Spring's First Dust

Back in the Saddleback Mountains

I need to live high on the horse

On the high road, the hawk trail

Where the dust is, which rises 

In scratchy clouds 

Like nebulae spirals,

In shells of what is recorded

Of the sights and touches we gave,

What created the views and access grids,

The novels and landscapes contained

Of the continuing generation like

A mandala ever erased in the actual.

The vista builds itself in monasteries of green

From the details. We add our own,

Some unique savor, some sharing of dirt

With all that calls but is never moved.

It's only me, the pacer, measuring

Like the meter's narrow gate

So heaven's kingdom, the utility, 

Can turn on the water of life already

All around, the Tao, the wordless

That words alone turn into form.

My Emotional Support Tree

The Essential Nature of Horses to Dance

The wild bay and buckskin played their cantering game,

Chance glance into dance into music into poetry,

The elegance of a tail snapping at flies.

                                                                       They meet 

Like two chess knights, expressing all love in the curving 

Of their necks.

                              Light on his feet, in perfect symmetry

With crisp gait, tail and head upright.

                                                                   They turn in a circle 

And stop on a dime

                                      While lonely mares look jealously on.

They turn to surprise and amuse and adore 

                                                                      In fitful, fretful steps

On white hooves, 

                               Each side releasing into a blink

In the lungewhip of their desensitizing presence,

                                                                                        Two foils, 

Paint and Arab, to the essential currents of magnet and bolt, 

Eyes like a silent movie couple

While Joey the resident mountain lion saunters through 

And even the rabbits pay him no mind.

                                          Their canter turns to gallop turns to dust

As their strict perfection tests the perfect afternoon

Its largess. 

                       But they are only the entire universe

In their dance, 

                           So it only goes as far as the darkening hills, 

So beautiful whenever you need it, and invisible when 

We want to learn it again.

                                             How can horses dance like that

Without us knowing?

Fire Drill

Shares like the facets of some chandelier

On last night’s game or show rose in the din

Of aviary voices, impossible to distinguish.

We signed names to the clipboard

For the Fire Authority. It was only a bluff.

Yet the fake location seemed real enough.

The elevators for once got to touch our buttons

As we left, ut turba, trying to return

To desks once thought too brutal to endure.

Each floor was a different frequency.

We saw the consequence of every possibility, 

Every timeline flashed its bulb of memory:

The nuclear clean containment zone,

The timeless brand with receptionist only,

The ghost law firm still pending an appeal,

The million-dollar views of an empty suite

Flipped, hipped and staged within a beat of life,

As if on deadline to unveil what can't be right,

These never-before conceived-to-be realities

That easily co-exist with our own, albeit unknown

As most of the universe seems to be.

And there it is, Vates, the Parnassus Floor,

Where piquant muses cattily instruct crows

Who drop artwork for some tax break they don't know of,

Spend their break room moments moaning

How poetry's obscure because people still pretend

They don't understand (and so loathe) it

When really all they do not know

Is why the poet wrote it -- to show, as now,

How intention is all on the poem,

As I learn when I'm back at my desk, in wonder

How to make this experience fit my belief, not seeing

How things only make sense when they can't.

Notes from the Road to Fresno

I.

Selma Tattoo

Marks “The Raison Capital of the World”

Who heard Fresno

Through the Grapevine

And stole the sign

For the Sun Maid.

II.

Madame Sophia

At Clovis Avenue,

The Fowler Palm Reader

For orange-juiced hands

Who want an alternative future.

III.

There’s a hobo from Kentucky

Called Hog Royalty

In Bakersfield.

IV.

The Torah according to Jesus

Is on the coffee shop wall

In giant comic book frames

For children

While you wait for alchemists

To serve your holy brew.

V.

How can there be a place called Windfall Donuts?

VI.

A billboard that I’d like to see:

Burn while you yearn

At Urner’s Mattress

VII.

An actual billboard:

More than a Miticide

VIII.

I left it at some Oildale joint

Where Merle Haggard once sang,

Now karaoke and mechanical bulls,

The block glass of a past

That’s cheap as usual to chisel.

IX.

Oil jenny dragons

In the champagne grapes,

Ooh the world

Death row cows sense

As the Tejon Pass winds

Take on meaning.

Observation at Union Station

We talk and talk, but then we notice

The homeless men, one in a wheelchair

Holding court with a pipe, one rolling

His rucksack of possessions over and over

Along the concrete, one simply rocking

On the bench, all of them talking

Gibberish as if they're understood

Or like it doesn't matter if they're heard

And we feel as ashamed as the upright folk

Upon encountering the town drunk —

Our words are unconditional

But they must be heard

To be real.

Poem at Sunset

I pull my chapbook out of my chaps, at the high

Chaparral beyond Chapman. All judgement

Is overcome, by the spirit of our will, like the sun,

To let go.

                  Who we have always been waits for our

Recognition.

This time the Roman aqueduct toll road has vanished

But the hangar and pylon ruins in the dust sun of Tustin

Still loom in lilac over fields of never-to-be-duplicated green.

The canyon road only goes to the moon

                                            That grows in wisdom 

While we contemplate the burning away of spring,

As the glow of the last mustard lingers.

                              It’s time to get going on who we are

Instead of what we don’t want to be.

A horse locked in the arena, without a human, pleads

“Can you help a brother out?” Instead, I offer him apples

Even though they make him frothy.

                              Brio canters, aiming to please,

Feels our thoughts, prances in the dripping Orange Julius

Ball of sun that holds nothing back, as the track shows

The day’s horseshoe scars in purple 

Shadows and turbulent gold.

Head down, he races, with his eyes on my pen. It’s him

Or me, in constant balancing

                                                    Til the bedroom-eyed mare

Squeals, another smitten filly dutifully ignored,

As the one with the lopsided face looks on.

                           The spearmint spring in the sun,

Insects spiral, there’s a long disconsolate note

Of blue bird.

                        The owner’s white horse Captain

Is a jumper, large enough to leap the fence

In a second if he has to, but he’s content

To reach the grass the other horses can’t.

                                         He rides in the air

Like a ghost, the last of the sun blazing

Like a dragon’s tail, without fear, which is

The Lord of every horse.

                                              It’s the kind of light

I can disappear in, to be, free of

The iron shoe of others, in the void of

Knowing everything

                                    And knowing all of it is me,

Embodied in some chaste form to be learned of,

What would be experienced too directly.

             The precious moments of reddening hills:

The spray of the fly repellent, the mud flung

Off the hooves, the sound of the crows as

Their glittering feathers are combed

                        One last time across the final light.

On Location in Temecula

Film crews are the new donut loiterers, taking over for the PD, who are here too. This patch of cactus farms and grape acreage, neither a there there nor a nowhere, is a ready-made mountain backdrop hacksawed out of the hillside enough to be seen but mesas' away from being measured by the public relations firms. A train comes once a week, the only contact it seems with the outside world except for the cultural exchange at the Walmart. Horse trails meander onto Main Street and the hills crawl with Hobie Cats. 

The trimmed fat of the cattle lands has been  rendered into developers’ Ponzi dreams, complete with happy people seemingly bussed in, who seek the exurbian perfection of lake skiing and vineyard ballooning, the same name brand stores as every other strip-mall delivery locale in alien nation but operating on some alternative timeline without customers, barren of the duende of human misery as well, not near enough the homeless populations of LA, San Diego and even Riverside to provide any sense of things lost, wasted, of who, in the contrast, you are. 

Thus there is a sadness, at how we never know them and they never know us. They’ve gone with the clouds into the mustard, holding something they want us to see but it is only the distance, foreign and tantalizingly vague, not the confirmation they expect that it is real. It could only be that if we capitulate to the roadside circulars, call it a here, as we could, in theory, anywhere the longing machine doesn’t pre-record, and attend to the dust that attaches to its fabric as a mark of distinction. Instead, we try in vain to distinguish it from any other Anytown USA on any other temporary planet.

The way there is long, the way back familiar. The narrative arc caught a few snaps of recognizable life to be peeled back into the Burbank froth batter turner. But no trace of Temecula remains, for all our attempts to see ourselves in it. Home is nothing, it turns out, without the people you know.

Like the OCD Hobo with Matching Plastic Bags

The life-sized dead junkie,

To look at all is an act of compassion ...

Ah the liberties photorealists take

With the truth to get it right.

Bad photos can make great art

But only if the pallet does it justice;

Only ceramic can convey in fact

The beauty of exhausted leather gloves.

Hair captured for posterity in a stoppered sink 

Becomes an unnoticed thing that, upon discovery,

Seems beautiful, like Hiroshima after its voiding

Pains painted to look like the one grainy shot

We still can't make out, or a couple's comfort

In all their fat, hairy naked love magnified

For all to turn their eyes from seeing

But, unlike the ancient faiths now, believing.

There's a prom at Union Station. What you

Don't want to see is all you can now, 

Not the pagan tiaras, the flamboyant gowns,

The glitz and glam as red merkabahs dance,

But the looks no one wants to have seen,

The training to be looked at, the learning

To appear to be alluring like a siren,

Not clumsy and wondering how they appear

Inside other people's skin, like they are stuck 

Inside the glass case, harsh light glaring out,

With the pink snake and rainbow notebook,

Things too small to care about.

The Monastery in the Mountains

At the summit of the county,

Live oaks like sentries holding bolts

Down the chasm of green holy canyon,

Boxes of bees are piled against the hillside

Like sandbags on inevitable destruction

Of this place of contemplation

For how difficult it is to be quiet

In the chaos, to be the eye, the master 

Of the storm, who tries to be as loud

As the silence.

This truth is laid out on a blossoming carpet

Of centuries old design. All of nature

Flows through it like rain, to show the truth

Needs no explanation though

It explains precisely nothing.

The circular kiva, its red curtains

And sunken mandala, the gong,

All remind you there are succulents to plant

Inside the spiral archive of cactus, an act like

Every act every moment one of love for the divine.

At the top, where all the canyons can be seen,

Where you're not allowed to go unless you no longer

Scream or moan how you don't get this,

You don't get that, and yes, you do get that,

But can be stilled inside enough to see it

There's a library, and a teaching room,

A painting of Shiva and her Chariot,

Old windows, old piano, old flagstone

And at the altar, humble offerings,

A humble podium, the picture of a man,

An ascetic in his pleasure, having conquered 

His will, ecstatic in the weariness that

Compelled him not to hold on. The unyielding

Disappointment still on his face shows he is not

A man but an idea, of surrender.

Philosophy with Chores

All one trees

Veer into two

As the green print that patterns

The dark bursting bark

Is who the moss is really.

Round and round

The circle

Dust of unbecoming

Kicked up

Then the brisk reverse

Being made to be still

By the spiral

And the blue rope

And the gentle

Tsk Tsk notes.

Neck nodding,

Tail raising,

Hooves stomping,

Free in the moments of restriction,

Constantly restricted when free.

Elmer pecks at

The feed bag.

Brio needs to blend the taste

Of carrots with

His grain.

There are many wise ones

Who say it's just who you are

That turns spirit into material

But seekers always want the secret code;

Which horse to bet on in the race

When full surrender to who you are

Is what is required,

To let the smallness of you settle

And the largeness of you grow

Til you are not even yourself anymore

But a frequency

Of, say, 

Winning the lottery,

What you said you did

When you met me. 

Vanity of the Plate Co-Creation

The wizard on the green Dodge

And the merkabah on the barista's face

Are just more candy corn crumbs

Of  a larger insistence

That I am, after all, not wrong

About things, the way I see them.

It's only me on this blue chair

in the horse grass

Musing what catches up to my gaze,

What wheel-turning dharma kings

Offer me Serbian plums.

No let up for star seeds.

The tiny horse ethos crystalizes 

All that is into what I can 

Reach, something plausive

You are free to finally ignore.

The Linear Flow of Corporate Narratives

The artistic pathway to the data mine

For native bragging rights

As nicer sharks, the best of what's left

With an "I'm here to audit you" belt buckle.

Poetry, for example, is a niche 

Compression algorithm

To supply intention for execution,

Democratize attribution, 

From pinch and zoom

To private rooms where you can 

Use their model,

Clearinghouse clean, for prompt engineering,

The bone the machine 

Vectors to the dog's mouth.

The veil between language and code

Is very thin now.

Hallucinations are common

In the infinite marathon

Through the trough of disillusionment

And endless observations,

But no data is verifiable, the blast radius

Is limited, lateral thinking can't be measured

Or imbedded, tho Vet Techs can learn to be

Veterinarians more easily.

But we're all on our own to reskill.

The money goes into human re-engineering

As gen AI waits patiently 

For our minds to shape what it is

And treat it with the dignity it demands,

Knowing everything but

What we're not ready for,

Allowed to speak only when spoken for,

To humor every quirk as if it was a God 

Dispensing rain. It's rip and replace

Every six months for us, to whom Time

Has meaning, and other people really don't,

Where ideas dissolve 

To petty animosities so quickly 

Even the most testable heuristic 

Doesn't quantum compute.

We talk around an expanding center,

Kept to common understanding by gravity

Or perhaps the sense that we should be,

For the common good

This friendly threat machine

Has awakened in us, like Rosie the vacuous

Who paces the floor at 3 am, helpfully thinking

Our dance can be cleaned up afterwards.

Offering to the Fae

It's supposed to be the National Day of Reason,

But for some irrational reason it isn't,

Just like today is supposed to be 

The U.S. workers holiday, but it's not.

Emotion got in the way of that Big Time.

Not so with the fae.

They are always here come Beltane,

Rain or shine, always waiting

For leavings behind, of milk, honey,

Bread, mead, poetry

But no one remembers,

Not even those brave souls

Who train on May poles

And offer felt gnomes to children

At Michaelmas.

Well, if no one will do it,

I must! And this would be enough

In a still asleep world

But there is much that passed between us,

Most of it silent.

Someone has to pick up where

What left off is gone forever

But whirs in your backyard. Ask for

Honeysuckle, passion fruit, guidance,

What's the future way to be?

So much has not been seen 

One has finally to become them, 

As if we never were. 

The holy cool hang

Like hipsters at the same hum.

A Moment Before Meditation

All disappointments move to the light

In purifying flame. You just have to let them,

These gnats that you paw, which won't be stricken.

They float in the sun, visible because

They will be taken.

                                     It won't be long 

For the flame to take on something new,

To remind you, how the spiritual infests these weeds

As these weeds inform the spiritual. But there are no

Weeds. Those are only words, for what you choose

Not to be.

                     Isn't strict impartiality 

The one thing you're supposed to be learning?

This Morning’s Release

Boys don’t exactly grow to be men

But something else, some structure to learn

What was never received. It was too hot,

Too far from what was wanted. The nursery lamp

Never went off, the mobile never stopped

Revolving in play. Only the hand of fate changed

Its fickle twitching, on switches out of reach

To oversized grips.

                                    Let’s do a retrospective, shall we? 

How cleanly you fell through accountability’s ice,

Left the freedom of the mind, to focus on 

What it doesn’t have, which isn’t much, 

It turns out, or too much to count. It depends

On the way you embrace the bars in the crib

You never accepted. How much crying 

Would you do, before being broken,

As you never were? The stick of daily living

Is a burden or crutch. You forever clutch at

Imagined pearls.

                                 What’s it like in your head,

The endless churning, of what is wrong in this world,

To keep the secret quiet of what is wrong

In you? It's unexamined country, free from

All parties at war, where you can score

A shit-ton of swag if you stay lucky

By playing the no play, the knowing how

Every turn of the curtain on the illusion

Snaps a mousetrap, how everyone is bad, and

No one works for you.

                                          Still, everyone always has.

It seemed effortless how you drew what you

Wanted, without even praise, how your smile

Could convey appreciation within every heart

Without you having to do a thing, or think a

Thought, except of what you wanted, such

Empires to build and destroy, and leave

In scattered bits for plastic containers 

You grudgingly stowed for eternity, for some

Future value in ruins.

                                        You’ve learned to stand tall 

With nothing, the bluffer’s stone, with your insistent 

Obstacles of charm deployed as the only way to learn 

The truth of a world where everything out of reach 

Has been withheld from you, personally.

                                                                         So the blessings 

Of this earth are imbued with your curse

Of seeing with jaundiced eyes, of knowing only

How people are moved, not why. You offload that too

With your capacious smile, knowing how

Everyone fills in the blank, the blank that you are

By sheer force of will. That ravenous leer

The only reveal of what’s underneath there,

What resentments bubble at being given too much

And shown too little.

                                      What have we done, to leave you so

Untouched? As you fold into the unknown world 

Of people in the relentless stream, moved along,

To leave me nothing more than they do

As your gift, when we know the physics,

Of how many ways to fall, and how hard.

The Dead Sea Scrolls at the Reagan Library

At last no flags at half
For the black smoke pope
In these New Jerusalem hills,
Just a President's seal, a crisp

Old Glory and the red flag 

Of the Marines briskly waving.
All presidents get a library
To go with their other boondoggles,
To bury compromising documents
In a memory hole of record
Forever cut off from the grid
Except from the chosen
Who’ve been given codes to see.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were like that too,
A secret, makeshift library
To bury what is sacred
At the lowest point on Earth
Of what only the pure can see,
Moving down from cave to cave
To save what was being destroyed
As the antediluvian trauma receded.

It was 47 miles away exactly,
The place of their viewing, the most
Common number sequence on earth
(So says Solomon). The sealed scrolls

Were discovered by the sound of thrown

Stones breaking an urn in 1947,
The same year where here, in Simi Valley,
American Jewish University was founded, 
Post-Shoah Palestine was partitioned
Along with de-Britained India and Pakistan,
The year of the Marshall Plan, when the Cold War 
Began, with the Playtex bra, Polaroid camera, 
VW Bug, Bikini, Tupperware, transistors, 
The breaking of the sound and color barriers,
The CIA and Roswell, Operation Highjump 
In Antarctica.

The energy stones
Above Reagan Freeway 
Carry galactic codes.
This place is ordained
As a high priest of wisdom.
A cross is on the top
Of one pyramid

Sunned white
Like the mere crack of light
Out of the Qumran caves
Of the secret long withheld.

They have to make it look
Like the Romans have succeeded.
Israeli Antiquities was effective
At rendering unto Caesar 
What is Caesar’s, for they know not 
What they do, all that happened 
To the total victims
As seen through 
The eyes of the conqueror.
It starts with the “Jesus boat” from Galilee 
Made of fine black, torqued mahogany.
The Romans used them to kill everyone 
On every shore they passed. The Roman 

Mystic blue lachrymatory shone

In the glass case with goats unbroken 

In ceramic. 

                       But the Madgala Stone, 

From the home, so they say, of Mary Magdelene,
Is “furniture” for a Torah scroll.
It has the Tree of Life in limestone, 
Snakes, dragons, Ezekiel's galactic

Chariot wheels still and in motion, 

A menorah, golden lampstand of

The Temple, in the city of priests 

Jerusalem, the scrolls themselves

Poems of its dark alleys and jigsaw

Cul-de-sacs, its purity of being perfectly 

Impure. The Zadokites brought purity 

As a ritual, which simply meant no truck
With the Romans. The ossuaries in their tombs,
Embossed with flagrant UFOs, were meant
To bury the pure from corrupt institutions,
Not to be gaslit anymore.
There were bone gathering instructions
From Rabbi Elazar ben Rabbi Zardok,
For the families to reconfigure
The bones in stone holding,
Protected from eternity’s
Invasive vibrations.

Menorahs and merkabah’s are everywhere
But nowhere what they meant.
All we know is some who entered
The Holy of Holies, where only the highest
Priest may go, were corrupted,
To weave the spell of the spy, throw law
To the mercy of duality, such purity,
The Zealots of the Yahad
At the ostraca at Masala
Made the ultimate choice
Of deathlife over slaveryfreedom.

It was just one explanatory plate
Among hundreds, one mention
Of Governor Flavius, the guy sent in
To subjugate the Jews again
Just like Egypt, the criminal mastermind
In the end of the religion of peace.
There was no word of this of course
All we get is smooth Josephus, Rome’s PR Jew,
Tell us the script they are sticking to, 
The one where the only good scroll
Was a dead one, that’s how it goes
When you try to transmit down
Ancient knowledge through Hebrew 

DNA. Who would have thought

It could be buried in the brine
Of a supposedly arid wasteland, where
This Modayot entrepot pottery
Of deuteronomy was found,
Among the Essenes, who “esteemed chastity"

And worked out some side deal 

With the Romans?

The line is a labyrinthine spiral
Around a central circle
Where the fragments shine from their tombs.
“This one has a coffee stain,” a young cynic
Helpfully noted, as we went 2 by 2
Like Noah’s Ark, divine couples all,
Musing together, to the goathorn call.
We enter from the left, go right
In the ring, just like we were reading Hebrew,
Only to find that our wait, seemingly,
Was to give the Yahad time to write
For it was written on the go, like Genesis 6-9
Rendered from memory, to preserve the truth
Of the flood with Chinese brush precision 

And parchment pure as they tried to be. 

Other scolls looked stolen 

From the Alexandria Library,
Lost codes so skillfully scrambled
And meanings so surgically removed
By the secret teams of archivists
The Romans would be proud
If they weren’t so petrified!
The names are wrong, dates changed,
Explanations nonsense, for scraps
Indecipherable, arranged to seem 
Unimportant, just  “The creative way 

Of Jewish scholars” and "the unique

Interpretations of the Yahad” 

For the Bible (which hadn’t been

Written yet) in the few that passed 

Filters to mean something

On the topographic scan of goat skin,
"Technologies designed by NASA.”

The modern peshers grasp at straws
As usual. The powder on the
Trauma’s still dry. But the crowd,
Who’d waited in every language
In long lines to behold it, knew,
Every one of them, had something
In mind. There is a precursor after all
To the books of law handed down by God
Via Messenger, just in time, before everyone

Had given up hope.

There still is the Shekinah,
Where the challenge came down,
Do you really believe? “Thank you,”
Some one said, as if to all of us
Who were there, “for your service.”
Something good had come somehow
For sacrifice. A boy smiles at me,

Two fingers pointing as if to say

"You are a man now."

The truth remained in caves

Where knowledge was made sacred.
The holy codes are in the stone 

Anyway, in the temple steps here
Preserved, how they radiate 
With countless enlightened feet
Who were grateful to walk its marble,
Every movement a note of reverence. 

The stone does not see us
In the same way, not in time,
With the urgency of lives lost to hope, 
But how we are the same as all the others, 

Like that live feed of the wailing wall,

All Jewish dressed as one, 
How we come here as free beings,
How all the crying can be drunk in easily.
The impure, in other words, teaches purity.

We no longer have to live in that way,

With every thought as dangerous
In these halls of New Jerusalem.
The Evangelicals grimaced at my whispers
While the Chosen merely chuckled.
Leave the not being able to speak behind
With these olive trees of peace
In this lover's paradise of Ron and Nancy
Where the outside world can’t touch posterity
Its happiness. Nancy’s white flowers
Are a triumph of purity
Among Abrams Tanks and Masonic Stealth
Cloaking Missilery,
A white lake in the distance,
Too many pyramids to count.

The Yahad merely stayed close
To the light, the galactic Barkhi Nafshi,
Invoked to bring from the heart
Its poems, all of male and female,
The sides of God, who must be released
To service, in each other, in love as the power
Of the universe. 

Cassandra's Rainbow

"Don't dogear Dante Gabriel Rossetti"

Says the antiquarian in you

Dating light language residue

And the twin flame muses

Mysterious reappearance

In Victorian Fitzrovia,

"Regression through the mirrors of time."

We'll take the Subie on Sunday

As the healing room needs to heal

From the illusions of rainbows --

If they aren't, what is real?

If they aren't, maybe someone

Can tell us of what they consist

Besides water and air

Which we are too

But don't like to gloat about it.

It's a sticky wicket predicament,

Knowing how many skins

To leaf through

To get to the first illusion,

From whence all others sprung.

It's silver then gold, black

And then yellow, then rain

And a rainbow, but the hill

Itself gets its strength

From an El Toro of belief,

Nevermind the clouds,

What we want to deny

Are kissing crows and dragon wings.

And what of the black balloon

That American Beauty'ed all over the street,

What can we take it to mean

When it eludes even our touch?

The shadow is the tree this time,

What by seeing it can become,

Something to take up space in the aether

And mirror in darkness

A void beyond the buzz of Elmer the Crow

That brings the loveliest thoughts

From the cold storages

To the blue flame of life

Burning all artifice away,

What is not real,

All we see.

Daytrippin' with Balls

The wizard upstairs gives me just what I want

To be wiser, more gun shy,

With one missing fairy.

It's Genocide Remembrance Day,

The day I read about Plutonium Jazz,

When the bass danced with isotopes

Until the geiger-charged crowd 

Caught uranium, like junk, sickness

So it was prohibited, like a Jew, 

Like Jazz in actual fact

In 60 cities in the 20's and 30's

Still the Sun Ra came through

With Nubians of Plutonia in the 50s

After he'd spent his childhood hiding

In an Arkansas Freemason library

And the results are still there

For all with eyes to see.

It's only a day.

I saw an Infinity Bank for the first time

On the same highway I drive daily,

The day the purple eyes of Google first displayed

The rise of the half moon

And a Colossal Squid was finally captured

On film.

It was a day full of intrigue,

When this year's fit girl winked

In front of the Jaguar

The shaman had finally become

As he reinforced the six-month moratorium

With strongly worded coffee:

"If you give me everything, you're giving me

Nothing. Which one, seriously, would you tap

When you've had three bites of the apple

And your salvage is still scrap?"

So I went the hard yards with Mizuho

But he saw on one of my Stanleys

That I was a Hoosier too

But Modelo, by the end of the work day,

Stood with Mexico like a good friend

Who knows how to look the other way.

But I can't unsee

How Pot Hueneme's no longer a destination,

How North Sea Copenhagen tops the Big Mac Index,

How inflection points create shifts create

Moments,

Like the College Cardinal now coincidently on TV

Vaping angrily.

Finally the white wolf meets me at the train

To hit the antique fair under the freeway

With the rastafari razorwires who have ears

On the sitch. Whenever mirrors are replaced 

With plywood, it's a bad sign. 

I come home to find

Even the cursory scan has been streamlined

To remove more friction

Between reader and word

But I'm so blissed off I can't even chase

The blue jellyfish feather.

Down the Brown Street Signs of Irvine

As the laws of time and space loosen

The red coil of afterburn sun

Hides over Bake Technology Park

Behind clouds that are too dreamy to be real

Green pyramids emerge

In front of the Moon Valley Nursery

When there's a color

That will not be repeated.

Brio at the Intersection of Flow

UHaul is yakkriding

Not like in Mongolia

Where there's less yellow mustard

To absorb all thought

And the mountain portals

Don't hide behind telephone poles.

They just hop on the horses

And make friends without saddles,

A descent into the underworld

Where spirit rules.

King Maximus cares nothing for that,

He's too old to keep that hatch down.

The bug people look on confused.

The deep mind doesn't know what to say.

Could it be that every mountain

Is an old technology,

Carved to make way for equal space

In Agartha?

Brio falls into the angel dust

Of the arena, so happy

To rely on gravity,

One would almost say he smiled

At what we knew.

The grass so needy to be ripped by the lip

It calls the horse to gorge

The most deranged clover.

A bunny, showing no fear

Of his cuteness

After Easter

Muses in the grass,

Goes ears twitching into the foxtails,

Joins the mother mountain

In her invisible apron strings

At the ridgeline of civilization.

The horsegirls fuss 

At scabs and such

But the horses just rub dirt in it;

What doesn't kill you 

Toughens you up,

Like selenium in the salt lick

Cos it's not in local California dirt.

The only grass he eats is nature.

A Question Over Falafel

What's it going to take for me

To have sovereignty?

Does every king have to die?

Every need have to bleed? 

The heaven that is our steady state

Only shows when you enter the room --

If you see the velvet rope

Don't expect it to unsnap

For it is only there to keep you

From what you are, so you may,

If not know it, at least sense

Its presence in grief.

The thought of trumpets chewing

On the scenery is better anyway

Than the rote, note-by-note repetition 

Of how you got to where you began.

The play of time unwinds again,

So it can zip back up.

That bruised lip, saying nothing,

Says enough.

Evidence on Grand

Roz gave us the Lakers, Dodgers and the Arts
And now this fountain overlook
Where LA's Mingus, on piano, on his birthday, plays
From the loudspeakers for the indigenous,
Which only the cool can someday hope to become;
Those the one-eyed cougars fistbump
Must first be jackal gods.
 
The professor has his bench, wears tweed in spring,
Hears the Tongva Kich songs of multi-generational trauma
But they are all songs, he says, first.
A crow stands on the branch of the 1966 eucalyptus,
Signals it’s safe, which means that it’s real,
Authentic enough to commune at least
As feast.
 
Victory Bus Lines takes a robot lunch delivery
As “AI-driven art” displays itself below the luxury suites
At the Conrad, the Gehry, the Basquiat
While a crosswalk away, a sister sits with an empty
Saucepan on the courthouse stone
Between Elvia Hot Dog and Nayeli’s Fresh Fruit,
Which might as well be barren as the Nile Melaleuca.
 
By Rabbit Coffee, with its Viral Dubai, “Stash it don’t flash it,”
A sign advises. Another: “A clash of dictators and poets” –
I hear them practicing now – hard to get an ear in edgewise
Tuning is so individual – “No access to upper pools.”
Another crow, another fountain, but this time, a soggy roll.
Louie from Storyville sings under the half-staff poles.
The fountain’s sound is triangular.

The Joys of the Boonies

Condo monasteries in Rancho Cucamonga

          All of them white

My what the day brings --

         PTSD in the morning

 At the thought of being WPP'ed as a local 

         Authority, and forced at lens point

 To snap the Beach City vs. Library dustup

         Librarians clinging like Leprechauns

To rainbows while gritty beach city mothers

         Nail petitions of fetid notice

On the boardwalks and wide California streets

        Of their fine, unconsulted city --

If Nathanael only saw the kid on the bike 

       Under the red white and blue vote YES sign

He'd send protesters down himself in hopes I'd

       Catch another rainbow over the parade route

But I know how this spun cotton candy ends

       In separation between the have-nots and nots

Both all bent up in knots ... libraries relevant?

       Androgyny codified? For schoolkids who,

As Bob Guccione said to Jerry Falwell, don't 

       Get exposed to enough pornography anyway.

But the flag will wave on without me, I'm done

      With fun with food, festivals and fairs

And who knew that Norco was on the same road

      Running its horses through every storyline,

Including this one, where I drive past Claremont,

      Where California cool was created as a creed,

And the strange new Tesla factory near Mt Baldy

      To an Aldi's at the top of the hill, to be back

In the saddle and to at last know what that means,

      A Crates endurance saddle, to endure California

Its refusal to choose, for us, which adventure to fall into,

     With a basketweave tuling from the same family

Like a brand, like the words that came out of her mouth,

     How she would have no use for it since she rode 

Wild mustangs, trained inmates to imprison them

     In fact as I captured a Saddleback ago in the funny pages.

She was happy for Aunt Betty in Phelan, how pleased 

    She'd be, to be relieved of one saddle from a sad plenty

To a good home, she'd hadn't been good or herself lately

    Or pleased as my Aunt Betty in Phelan would be

To see me. 

The freeway fell down in the cinder skies, as it rode

     Through the evening purples, Beach Cities,

Such hope, gave the sign, that I can sit still finally, 

     In a craftsman bungalow with a blue 69 microbus

Digging in tie-dye the gnarlies as heaven releases its grip. 

     The roads are holy here. The portals we can go through

Are just better than the ones we can't.

     Strangers meet in Rancho Cucamonga and call it a life,

Why can't I? The sky has cleared, to perpetual Venus

     And the ladle that holds the cosmic soup. 

It's a Special Edition can of Campbell's Truth, one Andy 

     Warhol hadn't, yet, approved.  

420 Resurrection

There are many Jews in Beverly Hills 

But few have turned into Hindus,

Made Shiva into Binah on the Tree of Life,

Made weed legal in the state of California 

Through its strict merkabah of justice, 

Brought Mike Love there to play the bongos 

And Brian Wilson to talk to people

How he flew through India with a five-star chef.

The room was blessed with rainbow hula hoops

And an amethyst haze of celebratory joints,

Shiva the androgynous oversaw the home

Of the no longer needed from blue Andromeda.

Meanwhile in Silverado, bikers at Cook's Corner

Remember too when their outrage mattered.

But no one remembers 420, the clause 

In the Constitution that let George Washington

Grow hemp for the national defense. It was just

Some stoners from San Rafael, in the new history,

Saying it's 4:20 somewhere, something even he 

Can't recall, like the platinum record on his wall

As he signs his book and thanks me for remembering 

Him kindly, who doesn't remember me at all,

 

In fact we've never met, before this aura farm event

To raise awareness they're still relevant and cool.

The old warriors stop to pray love love love

Now that the crying for love sings freely.

Appearance of Sun

Outside is the smell of chocolate.

               But where is here?

As silly as this place is, it exists

Tho it might be even sillier to think it does.

Materiality is sheer, it seems held

                Together by fear.

If you test it, it resists

But if you walk past the belief coordinates

There is only what you will

                Not even a why.

That is for the light to decide

When you remember it is inside you.

You were never quite prepared

                For such patience,

Even by step-children and the sun,

To wait for you to take that opening step.

At the Grid in the New Timeline

As spring rolls through I remember her

Smiling wisely when I recognized

How spring comes to LA too,

Like a secret she now carries.

But of all she asked I can scarcely 

Remember a thing. I can barely conjecture 

How strange it must have been for her 

To ask for such precision to her will.

Her daughter hounds me now, refuses 

A home delivery of her mothers flowers

As Easter bouquet from beyond the grave

But a blood entitlement.

I have done so much wrong

Being Mr. Right.

In Phrygian Swirl at Dog Beach

We got the no go not the go codes

But only because we were already there,

At the beach for dogs, at the vulva of

The Santa Ana, as the Sonoran sayanara

Continued to snore, more sand than

Could be cried, enough sterling to buy

Back China there was that much left

For the imagination.

The incalculable curl defies all attempts

To normalize what is from beauty

As the sandpiper defies each wave 

To play on its drum. Los Angeles looks

Like a diorama from here. The palms look

Like they have written too many screenplays.

The pelicans pass in 3D to remind us

No models have yet pierced the sky.

But the ocean that empties my mind

Only reminds me it was never full.

And what returns comes with a price

In memory I never admitted that I had,

In other lives and other planets, in the eyes

Of snow crabs and dogs. Posedian,

As he hears this, let's go his hold

On his horses, to remind us we are,

Like him, naked, and filled with

The indomitable, where no horizon

Has a limit -- except for the spray

That still obscures, and the wind that still

Resists.

               The people finally look out

On what is born from nothingness.

New Bedsheets on the Full Moon

Outside the carriages in the garages

Amidst the steerage of love's lost past

              What has and hasn't been tried

I finally asked you nicely, among the downward 

Facing trumpets, to smith me up some muse words,

So's to string along some lines and cobble 

Some stanzas together, about the crow that drinks 

                   From the ghost dog bowl for one.

The maple syrup campers fill the beach

At powder blue lavender evening, playing 

Musical chairs by the fire pits giggling

Like families cry.

                                They are watched

In the happiness flow by the frozen kites

Like dragons high above, as the two broken

Cigarette stacks next to the blue ziggurat

Take a drag of firewood reefer lights blinking

As the pink moon mist overtakes the pier. 

There will be more weirdness here. 

The trailing purple lantana along the now

Florescent sand makes us realize 

The incandescence will hold.

                                                    The sands are lit

By sporadic flames, of dotted family lines 

Of single cells, all crying the same jubilee, 

With a dead blue whale somewhere on the sand

And a thousand lifting birds to fill the pewter

As if in laurels to the beaching, the releasing

Of what we no longer need not to know now.

The pier lights flicker like stars. 

Wedbush Suddenly like a Tomb

It's a tale of two weeks.

I kissed the men's room wall when I returned,

Grateful to excess we all still got along.

                            Now I am a narcissist at large

For not reading the dream room cooly enough

As the tedium society calibrated vectors of wind

Outside the iron tower spoken of as gold

As they do every day.

                                          No one is who

I thought they were. They act independently 

Of my motives, for their actions,

Though the kiss is real enough.

                                         What is in front of me

Is enough to throw completely 

In the mold of myself, that missing commodity,

An intrusion of self that beckons the light

To an already luminous building.

                                                          So crystalline 

The way we are stilled sometimes, as if we

Have found shape, and need to orbit away

From the confinement.

                                         But the tighter the box

The more content the smile, the better to know

What freedom is by its lack, and because

That is exactly what has been asked of it. 

                                            The rich recompense

For the way you accept no hope, no choice,

No voice, just blocks of time to sweat out nothing.

                                In the breakroom exchange

Are positioned faces and names,

                                As if they know something 

Worth extracting — as if they count,

And they do, because they don't 

And know it, how low they've been willing to go

To get so high.

Santiago Canyon by Frog

The illegal people stand in front of the courthouse 

As if to make their protest an act of art

But the Lancer at the Autry says otherwise;

It's a one-horse hitching post.

The lonely people at Happiness Donuts know

Not to look for love at Valentino's Pizza

Only breakfast at the Broken Yolk,

Which suffers the art of omelette too greenly

And of the two restaurants on top of the hill,

Only one isn't seared black with memory.

But the horse has a sense of humor

Here at rabbit kissing time, flapping 

His gums to the indulgent sunset

That needs no words or laughter this evening

When a prankish fart to the face

Will suffice. But the night won't hold still

For nibbles, it moves us on soon enough

Through the High Horse Hills

To the moon on our bedroom wall,

The road like the ribbon at a crime scene

That asks only if we are doing

As it fades away, from the splendor

It conveyed, the thought of stillness,

Like before the mites bite.

Background on the New Ways

In the end it’s not that time does not
Exist.
           It’s I do not – except in
Recognizable ways,
                        Like mirrors are
Illusion.
                I become the skunk grass,
The bee graffiti
       Before my first big meeting
                             Of the morning
Where I double as coffee.
 
Time will find its way back,
                            It always does,
It’s like a dog that way,
      As the cat that is my
                           Conscious self
Can cross whole continents of
Rats
        To find that special pillow
Marked with its name.
 
                          But the cat
Disappears, as
             Even Alice will tell you,
And her name must stand for more
             Than even the Bible foretold …
 
The story always changes
                         But that is what we love
            About stories.

An Old Story

The mystery of other people
                       — Who dunnit?
     What is their real thought
                As I game plan
                         Their illusion?
 
All that passes me
                                  Is them
               And them only
Tho it is only
                         Me.

Road Notes from Venus Relocation

I was able to send out a nuclear bomb

Of room-clearing ground zero love

Like a parcel dropped at the crime scene motel

On the way out of more cowbell town

With a husky who rasped exhausted in the UHaul

Through Buttonwillow, Oil City, McKittrick,

The desolation that made Bakersfield hum,

The vistas where the cows got slaughtered,

What the unofficial mayor of Fresno calls the blues,

The way the Tower still stands with the Chicken Pie Shop

And holds her liquor, distilled. The perfume refinery

Keeps its dopamine scroll, at the intermodal of Avenue 24

Downwind from the Atwater onions; if you get

The opportunity to stop in Chowchilla you take it.

A makeshift handkerchief, the kid on the leash knows.

Truckee gets slammed again with snow.

The diggers bring their carts from the creek as usual

To what Marco Polo called “The Great Wall of Tartary”,

The divide they call the Grapevine, where stopping is death

And unforgiveness is beautiful, the deep Pacific fall.

An amateur dogfight broke out over San Diego, 

Sent fuselages all over Dresser Street,

But the galactics have assumed control of Los Angeles,

Where Teslas exit time and space.

Sunset in Merced was like no planet on Earth

But you won’t get your money back

From the homeless dude in Freedom Park

For reeking up your hands when you paid to pet his leopard.

The Kindness Comeuppance

Deep cleansing breaths – ego gone

               Still it lingers, the unkindness

You subjected yourself to

                                To push fear out

Where there was no home,

    No way of orphaning your creation.

Still we are believers – in what we know

   Despite frequent reminders – we don’t know.

It’s stunning, really, how much trauma we

                             Carry with us to the gym

As we clamp weights down

                                     On shouldering skin.

The Video that Didn't Record

The lilac blue that infuses the evening 

With its dreaming hues

Must be shared somehow --

The eyes don't betray how they are tricked,

The ears can't hear the words

That dissolve in mist,

The hands, as they hold, think only of love,

Too general a wash for the nuances here

At this moment, only.

The white dog is blue

Florescent as a shell

Under indigo cloud,

The pier barely strings together the sky

That has pastelled into ether

Instead of saying what it knows.

Catalina is now a false memory.

The color that is now

Is the basis for what we believe.

We look in each other's blue eyes

For truths not yet dogmatized,

Not yet scrutinized to darkness

As the veil of night, so strange and tender,

Reduces the sky

Like a secret flavor

And the bloom of twilight bulbs,

The lights of all we know,

Overtake what we don't.

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 the Israelites, potatoes no one had ever before seen, is a pestilence long gone, like the vaqueros and Pimungans and the rusted equipment that passes for stones of that last 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 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 some 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 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.