an aluminum frame

As telephone lines are strung up above

In Spanish, to connect beyond the ridges

Filled to their crevasses with grass

As the water spills again from the bucket, 

Even with the rain gone. The hooves are shaved.

A bulldozer carries its arms like upright alms

And the trainer's voice intones instructions

When no one really knows, it's just

That you have to believe, in a hat, that,

Even if it flies away, doesn't alter

The belief at all, it adjusts

To itself, like a knob with limited extremes.

The white pen's repainted when it feels

Too fenced in. The horsewoman sings

The Healthy Song as she brushes her charge.

The horse appreciates the effort, though says

It's lost on him. The arena's plowed flat,

Another season coming, as the oak trees

Turn green. The horses remember how to turn

And how to hold the space for their humans

Despite their "magic wands," for they know

Appearances deceive, they use that very trick

To garnish carrots, so much easier to see than feel,

For humans at least, so dependent on 

Being observed, what's inside

Seems so small, not large as the horse prefers,

The only thing better than grass.

Incident at the New Stall

Brio has this effect on all of the fillies, 

They whinny and circle like their world

Is ending whenever we take him out

For a stroll. He doesn't even notice.

He's so fixed on the horizon of grass

Such female companionship is endured

With the same stoic mien as his

Fetlock inflammation.

But Gigi in this case is despondent,

Her neighs are so majestically dejected.

Even Echo and Chocolate Chip

Glare at her, why the boy?

What is it about men? 

They don't even do anything, 

Their promise is always more real 

Than their fur and foot reality.

The horsewomen are the same way,

Saying what they mean to men

Who don't hear them. They are counting

The moments down before

They get to taste the grass

Or watch the football game

Or cap the moon-lit evening.

There's no let up to the bellowing,

Like any attention at all and she

Is seen and heard and known.

The horsewoman has so many questions

For the vet, and the answers are never enough.

The horseman at this quietly withdraws.

He takes the Frisian deep onto the trail

To the top of the mountain, to that particular 

View, that particular mix of breezes

Where dreaming can come,

The mystical state of emptiness,

Away from all obstructions

To the lonely call of freedom.

Mermaid California in the Sights

The fingers touch like sensitive fronds,

Longing and regret.

I wasn't made for anyone.

I wasn't made of stone.

There's nothing wrong

On this beautiful morning 

Everyone living blessed lives

As the vistas are covered in white

But the only sounds are tears

Unheard beyond the engines

That know only how to serve and move

Through silver's ungovernable hue.

It promises what this shell doesn't have:

No memories, of morning glories,

Distressed damsels coaxing miscreant weeds

For unseen harvests.

They say you can never leave

But can you ever say you've arrived

With so much hardship on the voyage

To only dream?

Unrealized in eucalyptus trees,

Unspoken of in the light that fires up eyes,

And all the reasons that you came 

Replaced like bean cans on grocery shelves.

Angelo's Burgers, through it all, serves

Though it does not say a word.

The birds fly over what was once a river;

That's what freedom looks like

In the morning sun, before

The steam shoots up again,

The train horn wards off suicides,

The decision must be made.

The parking lot is empty at the trading

Company, the prize still far away

Beyond the glittering spires that are

Everything you want them to be.

The seagulls rise in a bloom

And hold their wings for you.

The void is only where you leap.

It is never who you are.

The Dance of the Last Nerve

The palms go limp. The silence that walks by

Forms a shadow in the gold morning glow.

This was a place I know, but now its touch

Is cold as it lets go across the endless ocean

That will not let you in. The orange homes 

Don't contain the memories that I do,

Each street sign a trauma, each storage shell

Full of dreams that never would be realized

Just kept in safekeeping, for someone else

Who is no longer here, except in what

Is being saved. The guns of October 

Are now upon me, as Thunderbirds strafe the sky.

The sun shines on homeless and the lonely

Equally, but don't try to make that leap

Where the rip tides take you out, to the place

Of my being, infinity, where what I'm feeling is allowed.

They are digging up the oil field Jennie's

So the pelicans return, from the distant

Purple mountains, no more than a dream

To us here, who stay to make things for everyone 

In prisons of familia where there's always

Cornucopias, weeds illuminated

By rainbows. What happens when I can feel

Everything, and the silver scenery falls away?

Even the scrapyard, with its bales of wiry hay

Makes me break down and cry. The days go short,

They grow reflective, harvest emptiness

From the wheels of golden motion that loop the freeway mosques

That chant like rumbling oceans, self contained

As the music of the spheres still washes

On their shores, and they forget they don't exist

In the rolling swells, how they never learned to speak.

Some Sounds and a Cooper's Hawk Appears

I have my truth

Long before it's settled.

One glimpse of the horizon

Is enough to know

Every belief we now have

Will be shattered in ten years.

The clouds are unearthly,

The mountains alive,

The birds

Undisguised messengers.

Solemn Swing

In the uncared-for gardens

Palms gesticulate sharply

Against the laughter of boughs

And spider plant nods

As grasses dance their way

Into meaning.

The avocado tree shines as she

Shakes loose her joy philosophy

Impervious to the rosemary

Always guarding her from harm,

Whose sheaths protrude provocatively

But have nothing to say.

Like dangling fingers

The quills of neighboring fronds

Play the airborne keys

And all that you can perceive of this

Is the solemn swing of the central chime

That hammers when it's struck.

Rainbow Hunter Eyes at Clifton's Cafeteria, with its Intermittent Downpours

Lenticular prophecy, fulfilled

With tin roof rain from a leaking sky

Feeding the green that only

Comes out when its gray.

The dun likes the rain, unlike us

Protected as we are by archangels

And whatever else the mind needs

To construct our understanding of spirit,

We hide under the eaves,

Rely on older messages to respond

To earlier, long forgotten traumas

To explain to ourselves

What is happening, now,

What we should do

Now that the oaks are shadowed

And the crows veiled in leaves, unwilling to speak,

And the entrails have been clammed up

By shovels that lean precariously

Against an empty barn, seemingly

A primitive form of currency preserved

When it was never like that at all; the shells

Were honorings, because beauty is valuable,

The eyes of the beholder need no central bank

To validate the gold piece as it drops into the sea

To churn but not to drown, never losing itself

In what it is. There's a shack in Palau

That still stands from World War II,
Still leans into its memories

Of the brutal leverages of the colonial fucks

And the ruthless occupier harvests,

And it still holds the fuel, keeps the tanks

From rusting on these kinds of days

Which are, someplaces, every days,

Where they scrub clean without thanks

And recycle as if soap suds through a porthole

In the washer, where, with each spiral

So little is lost in lint, as the revolution proceeds

Despite what the limp underthings would like

To do: end it, because that's when reflection

Begins, when one evens knows they are alive,

Separated out just so, engineered precisely to last

As an illusion, a form whose shadow takes

The sun, the whole melting ball of hot mess fire

That drops so slow for us, across the sky.

The Arcturian Goes Slumming

I told my fun fact to the team 

About Brio, no one knew

I had a horse, no one suspected.

The next time I see him

He knows, he gestures the feeling

He has reached my heart.

We feel alone

Because we aren't alone

And never have been

But for the seems that

Bubble up from underground

Like self-esteem steam that rises 

To the glare of the moon

And the blue tube quavering, around

An outline where there was none,

Filling in the sand

Of identity, into the hole

That wasn't there before

There was a you

Illumined in the sick glow,

Mirrors flung from everywhere

That cast a boundary, a spell

To toss you into the sea of others

As if you'd drown

Or become anything but 

What you've just learned

You are, a drop that can be any shape

As the Hymn to St. John the Baptist shows

You are multi-dimensional,

Agreeing to repeat a frequency

Until you get it just so-la-ti

As a Cat and a Deere level

The playing field to plant the nasturtiums

Of every shade, of every seasonal tuning,

For everyone is equal and is free,

Whatever role we assume this time,

Whatever pocket we fold into

Like an undetectable mouse

On our very own soul journey,

The singular cut of our lapel, 

Our single story, to protect us

But not from who we are. 

The Guy with the Eye is Vesica Pisces

We get to find out what it means to be human!

All the problems in the world

Have turned out only to be

The loneliness of not connecting

To what you've individualized from,

Not to be able to,

It is foolhardy to try

To harmonize a shadow.

Forgive everything!

Impossible you say

But that's where your freedom lies,

In trying

Strange open

Receiver,

Afraid of the

Paradox.

A Foal's Salvation

The nurse mare's baby

Typically discarded

To keep the bloodline racing

Via surrogate milk

To bottle fuel the thoroughbreds,

The ones that win, or promise to

Wear the roses, get

Another day in hell

While the less uniquely

Competitive are

Disqualified from life

Or the part that's game at least 

But the dream is all that matters,

The beating heart that keeps

All the mothers lactating

Systematically,

The system that he

Rules the world with,

The only one he

Understands.

He owns it all, all of it, 

It's his dream that only matters

When he notices the foal and says

"You're saved,"

The gentlest horse,

Who has everything to give,

So much gratitude to be alive,

So much try

Given that second chance,

The one that plutocrats always 

Love to give, it's their law,

To have the horse of the year,

Or anything their dream

Leads them near, but only when

The one thing they can see

Is a flag.

Ying-Yang as Verb

The sound of the voice creates things. 

It can. It does.

The Trabuco crystals underground twist the live 

Oak trunks.

Every second a new ionization, instant

Isomerization 

In the piezo-electric body

Effervescing slowly

All around, so we all rise to transitional states

In the slowest of fluxes.

A flaxen-maned sorrel echoes her hoof

In the crystalline dirt

Like sounding a watermelon as the crow shows 

Anyone who wants to know

The slow let go of codes, something in its voice

Shapes sound,

Moves meaning through the antennae you confuse

With your brain, 

It spreads across the whole crow 

Like flocks at sunset

Carrying away the hotcha, the sepsis from Tuesday,

The red, white and blue macarons.

The branch is finally bare, with nothing now on it

But crow.

The Defamiliar

Nelly Larson was at my vibrational boundary

Writing her aloneness, before she turned

Alone to stone on me, while Zora continued on,

Seeing but shielding her own.

There are journals. They exist.

Just harder to find, ensconced in drawers,

The secrets that everybody knows

But not how to say.

There's a Parakeet Gate on Waxwing Circle,

A Wet Lab Life Science spot. The ground dries up,

Stones like little candies, straw wandering,

Tails waving in sync with the leaves.

All the streams are now crystal, dissolved

Like the Ascension Church's way of the waters,

Grape vines yellowed, Jackson Ranch

Line Dancing Space for Lease.

Different choices, different result.

I think of the flat plains with my trailering shot

And little gestures that show the bloom is

Recovering, but it's too soon to tell

Hubris must be swallowed first, yet again.

The cottonwood, translucent in its dance

Brings the thirst, as their sun mirror

Snakes along the cool valleys to Lake Viejo.

Even in these Space Goose houses

Inclined high in ashen flax they look beyond

Where they came from, ancient temple or old church,

With the PTSD of ruined pioneers

Like the Light Rail at Patriot

Never built but it could be here

For the enthusiasts of hummingbird moths

And fire authority helicopters.

But no matter where they are now,

Shopping at the marketplace with the waterfall,

Golfing or gazing on the irrigation, they'll be here

Come Sunday feeling upside down, stumbling

Between program bands, green lights risen

Over the Tustin aircraft yard, the Free Chapel

With a giant Betsy at its entrance. You know what they say:

Cleanliness is next to Commerce West.

Masonic compass on that strawberry Tesla,

B.W. Boyd shears, Experian happy to be here,

The privacy invasion people, its only the tomatoes

The nursery throws away that can be nurtured,

The tagged flats are just algorithms, measures

Of contentment, but they have no such worries here.

The smiles creep into everyday conversation

And though there is nothing to laugh at, we all do.

Still Life with Wood Shavings

I no longer have to be 

Every human who's ever been born,

Because I am every

Human who's ever been born.

Pinoy cuisine by Shoreline Ministries,

Lunar Orthodontics by the Wagyu Factory.

They are instituting a shavings regime

In the quiet before the symbols bellow meaning 

And the mules snort uncle and hoses swallow

The thirst like the date oases that dot Cabo,

Aligned with whale birthing noises

That creak through the flagpoles breeze

From deep in the seas, even up here

On the old volcano, the soil still metal and glass,

Water has no resistance here to flow.

The alfalfa is wheeled in on an EZ-Go

With a canopy and sombrero

And some Spanish by way of Guadalajara

To nourish the oaks. The gold is good

For a glow-up in the arena, in a spiral,

The way the galaxy arms explode

Into what you are, light, and light only,

Though the shadows in the shavings

So bright are hauled away by force

With fuming machines, the trace of us

Still more than a rumor, a note,

It must be distributed, like thought

Leadership into the still wilderness,

A first-cut gold that too

Will be consumed

With one eye

To the woods.

Sesquicentennial for Dogs

Cones everywhere, you have to have the tools

For the war zone, the bazooka in your poncho,

For a pressure shot that presents itself continually,

Each fire display a demolished village

And the sound of guns coming after me

On the Born in the USA beach.

Every family's staked a fire in the sand

Like the barren lands, for sparklers 

And fire dancers, the flames alive with the moment.

Each mortar has the will to create a universe,

But the sea clears the smoke, lets everything explode.

Everyone has a few barrels to shoot.

It's only safe at the edges of the sea.

Car alarms go off from every side,

Fire flowers in every direction but one,

A multi-dimensional explosion,

Multiple detonations of the same urge,

Confetti snake, sorcerer's spore,

The swarming of stars, while whole

Neighborhoods are under siege, exploding

Joy pop gunfire, clouds rolling east.

White smoke coats the neighborhood roofs,

The phosphorous left over

After play.

The 4th, When Californians Stay Home

Even though you're innocent 

You still have to have clean hands.

And the streets of Lake Forest are immaculate

With red, white and blue bouquets

And chairs of the same brave colors placed

Along the roadside days away from the parade,

And traffic on Toledo, with those breeze-scream yellow 

Tape rolls ribboning off the open trenches

So Tacos Ensenada and Ballpark Buns and Rolls

Can rest easier, afterwards, when there's rest,

And the four F's of the Fourth are over.

It was what we photojournalists called the crazy day,

Festivals, Family, Fireworks, Food

But no Fun, my light flicked onto the red Firetruck

On their day of hell, they're out there already

Mean streeting to avert some boys with brush fires.

The dangers are legion to public enforcement,

Dogs, cats, squirrels, kids

And the controls are few,

Sunglasses, a haughty look,

To disguise that you have eyes, ever-compassionate one.

You have to make nice and let the city skies burn

In the name of freedom, whose cost is gut bombs

At midnight, clearing out the animals,

Reminding us our warrior nature is our freedom,

Our willingness to say no, that does not

Work for me, no, sir, now, where's my hot dog?

I have to keep my eyes on the game, and don't want to

Have to search for where the horse radish root

Has been bedded. For I am finally a King,

Licking my fingers of pomegranate.

There's an Acrisure nearby, a Blooming Onion Dales.

"We Get It," the license plate says, "Santa Marguerita,"

Here in her town now to bless, and I to snap

A life strapped on top of a Kia, poignant toys, 

A pathos-filled mattress, a voyage to a new beginning

As yet unknown, still red, white and blue somehow, 

Like on a floatie in a start-your-engines parade, in Fountain Valley, 

Say, there are so many stories, but still you can count the daylight

In waiting for the perfect dog to traipse upon your perfect

Sunburst yard of a hundred flags. There it is, exit 9A,

The elusive sea route to Pepperdine, where they marry

The mermaid that is California, and disappear

At the western dome of what we now know as freedom.

Song of the Would-Be Backyard Pets

The hummingbird trills what I need to hear

From somewhere up the bottlebrush tree.

The heavy fruitfall avocado bounty 

Bears the elsewhere wisdom of the elders.

Sometimes it's merely the wind

Rings the chimes.

There are other collectives

But none of them talk to us.

Dolphins? No. Whales? 

Forget about that.

But the crow

Is sharp-tongued guide

And now the spider caught in light

Is only dancing.

The Tower as Exploding Phallus

Another rescue horse put down,

I saw it in his eyes.

He didn't want to be here, too much

Pain on this here

Earth grid with its malevolent

Algorithms. I wasn't

Supposed to look

Of course, nor speak

In any way, either

Ack-knowledge-ing

Or inter-venous-ly,

Not even supposed to be there

Of course, some experiences

Are too private or at least

Too shameful to share

But I needed some timothy

And it was the only way in, through

The barn where the pain is made

In eyes kept dark, without even

Blinders on. But the sky is so blue,

The transparency today so complete 

I want to retire to Portugal, so the breeze

At least will match the vibe, such silence

When every word is in a poem.

It's where they grow the cork,

It grows on trees, like money does here

Before it bursts like 10 million penises

Into every aortic expressway

Carrying some unseen germ, in each car,

A virus or a gift, take your pick.

It's probably a little of both.

Anything out of the ordinary unified whole

Is a flaw, but it is that very quality

That makes it so very highly prized,

Like the pock stamp of beauty, or the fly

On the Eindhoven still-life of fruit,

The unique. You can't read that shit aloud.

Every cell beyond the ear vibrates with its own ...

Insanity you could call it, an inability

To conform, the breeze that makes our freak flag fly

Always stirs some goosies, conjuring within that tiny

Heart of yours an egg chair for two.

Euphoria of an Empty Fortune Cookie

The horse

Runs round and around

From the center

Where it already is.

Carrots like antennae

In the hanging ball

Twirl around the stall

In late sun

With the creak of

Something speaking

Or trying at least

To be heard.

It comes and goes

The nonchalance of being

But when it returns

The heart has prepared the journey,

Doesn't matter the road.

Hell, there aren't any

Until you decide, 

Much less end.

Another Money Shot Successfully Evaded

Photojo PTSD kicked in again,

That China Syndrome chemical spill

According to the BBC

Five miles away but

No one would know it

On the ground here

Were it not for the news

Media and I am so glad

I'm incommunicado now

Because they would be calling

To check if I could check out how much

Exposure had to be swabbed down

Or drop in on the evacuation center

In Fountain Valley. It's just that

I've been to too, too many

Hazmat situations

For one lifetime, and they cut 

The media off any way

Not like the good old days

Of transparent horror, 

The anthrax stations

And the tire fires

Worst of the worse,

What hell looks and smells like.

The thing is

It was my job

To remind people

They lived in a fire zone,

Those poor, chosen

Doomed people.

What if they had to let

The horses free? is a question

Most people don't have to ask.

The only way to survive

Is with an escape route,

A valuable skill for a rat

But it makes normal life

Claustrophobic, forces a course

Correction, a re-routing reset

Of just stopping the watching

For the blue lights of cop cars

And their perfect algorithm of surveillance

At least that's the way it looks

From the mountain, where the hawks,

The messengers you're not supposed to kill,

Don't care what flag you wave.

There's no residue way up here

Of the latest apocalypse,

Up here it can only exist

As a belief. The peek-a-boo view

Of the ocean from the Daily Seagull

Must be considered in the frame

Of the panorama that bursts

In your back yard.

Crowded Day at the Ranch

People are confused by horse owners.

Why would someone even?

All they can think is the Kentucky Derby,

Mint juleps and owning a fine steed

That pays off at a million to one

In club membership and royal

Pretension, but that's a lot of trouble

And effort to the uninitiated.

They think you have to ride it

But the heart coherence is what

Makes the horse such a fine pet ...

They prance now like in Western movies

On the upper-yard arenas, distinct

In their magnificences and browns,

The way they pay allegiance

To the same thing as any of us.