Flashback

                    i.m. Albert Hofmann, 1906-2008
 
I made my way thru
the undulating brick walls
& vibrating neon colors

watching the faces of those
around me freefall thru
a kaliedoscope of distortion

beautiful, horrific & eternal…

I always found it to be
rather charming that you
denied having anything to

do w/turning on an
entire generation

Another Shitty Day in Paradise

No more lost than any faded
x-rated postcard misdelivered just as this

sky kind of slid down past your
subconscious gridlocked turistas

in a past life that you never could shake
all pastel & turquoise w/blood-stained lessons

up against it when the squad car bears
down string them along real polite-like

but don’t make it too obvious the mother-
fuckers are always ready w/the riot stick

upside the head like Sullivan he never did talk
quite right after & his eyes would vibrate

at times as he stared intently at nothing
in particular caressed by the golden light

that all of us took for granted

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 35)

I was being swung on an idea, but it wasn’t an ideology...I continued to sit mornings, chasing thoughts, watching erections, feeling cramps and dream pains, letting it all ride in the empire purge...

And that didn’t stop me from moving out of San Francisco, right in the heart of merry old December, after a Thanksgiving visit from Gabriela and her Father...Three days she was there and three days I spent time with her, and not once did I end up alone enough with her to even entertain the idea of sex...but I didn’t care, I didn’t want that because when I knew in the chest that I didn’t want to invest blood, there was no chance that I would want conjugal matters...

Sure, I told myself, it will all make sense soon... sure, Gabriela came to visit and I missed a connection by seven miles because I was afraid of raising the troops on guilt and the articles I read on faggotry, misogyny, and a tincture of sperm, all being closely tied to mental illness...and I had the next few days to think about how I might get myself out of my own created Dante rut, and so I went to work with the I Ching trying to put something together with as little pain as possible...in the meantime, along came Tanya, whom I swindled on and on about 100 pages ago...

The Universe was picking me up by the chin hairs, a daily shaver to put me somewhere away from the epicenter dandy/pinky rotting honest-to-God death tier... I told my supes at the college that I needed a break, which was the entire, shattered truth.   I said I needed to get away for a month at short, and maybe as much as three...I was ripe for the tropics, I was half in my mother mother’s lap...In short, I’ve now recounted episode # 3 of Thermocouple Ball misfire, meaning, Tanya and then the Jewess, and now, in a fit of friendly plaything slightly soused nerve-angel fooling around, with Gabriela on the eve of my departure for the tropics.   One last time we had dinner in her living room wherein we found ourselves nearly naked and to the point of senussi rising, coincident with the entry of Bulgaria, me threatening her on new flanks, she threatening me with nothing but her beauty, and we all but sealed my fate by nearly but then calmly, she steered us away from a climax, and I was going away with nothing but goodbye and tersely swollen balls...and then Boom!   I find myself in the air, screaming across Texas with more terrifyingly good thoughts, more submissive relaxing airs about me, ready for my mother, ready for the blue ocean, ready for the twenty year Dardanelle Ramona and her Constantinople hair and skin...

-Michael Price

50 Devas in the Driveway

It’s no different
              a minor
                              tearing of the cloth
or that other time
              ripped on the Cuervo
                              a wavering dance thru
machetes & blue light
              I had expected nothing
less
                              tore off a corner of it
for a rainy night
              when you’d need it most
aesthetically arranged
                              over that way
beneath an off-brand palm tree
              stigmata, enough
to surrender this moment or the next
                              ever to follow that

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 34)

I rose to the surface, then swung my port around in the direction of Gabriela’s face.   It didn’t occur to me that I was repeating the same pattern which had brought me to my present lowly presence, which had actually brought me most of my suffering for my entire life, that same pattern of look, pursue, flirt, romance, eat out, and fuck.   That was it.   A simple recipe for torture that I had alone perfected, of course with the consent of the woman who was undoubtedly working on her own similar torture pattern, laced with insecurity and a few hours escape from boredom... “For every bodily pleasure brings joy at first, but at length it bites and destroys”...and here we were, Gab and I perched on that precipice of atomic desire, me with my cock an inch inside, she with her mouth agape and her historical, Mediterranean face aglow, her womb pulling the inevitable and perpetual part of me close...

I had forgotten what it was like, this uncertainty, this moment where a decision is both born and made...I hadn’t been this close to a major life move in nine months.   And then we made it with not so much as a few words, by driving into hips, by letting go into the carelessness and coldness of these times we live in...a coward’s choice but one covered by universal love and blunder, a guarantee that there is no one who is not a breaker of rules, and that Gabriela and I had made no mistake for bright, roving observers and friends...we simply exchanged bliss and heart and we did it for at least an hour...and Gabriela could make a man feel like a sexy mother fucker... I want to say Italian Film is Great!   For the women of Italy!   Passion is their pose and they strike it perfect...

I have one image alone of the night and that is of the cold winter window open to the tip stars and the blue repose, while under me and with me Gabriela had her own visions and memories, probably minute details of a touch, a look, a particular breath...Women’s movements are the more shocking by contrast with the quietude of male ignorance...their convictions are by instinct, and their activities intentional and their memories exacting.   The man’s spontaneous, clumsy and loose...their failures they keep to themselves and so they appear weaker...

So I left.   Gabriela and I left it where it was.   Which was an intense condensation of confusion misted over a shaky premise.   A premise built on projection.   A premise acting like a promise, already broken, already regretted.   A weakness, not oral or traditional or expressed, but a convulsion of truth that would need to be ferreted come soon...but i was gone from the Centennial state and back in the orange kiss western edge of the western world...So I continued with my plans to move back to the place of my birth, continued to discuss things with a candor too simple, too palpable, and resumed fucking my ex-wife whenever I got the chance...I was a coward at best.   There was the same tired old and familiar guilt, guilt for needing the cunt of my ex, guilt for not being honest with G, guilt for barely writing poems, for wearing glasses when looking into the vision of the unity of God.   I was a man apart.   Apart from the gilded poet fakers I worked around at the college, apart from my own season of refuge and rhythm, apart from the two women I was carnally unworthy of apart from a family...

But by god by jesus I look back now and I was not apart from the path...a path with signs now coming swift as the thunder that peals, and what I could see more clear along this trail, like a mountain fire road cut between the stands of pine and looking up like a night to see the arms and hands of them, what I was beginning to see was my own budding perfect contempt for the world, how each and every manufactured and merchandized moment, object, and thing mattered less and less...what mattered more and more to me was the annihilation of the demarcation, of the effulgence laid over each aching moment of living, like the grey dusking light coming on to snuff the pulsation of the self, the drowning blue sun, the true self, Atman, the self-effulgent witness...Like sight in the eyes, like hearing in the ears, like smell in the nose—so too love in the heart and so too, the true self in the false...

-Michael Price

Medium Blue Vinyl

Outside there is a world.   A word.
It doesn’t mean anything.
Out, up from the
waves, the sea, say what you will,
reconvene that last
finger of cypress.

Insoluble gray-white vistas
              returned to silver, to smoke
dependent upon a parallel vocabulary
                              the shuffle of glass cards
on the horizonless horizon
              that later you can’t deny
hardwired to the pavement
                              driven down
into the sand

I let it all fade into the sound of
waves
              humming out there like
silk-weaving looms
                              in the opium dream I
never had

Beyond Repair

The sun is shining.   Rigorous criteria.   Crystal & cement.   The
          richest country in Africa is skipping across Walnut Ave.
I had it figured out.   Falling from a great height.   GOLDEN.
          Turned upsidedown in Kansas.   A blank space, a few
          numbers, a ripple thread creasing the tide.   Look.

In yet another state the music continues.   Without you.   Trees
          drop into their own shadows.   Shade.   Dancing skeletons.
The short cut loop down the alley across the vacant lot tiptoe
          debris.   Weeds & thistle.   Gravel & pearls.   All of it set
          into mosaic sessions.   Body art for lost souls.

Particle Accelerator in Overdrive

suicide attack
murder suicide
standoff
                            hostage situation
suicide mission
suicide bomber

I’m going to take you with me
when I go

peeling out on
Kamikaze Blvd where we can
plunge to the depths
or fuck it up all golden-like
guaranteed

(Better spell-check that suicide note)

suicide blonde
weak in the knees

suicide squeeze

There is one knows not what

spinout WHOMP altocumulus
descending
                    something else than
                                        restlessness perpetuates
running out the blood
                    never so gently (waves)
                              the other end of the beach
SOMEWHERE for certain
              birdsong splashdown riptide cutback
                                                  falling upwards
step into silence
                    whomp awash
                                        “Silent cities in the sea”
(howling in my skull)
                    tumbling as well
                                        any minute now

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 32)

The Naples number I was fixing to play on the 33 had the ring of newness and adventure...and Gabriela poured on her sweet gutsy Italian ideas and charms, making me feel blessed in some diamond way, cut to exact glass emotive fixation...so I was drinking it all up and fixing my move, telling myself that it was time to go...meanwhile forgetting for the hundredth time that I never made a good decision that I myself decided to make...I was simply too taken by my own romanticism because I was impatient, bum steer, and randy.   Not to mention busy inhaling my won sweet smell practicing my cataclysmic tantric cock moves, and writing (handwritten) poems commemorating the countdown seven days until my arrival in empty big lot Colorado—good, strong, male poems, lyric and right, to Gabriela, which I then typed on Blue oversized postcards sent off one a day so that I could keep her heart turned into the stream of the emanation, even when crushing...I was hitting on vibrant poetry nerves, reading Tao, and typing on a big beige IBM Selectric in my office at the college, and humming along...and before I knew it I was on a plane to Colorado

It was late fall, maybe Thanksgiving, no earlier, maybe it was my birthday, end of September and I had written the seven poems that made up the week prior to my arrival and I was firmly planted at the base of the foothills looking up, mortifying my passion as much as I could, rending the code of the samurai, trying myself like gold in the furnace to be righteous and sing in tenor...my mother liked Gabriela a lot, and so that was riding on my mind...nonetheless, I was arrived and enthusiastic, dangerously so, to make better acquaintance with Gabriela’s father, with her two daughters, with her tenable niceties...

One night we spent together in her house with the girls asleep and it felt not so much strange airs but empty airs, a house with just us, willy nilly to become just one...this was the night and the only night where Gabriela and I would make certain love in the Italian sense, love ripe with surrender and mystery...dinner somewhere, not important, drinks to loosen the healthy parts, and then the darkness and ropes about our necks as we made the bedroom upstairs and swirled in the drunken slake thirst cinematic endeavor, VENGO, this majestic ode of expectation as we made it upon the bed, starting removing our clothes and finally, stripping down only to what was needed to keep us honest...Gabriela and I had an uncontested, unsaid breathing simulacrum...we had an understanding of breath and movement so that there was a crease of fainter words as I slowly ran my hands down her hips, across her appendix, through the soft hair of her womanhood...I was young and sturdy, she tipped scales full of passion and we had agreed to take things slow but in one flaming effort of last hope clothes were coming off as we drove deeper and deeper into each other, naked now and rolling like baker like bartender, blood surging and waiting, heaving up and down, changing position, rolling innumerable times, finally ending up with our faces in each others’ rare moments, simultaneous head, 69, glorious fellatio and cunnilingus non interruptus...of course our rewards and pleasures were suddenly sweeping, and in order to stave off orgasm, we moved back into missionary strike pose, two educations, two approaches, two believing strangers staring up and down into each other and now talking in heavy breaths, closing eyes with visions of Mesopotamia, of great wings, affections of divine and saintly sensations...There was definitely not a chance in Hell that we could stop ourselves now...and so in, just slightly to her deep moan, the tip of my cock just in the first folds of her wet wet pussy, that minute perfect parallelogram moment of inner first connection, when surges of sneeze like sensation course themselves through the body entire with an equal and essential likeness...

-Michael Price

Alternate Route

A hand reaches for the bottle
grows wings
              otherwise delicately confused
not even the charm of a doubt
where once was parked a garden of
broken glass
              w/orient attendants & associates
passing thru the deeper bronze shadow
of a working hypothesis
                            Their several garlands hoist
ensigns of light & proportion
              unless of course “motel” & “vacancy”
could rhyme
                            the sand & the time full of
sighs & accumulated loss
all that I no longer am yet at arm’s length
I had watched
                                      & was shaped (shown)
The tide a rush of green steel rusting
along the edges where stones
disappear
              the shoreline uncertain
crumbling even the sea-wall beneath the sun
upsidedown
                            as the torn sky bends in the wind
whatever I pretend
              this is my life now

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 31)

Gabriela because somehow this goes back to Gabriela, of course, and the book on love and longevity minus fluid exertion, but to the woman herself, whom like I said, I had met through Aaron Daney the summer prior, just before or just after encountering the Jewess...I was thinking of falling for her Italian beauty and I had managed to get a copy of my book of sonnets, Doombook, into hers and her father’s hands while Gas and I drove my father’s green truck about town looking for her...on her street, Gabriela approaching my side of the truck with a smile from 1945 saying all I needed it to say along the lines of “Plan A, the original plan, to smile” and so that’s where the romance started one hot afternoon mid-street, the father daughter best friend place of intricate meanderings graced with Chinook wind...So I got her phone number and address from Daney and upon returning to San Francisco, commenced to write and call with delicate uncanny patience, a subsonic latitude, a will to win this fair-hearted dolce gabbine, with her good strong Italian nose, golden hair, and sweet eyes...I was ready to win Gabriela’s heart and start my married life anew...this time with too beautiful daughters aged six and ten! Here I was! The principle of Fructification, ever from above sunshine, rain, etc...I think I thought I had it figured...So I sauntered right into my old usual habit of obsessing daily about her, her love for me, her hatred for me, how long she might love me, how my vaunted friends would receive her and she them... my moods from September to late November, when caught up between Gabriela’s ploughshare dedication to me and my own sense of growing foreboding, got worse, feeling my inferiors drag and push around my heart, which was calmly, quadrilaterally beaming its manna message “follow me, thus The Path”...Daily I was asking the I Ching what to do, where to point, when to do whatever it was I was about to undertake...

I had reached that point where I couldn’t force myself any longer to stay with her just because she was dead-on gorgeous and generous...on and on went my wayward nerves & I could feel the repercussions of my family and friends when with plumb crazy enthusiasm I would relate my plans with her...thankfully, their looks of doubt and care became teachers of the highest order, teachers willing to let me hit my own walls... I still made a plan to travel out to Colorado for a few days with my mom, who was living a mere five minute walk from Gabriela.   Then there was the question of how I would find a way to make money in Colorado, where mountebanks were few and corporate cutthroats were aplenty.   ”Was it not my privilege to demand work, I a full-fledged American Citizen, the heir of respectable parentage, a devout worshipper of beauty, a democratic hooligan?   Hadn’t I gone to college to learn how to die, die like miserable coward, die with stub tail betwixt my legs, die the slow joyless death of samsara?”

Sometimes it was a conversation with my father (verbatim) “I don’t know five jobs that would fit your lifestyle in Colorado,” other times I just thought of cancer housing developments and the resignation to unhappiness that would proceed buying and moving to one...and how did I manage day to day, month to month, to keep up my eat out/buy books/live large lifestyle?   Debt and reckless abandon.   Debt in the form of credit card/student loan and the downright blessing of my family...I spent way above my means, entirely, cosmically beyond my meager salaries, yet somehow made it work because ultimately, finally, I get the sense to stop before it gets out of hand, borrowing money from friends, dad, sister, almost always paying back and trying to offer something above and beyond cash like the proton charge of loyalty or good advice...money has always been this thing for me, and ONLY now am I learning that it need not be worried over like driving directions or the checkbook—

Fact is money & cunt are the two dirty sot stories left to be told of the liberation of bug-eyed glint reaper ME, save the big dark holding room windless Ten eyed death of this body...at least in San Francisco I was making thirty K and had not a one woman to support and half a rent owing to the move in of Sim Flyer, whom I’d asked to share my apartment when the wifey moved out...

-Michael Price

Hollywood as a Teaching Tool

All the lies you have yet to tell yourself staring death in the
          face until one of you blinks

The afternoon caves-in as she looks right thru you & boy
          you wonder where those eyes have been

The ideal of patience grates on the zipper of your resolve

Walking downhill backwards Taqueria Las Palmas corner of
          Nowhere & Pacific, Jim

Lights on the pier as the fog rolls in

Sounds cross the mind easy seeming as she says embalmed
          in velvet

Goodbye, Dirty Machine

And her loose blue warm-up pants over her thousand times legs were coming down the hips every so inchly, exposing the pelvis and the wonderful iliums and that naked spot that a man could spend hours touching, like childhood doctor dark closet...every once in a while I would send my sentry right hand down the middle of her abdomen under the elastic eve apple bite line and find the hair soft as my own...back up her breasts I played angrily in jest with her standing-room-only nipples, elastic, near inch lactiferous ducts... because sucking I was with turtleneck amorous motions like the façade of the beautiful Orient word for “fuses,” “take off your athletic pantaloons you foolish girl!” So off they were sliding and out was her breath and up was my cock and down went my face...splitting the distance half between each leg to the maternal spring (I have the longest tongue in Science) & my mouth filled with kosher delights face flush with no panties just white magic flesh, being its own particular muse stronger than rot-gut and more great than gold.   Her entire cunt was in my mouth. God, the Jewess was too much for us men of sensibilities the writhing and radiohead thinking of spending December’s laconic eves asking redoubtable Deities to prolong the sweet melancholy Head I was giving to this wonderful creature—a picayune deleterious head which she was gladly accepting and what the hell, I figured the black snow piling up outside her window was fit prelude to a descent further down the anatomical fool’s gold pleasure stops and so down to her puckered soft asshole I went putting my own mutt jew ass nose right in the folds of her open heart...But the Jewess would let things go no further, and as she sobered up and thought of her stag, the night slowly slipped from my grasp and I had to leave unfulfilled. We had hit 90, but blew the clutch when she looked in that rear-view...

So take it here now, the Jewess, what I couldn’t give you then, my head between your legs your mind pushing out your heart roughly two playfully rough hours that night are mere prelude to these words...take the best inch of my heart and run with it dear J to somewhere like peace and a moveless place and I would take from her, as I did with Tanya so much recent, a pair, nay the very two of my jewels between my legs, again blue, again an unfulfilled retreat...blue balls.

-Michael Price

You'd Better Have a Plan B

This twilight is a slur against the
fading day
the shape of overexposed
kodachrome colors
collapsing upon cold sweat & diesel
exhaust
where the beach has already left tracks
which you follow
up along the inside of your left arm
to the ruins of an ancient city
built of sea-stones
& glass

You need to go someplace
                              where only the rain can follow
              to carve a name in the
                        muffled roar of the surf
which is a sound you can feel echoing
even now
                        in the rust-colored sand
that flows thru your veins

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 30)

Suddenly, as if by a particle accelerator, our escapade was erased and it was closing time...we had killed it dead and everyone made their separate ways home in defiance of all law...and the Jewess had shown me just one more aspect of her nine-headed self and I was content...

There is, locked indelibly in the mind of any capable reader, the need to finish off the Jewess, the Kabala lyric tale of her hairbreadth influence on myself, which didn’t transpire until the following December, so rightly on the heels of the blue-balled tryst of Tanya...and there we were, Gus and I, driving US 36 from Denver and a sweet night of bean burgers and beer at the Wyncoop Brewery in Lower Downtown Denver, the old haunts of Neil Cody and Jack Duluoz and their Benzedrine vapor history...as we came down the final approach hill between Superior and Boulder, at the apex of which a swell of relief breath will fill the lungs and heart for the green sweeping expanses, when the Cellular phone rang in my hand and the late night voice of Scorpio appeared in my ear with the information that the Jewess was inquiring as to my whereabouts in the bowels of the Sundowner, and that I should hurry because, as Scorpio put it, “She was hot to swot.”   So dropping off Gus at his mall-side location dwelling, I hurried the ten blocks to the select and reject underground swilling establishment known by locals as the “Downer” and located the Jewess in the smoking section and approaching her as an abstract concept, gave her an arm-wrapping and side kiss at the cheek level...all was certainly well.

I took a couple knees outside the smoking room, a great occasion for the both of us, and said a small prayer to gain a certain favor from the almighty and watched those smokers red-faced in their purple grey death mist: a tall athletic mason, a harem of frat lords, a couple muscle car chicks, cut off long sleeve flannel muscle shirts, business in front party in back coiffed and by God the Jewess in the middle to make my heart bleed...I was dead heat walking right into her aura and I knew I had come for strange reasons into this world...We talked and we muddled through nervousness and common interests of the sexual nature, but like every small glib conversation in a drinking establishment, there wasn’t much heart in it...I knew the Jewess and I could talk the poem line but at this point we hardly knew how to get each other into bed which was where it wanted us got to...So the Jewess and I sauntered out of there and mounted my mother’s purple Cherokee chariot which I deftly maneuvered to her confines off canyon blvd right on a branch of Boulder Creek, childhood inner-tube and girl chase river of brightening memories...she shared an apartment with another woman who was already sated in REM and we quickly moved to the bedroom (tho’ I failed to mention that the J had only invited me to come in for a few minutes, a quick drink or something)—The Jewess was trying to sort out her heart over her 43 yr old stag and I could see her tripartate reason hold for getting me involved: 1. Because I was it 2. Because she wanted to make her man jealous and 3. Because she was just one horny woman. It was night.   I wasn’t asleep.   And beautiful tears had blossomed in my eyes.   Strom Thurmond was not dead.   Jessie Helms was not dead either.   I lay on the bed of the Jewess Caesar-like and expectant of news that would be breaking news that might, as for my marriage, show me that rainbow in Reno was a false omen, or that the naked upper half of the Jewess was suddenly there before me in her 1:30 am half-light parapet midwinter pose, and let me tell you Lefty those perfect breasts stood up immersed in themselves like spring iris bulbs deep in their yin garden beds, every hint of the temptress perfectibility in woman there in those verisimilitous mammary organs piped up and belying her very circle of darkness, the areola funeral fugues of hind stat desire & rushing up through my very limbs as I lay in repose watching the utter genius in her movement as she made the way to the bed and where we commenced to admire her “upward optimistic tits” like my old man thoughts, for the Jewess was quite fond of her breasts and was turned on almost to the point of madness by my seemingly endless interest in them...I spent literally an hour coursing across her lovely chest, kissing her neck, her lips when I could get them, her ears...she had a fantastic deep earth moan and breath outtake from that beautiful mediastinum...the root of the lungs...must carry that much of celestial information, for the breath is the song, the connection, the link to the primordial, the one taste heart...so close to the central ticker, the push behind voice, a woman in ecstasy was like nothing else...

-Michael Price

The Tempo & The Space

Around you not
only here but underwater
drums from something as elemental

but if you tap your knuckles
against it you can hear it
must be real?

        * * *
what am I to make of the
supposed electronic harmony…

from this corner of the cosmos it
don’t look like a whole lot now does it?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
OF BREATH


to one from each
____________________________

(Any number of
places
en Español)

Santa Rosa
San Francisco
Santa Cruz
Salinas
Monterey                         a sampling
San Luis Obsipo             north to south
Santa Barbara                (abridged)
Los Angeles
Playa del Rey
La Jolla
San Diego
Encinitas
              & Bakersfield

        * * *
Here is I meant to
whisper along the blade of
breath

              “all ways”

              “have known”

STEPS
reflecting

We have constructed pyramids

Spinning like those vacant eyes behind dark glasses
midnight on the last train heading south
no more than a pantomime in transit to clip the
heart that never made it past the security checkpoint

eyes like whirlpools drawing down to
a single point on the map east of nowhere
the cave the cross the dull mid-morning sun
falling in upon the murmuring confessional

built out of introspection & denial
the music folded up & put away 300 years ago
translated from green to blue to the cement gray
of eyes only slightly more pale than springtime

to be sorted out like loose change in the damp
alley back of the liquor store where even the softest
whisper of a breeze cuts you clean to the bone

Air Lines

The in-flight rockabilly station has been
overdubbed w/sub-space fuzz
a Martian lullaby for the fool poet
who should have known better

A little more turbulence, if you please
just to straighten me out & soothe
the 27th can of Budweiser that has
materialized before me as if dropped

from Cloud 9 which I’m sure we
just passed thru at 20,000 feet
& climbing

In From the Rusty Edge like Absolution

Fogmist floaters waved & streaming
down thru the atrophied
palm branches so firmly held in the
grasp of a Destiny
that most often appears in a shroud

hopelessly drear & dank save for the
asymmetrical menu

as those initiates of Delphi
or Malibu
w/drizzle & circumstance
              (except for the tunic)
park along the coast highway
to read the future in the glassy tide

a point of entry & return within that
broken dissolve of mist & sand

threading the needle

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 29)

I went from exposing my jewels at the table to the server nook by the bathroom, where I forgot to mention the Jewess worked as a waitress...and she was naturally back there as I stumbled shitfacedly into her conversation.   The coworker quickly left after seeing my junkyard face and it was, so to speak, the Jewess’ and I’s first private moment...and the Jewess had gotten herself totally smashed, right up alongside the rest of us—her scratch and sniff voice box was slurring and her eyes were coming down barbituationally—so I made my next bold parlay...I had to dive in the bathroom quick because I had done something even I could not believe and once inside, I wasn’t sure if I actually did what I’m about to relay, so misplacen and out of body was my temperament as I looked at myself in the mirror and pulled out my cock to piss...it all came back to me...and “it” wasn’t more than five seconds in duration but was profoundly irregular, and went like this...”Think of the most beautiful person you have ever seen...”   I was saying to the lovely J, and at this point she had her arms around my waist, and her answer or rather half rebuttal was half started when for no reason other than blonde jingoistic ornreyness I deftly, unconsciously, and very very quickly put the index and middle fingers of my right hand right down her open mouth and throat while simultaneously shooting my left hand right up her little tanky t where I found her right tit, which I squeezed with zeal.   And for maybe one to two seconds I was quietly frozen by the gentle beauty of the mammary gland...but as quickly as I had acted, I un-acted and ducked into aforementioned bano where I decompressed and left the JEWESS in a state of universal bewilderment, perhaps slightly swooning into her eventual death...goddamn what I had I done?

Fucking great, I thought, but fucking weird too, I thought again...Here was the start of something beautiful, a holon, a separate kindling whole event to go along with many other whole digressions to form a holoarchy of “perfect practice indiscretions” which I believe I am one of only three in the world creating such a system...I laughed and laughed at my dirty mug in the glass, asked myself aloud if I knew what I was doing, answered myself that I had not shitting idea and marched my candy ass back out into the group barking at Hemlock and Vorken to do some mouth lock gymnastics, squeezing Lana, the wife next to me, every chance I got... everyone squashed with the table resembling something like a wreck from the hue-down day feasting...

We finally got outta there after the third rendition of Grease’s “Summer Nights” Karaoke that had the place in stitches...Waiting along with Daney and Loon to get a cab, with Hemlock’s etc. already gone to the Bustop, Boulder’s only strip club, when approaches the Jewess losing her stomach contents right there on the sidewalk in front of her place of employment!   Christ she was good!   I didn’t know whether to run over and scoop her up for takehome or get the hell out before I grabbed that little five dollar ass of hers...the cab arrived saving a decision and in we piled for the journey out North Broadway, land of Autoshops, Truck rentals assholes, and horse tackle...and this Bustop was a mother of a place, and it had a smell, like stripper perfume, secret diabolical cotton-candy of the wonderful ladies of the neon and black, the fireman’s pole presaged synthesizer look of ham n’ eggers holding tightly onto their few singles, wary of giving away too much, hoping to buy some attention...what is it about the men who sit front row, dumber than a bag of hammers, with their measly sawbucks, holding back, expecting special favors from the ladies, to tip with only a buck or two every hour?...these bastards who expect to be admired for their mere presence?!   Waiting like doomed roses blooming on a sidestreet, don’t they understand that these women cannot give them anything beyond a show, an illusion, to surround themselves with themselves, like Gandhi’s harem there to test the moral fabric of one willing enough to bring spirituality through the door and five dollar cover...

So I say, and even from my pisskop bank empty existence, bring at least one hundred dollars to your strip club and throw it generously!   Stand up and throw the women your hard earned fun tickets, don’t wait, don’t be late, hurry up, the choice is yours don’t be late...if you must play the game then play for the sake of the hard nosed whores and at least give them your full attention and livelihood...

We had cinnamon thrills...blue light of evening had set into the cavern, helped by neon, made kinky by phermone, and spontaneously I turned to Vorkin, all six and a half feet of him, and exclaimed
“Les Morts Sont Dans La Maison” (the dead are in the house)
to which he replied in Draconian Croate
“Ya vit a espo la damme” (I want to marry the bitch)...Jesus, I had to calm him down, he wanted to run off with this Brazilian Russian Sasha and take me along for proof and an extra hand...
”Vorkin, you big ass, remember this: What we can leave is NOT the Tao.”
“Price, your kinetic energy, I want to put to my lathe, leave me to my Uzzo.”

Like Blue Meanines, the women of our crowd were seated all around the perimeter tables, in an oblong form, with their cuneiform cocktails and smokes, for they loved the smut and their men’s partake of it, but just wanted to chat—those chits—and compare the important accessories like shoes, handbags, and external integument of their cheek structure...but hell, us men were filling out the front rows and each had visited the ATM in the lobby and pulled out some amount ending in “hundred” & proceeded to the bar to procure a heineken or coors light, a vodka tonic and finally to trade in the twenties for packs of singles...

The Roy and Scorpio Gun brothers were each holding in the two hundred range, generously making sure they padded my forty bucks so I could keep with tradition—history must be this or it is nothing.   The sundry details of stripping, like an enormous wide load bearing down on you in the street, well, that’s bout it, there isn’t much to say that everyone doesn’t already know about smut, being the oldest institution and couched in the deepest human desire, the one for men that is the “biting through”...biology, taxonomy, wretchery, squalor, or the Meister Ignorance, which I believe to be the case for inquiry, the place to start...

In a way the Bustop is like a Killing Jar, a place where you put your insect desires to die so you can look at them undamaged, turn them over, take copious notes, begin to make your collection that will pin up somewhere on your merit field blanketing the mind where both the Id and the Savior can threaten the EGO...and I cannot say of course that my clear mind awareness was very much present on any of these occasions of the waiting at the Bustop...thereby Emerson said it best that genius studies the causal thought but I wonder if Emerson had ever seen the things I’ve seen for there was surely not the pimp assed bright neon half-truth Bustop to further his studies...

-Michael Price

Just Add Water

The barometer wavering
somewhere between gloom & revelation
as you would part the sea-clouds the
numerous extend

like drifting sand dreaming there
& evidently the wind elaborates upon it all
in the wrong kind of transliteration

I want the classic model w/chrome
& dual exhaust the seats ripped out the
wheels no more than rims

We are allowed only these clumsy interpretations
Mexico acting like Japan
in the grainy black & white film clip
that pings the eyes of clouds riding in on the edge

of a low pressure system brewing out near
Samoa in the futurecast you slept thru

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 28)

I’m inclined to ask if you are suffering?   Is your soul wounded by sharp objects? Have you not found love? a soulmate?   Well, I have something that understands.   I have a friend for you right now...a friend named my balls.   My balls will be there for you and my balls do not judge...they just love.   Can you imagine being loved by a pair such as these?   Not one for your left side but two for your both sides...This is a joy you can enjoy today, simply by inviting my balls into your heart and upon various other parts of yourself...you’ve probably heard of my balls though probably you haven’t thought seriously about what they could do for you...you probably surmised, “I’m ok, I’m still young.   I have plenty of time to meet and establish rapport with Michael’s Big Flesh balls.”   Ah, but there’s your mistake, as none of us knows just when the reaper will come calling and for all you know it could be the day before you’ve finally planned to rendeaveaux with my balls...there are countless victims of the balless life on earth...with my help you won’t be one of them...My balls embrace affirmative action...they indulge rich, poor, yellow, black, white, red or brown...no one is turned away from my balls.   And do you know that my balls have never turned the other cheek?   and not merely because they have no cheeks, for even if they had cheeks (they’re close to some dirty cheeks) my balls would never turn one on you...and say like “talk to the hand”...My balls have had their detractors as well.   There are people who loathe my balls, they persecute them, like the Heretics, they mock them, beat them, and pound nails through them.   But, alas my balls are still here...they are one with the everpresent space...Behold, for my balls have risen (especially if I happen to be teabaggin) and they will rise again and again...so for those of you who have fallen from grace, let my balls sag with you in the right direction...children, women, suffer them to come unto my balls and I invite you, every one of you as well to accept my balls into your life...

Sadly, I must have shown my balls at least three times not to fortify my delicate self but to completely shatter it...

-Michael Price

From My Chinese Novel

No recourse as choice
is our burden

& the one voice
snapped in two
by words so blessed

or cursed
to go on this way

invents its own
retribution

Second-Hand Smokescreen

There is that difference
the angle of the coastline
& the way the shadows can be so
necessary to divulge
something you didn’t say
just as Santa Barbara & its
leopard skin apostles
request the casual sacrifice
Guatemala needs a pint of blood
once, finally, & for all time
this time anywhere west of Hermosa Beach
California where we don’t stop
anymore but if we did you’d get that
neon freeze-out you love so much
& I’d fade into the pacific-colored
haze that the sky here wears so well

AMERICAN MUSIC by Chris Martin

I met Chris Martin some time ago, back when I was doing a lot of readings in SF.   He seemed like a nice enough kid, had a quick intelligence and I liked him.   He moved to Minneapolis where he worked at Coffee House Press for a while then I heard he jumped to NYC.  Just about everyone I’ve known that has moved to New York has become incommunicado.   It’s like nothing & no one exists outside that city, I guess.  I’ve taken to calling it the City of Lost Friends.  But then I get a cryptic little email from Chris asking for my address.   I send a reply, hear nothing back, & this book appears in my mailbox a few weeks thereafter.   I know it ain’t the friendliest approach & yet it is contact, & I’m grateful for that.

It’s a beauty of a book w/poems that move back & forth, up & down, inside & out, w/forays into the echo chamber for those light-fingered liftings & I like it mucho.   Chris Martin has his eyes, ears & heart open.   The poems are written in tercets & they average roughly about 60 lines each.   Lots of leaps, fakes & fade aways are built in to keep you guessing as you are propelled along the course of a free-flowing lyric that “falls into knowing” along w/you.

American Music is the winner of the Hayden Carruth Award for New & Emerging Poets…whatever the fuck that means.  Weird that this book made it in one of those bullshit contest deals but here it is, all shiny & bright, as published by Copper Canyon Press.   Every now & then something real slips thru.

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 27)

Kelly and I did not see each other again until a krill-fated night with the Hollywood cuts, namely Sativa Hemlock, one of the two Hemlock sisters, who had been torturing me since the 11th grade, and her gentle giant spouse Karl Vorkin, a Serbian six and a half footer with the hands of a skilled watchmaker, who could build anything with style and a flair of genius as subtle as his humor and grace...We were to go to a sushi clip joint where there would be something like 15 nibblers and with the energy I could taste that morning, the neutro-fill anticipation that coated my tongue said this very night was going to be ballistic, because frankly any night that included myself and a Hemlock sister was going to get filthy because there was always this shared Luciferian mischief between us that was sometimes chemical, nearly always sexual, and often times just short of suicidal...


The big birthday celebration of the giant Karl Vorkin, with fifteen screamers present, including immortal boyhood first friend Aaron Daney and my twin cynic soul the actor Gus Loon, who was everyday emerging from the world of the dead, ready to weep, who could buckle the knees of any mature woman with his French Canadian Kerouac but curly good looks and a Russian novelist honesty...yes, Aaron and Gus were both there, as was Hemlock 1 & her sidekick October, a lush 40’s belle damn madame there to support the image of absolute coolness...There was Scorpio and Trixie too, plus various other lost friends.   And the minute we got in that place the damned sin began...I had scored a seat on the end middle, where my hind quarters practically hung off the edge to the table just below us, which held other offspring notables, of which The Jewess was one, dressed in her usual low cut loosish jeans with no underwear (I knew this because on the way in to the restaurant I had put my hand all the way down the back of her pants only to find skin skin skin) and a small and tight tanktop with no bra...from eye view, The Jewess had a nice handful of French tits, with semi-sonic nipples which were always showing to varying degrees due to the Jewess arousal principle...somehow out on that sidewalk I had been given the cosmo-permission to get intimate with her backside, because up to this point, we had never touched...

And so it went with me most of the time...I was afforded tremendous liberties on account of my brazenness and Venus smile—(mixed with high powered poison of the spirits)— Happiness from below (this long winded sexcapade) is sharp, but it is not lasting, and it is not sufficient to sustain the modern man, especially in America...”once a guiding light for everything new and progressive in the world.”   And now?   I was there.   I saw.   Waves of cynicism, pessimism, and doubt. Sex and greed.   Merciless exploitation of the basest instincts...Yes, this was my starting point, the dead tail end of the dark kalpa...loafers, drunks, good family men, insensitive doctors, half insane inventors...and then, just base people working, coming home, watching television, bearing children, putting away horrible food, modestly dull, modestly cowardly, poached love and hatred both...

By the time things got rolling I had three bombers of beer and a few hot licks of sake down my throat, and with all the cast hitting their liens on perfect cue, I could do nor foresee doing anything particularly wrong, and in fact my standard for decent behavior had dipped so far below most of the fakers that I was virtually free to do whatever I pleased within visible law standards, so sliding my hand under my neighbor’s descending ass was my first stroke, and one she met with a mix of interpretations, one of outright glee and one of mock surprise... luckily she was a flirtatious wife, and her hubby had no problem with a little messing around...

And Hemlock, ever since the first day I knew her in Spanish level 3 in the high school was up to no good, or had the agenda of six witches both lovely and cool, a lure, alluring, lurid, diabolical, yes...was it her eyes?   Her swotting occult voice? Able to control great groups of people with her aptly timid--genius really--barbs and questions, her asinine situations that are sodden with guttural human folly, tears, affairs, dreams, lawsuits, hangings, bloodlettings...really, there is no end to her creative imaginary lathes and blueprints and I love her to death for it because she’s out there breaking as many necks as she can, especially in her 15th and definitive edition of the enemy’s handbook, the greatest teaching text known to...(like all over the world there are trucks that run over good people at the rate of one a week.)...as I said, Hemlock Sativa was at it good from her head of the lap table nook, and this being Friday night, Karaoke night, that haunted pastime I found so revolting because I was so afraid of doing it myself with the sometimes falsetto/sometimes freakshow voice, the atmosphere had quickly turned from raucous derogatory to Caligula everywhere...it seemed that the hundred or so people in the restaurant were all maddenly drunk and festive, as was my humble table, and not forgetting we’re perched, and can see the tops of peoples’ heads, especially when standing up, which I was doing every ten minutes or so to show Tracy the wife of Scorpio my balls...

Tracy came from a long line of daring women straight out of Newport Beach California...and she was completely whacko, but in the greatest and sweet way...she could tell you to fuck yourself faster than your own buddhamind and then turn around and give you a sweet embrace or hear your sad story for hours on end with genuine ear...that was precisely why I was showing her my balls, I suppose out of gratitude but mostly because she could also laugh at anything dirty and listen to smut no end...The first time I got em out and left the rest in so that it looked like a flesh pear was attached to the front of my black pants...she nearly jumped six feet back (we were shielded by the backs of some standing friends, I made sure of this so there would be no arrests) and she pointed and guffawed and I laughed and played dumb, like what’s the problem, and she ran to grab Scorpio so he could see em too...apparently, this from a Vietnamese poetess from my past, I had large balls and some good hang...

-Michael Price

Theme from Endless Summer

Why not just go w/yr own
inherent bullshit
& see where that takes you

None of the spinal jobs
down at the pier will ever
notice you being so
defined

The wind backs down the
tide picks up & we’re no different

A simple gesture
                              unconsciously
              my hand slipping under her blouse, say
or my heart turning to glass against the
abalone twilight

shattered into a million pieces

all of which I
have to name

The Evolution of Twilight

We are back to counting
every ripple in the heart
the arc of theft or indulgence
beneath an unreasonable
sky (blue & insistent)
as even you would
be yr own unanswered
pulse & as such an excuse
one should bury in
whispers on the outskirts
of Eden

Some of us walk away

Nasturtium shadows on the grass
& against a rock (a
STEEL DRUM
arrangement

                    or its mirror image
                                      rippling

All the old mythologies are realized
& dismissed

The stolen fire is in a notebook
I can’t find right now
a dark, rose-tipped lament
in the heart’s house
a pile of rubble at the curb

The Tiki gods whisper a kind of sideways Latin
into my right ear
while my left is tuned to the music of the spheres

(a wind-tunnel banjo played thru a megaphone)

Five o’clock shadows raining down now thru the trees
I thought to roll up my sleeves but the light had been
encrypted & my tattoo didn’t translate

They Say It Kills You (But They Don't Say When)

She rode in on a south swell
possessed of a moral authority that
didn’t really give a fuck

curling in perfectly around the point
compelled by grace or mystery
(same thing)

The sun & the moon fall from her
                            things have happened that
have yet to be known
              what any of us might imagine
not enough, evidently

She had erased the past as well as the future
set fire to her board in the parking lot
& broke off a corner of the sky just to
prove that it couldn’t be done

This luminous fact & the next
as some are born to it
in one voice or another

out of nowhere

returning
                            & out there beyond the foam
across waving fields of seaweed
              the sun balances on the horizon
like a gold coin (doused in gasoline)
                            on the edge of a spoon

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 26)

Scorpio and I were at the Fox theater awaiting the arrival of his brother, Roy, for amateur boxing known as Fight Night, where bamboozled and drunken matches provided medieval hi-jinx and brutality...So good, in fact, even burly and athletic women got in the ring for the three rounds of four minutes each...and not to mention the local Bustop Club strippers bearing the big numbered cards between rounds.  Outside Scorpio and I waited while drinking tall Sapporo beers and enjoying the twilight perfect Boulder temperature and light like sugar nickels dancing in your pockets...around us the dirty and happy vagrant kids let their pit bulls fight while on their leashes while all laughing their idiot laughs...”the Hill” was full of all kinds of degenerates, and it had always been the wrecking ground for the college... Tulagi’s had been there since the forties, a 9-live drunk tank which had changed owners and decors each decade, if not more... this place I was standing with Scorpio had seen all of it for Boulder had always been a liberal and spiritual place, and I don’t mean in the soft lefty kind of way because it has a natural spirit outside of human moral compass and there were energies converging in Boulder in the early nineties, a kind of coming together of the TROPICS and A Season in Hell...But it was, for the moment, inarguably, our home town and a typical summer night full of sex and bebidos...

From the corner of an eye I make Kelly and her old man sauntering to the door...she was dating some 42 year old bum but Scorpio had told me it was rocks at best... she abashedly said her hello to the two of us and made her way inside...I told Scorpio that I thought she might have eyes for me and he chuckled...and Scorpio could chuckle...We stayed out there for another ten minutes and to my surprise out comes Kelly from the sweaty hill crowd and up to me for a more highly ritualized greeting, making fun of my sandals, which she called man-sandals, described as women’s sandals worn by men...black leather like the kind worn by Frank Lloyd Wright with his suits--and his influence was Asia, where men have been wearing sandals for a hell of a long time.   And Kelly stayed for a while out in that peachy tremble light and I knew then that she was interested, and I laughed with her about my penchant for Asian leather architect’s shoes...and continued to be awed by her unbelievable sexy voice, Audrey Hepburn eyes, and floating pheromones of promiscuity...

-Michael Price

Defying Gravity

The sun rising
over the ridge as I
stagger back across the
beach & sandy pavement

my board under my left
arm my body sheathed in
black ripcurl neoprene
dripping wet

A hungry ghost wearing
some kind of heavy duty
Bodidharma headgear
approaches

he’s got a snarling 2-headed
pit bull on a leash

Life is short & I know
there are no answers
in this confluence

& as he passes he says
“Nice Ranchero, dude”

I took it as a gratuitous
blessing & bestowed upon him
the mystic hang-loose mudra

as he turned the corner
& disappeared
into the early morning mist

Spaghetti Western Sky

In from the edge (on it)
outside
                              to be abstract
in a concrete canyon
              itself somebody’s dream
“frail as a butterfly”

a gray bolt & tremor
above
thrown out like an arm of the sea

The sound made or taken, finally
like I said
a durable redemption wasn’t in the cards

The radio blasting something
in Aramaic w/guitars & heavy bass

indecipherable as it should be

while the sunset turned a
bleached blonde color that
stained our eyes

Ode to an Exploding Meth Lab

Broken bottles
avalanche
a motor buried in the sand

              ocean music you play
              w/guitar picks carved from
              the bones of a martyr

                              “Let us pray…”

A prayer for demons as well
that they be freed
from themselves

              as one might pick & choose
              their blessings
              all one heap

blank pages in the book of the sky
to reverse the infinite

                              if anything at all

the face that stays in the mirror
after you’ve turned away

ODALISQUE by Mark Salerno

Why the fuck not I thought.   The ODALISQUE is tinsel, as is the town.   Maybe Salerno is still dreaming of chasing nubile young co-eds around the tomato plants in the imagined garden of his palatial mind.   If so, good for him.   The poems will stand him up & break him down, as they do in this new book.

It’s an L.A. noir tour w/all cinematic cogs & wheels running.  Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall watching themselves in The Big Sleep while reading John Clare, or Yeats, or Thomas Lovell Beddoes.   Maybe that’s Robert Mithchum & Gloria whats-her-name in the B-picture that was better.

The threadwork is what it’s about, & Salerno is a tailor of sorts when it comes to the poetic line.   If you lose yourself, that’s okay, it’s part of the show.   Pick it up on the next line.

         “the idolatry of reason will fuck you up”

Nothing else need be said as Gatsby fades out in the third act.

         “she told her soul to leave her alone and it did so…”

Yes, I knew her, & this is exactly what happened.   M’sieur Salerno must have been listening in through the transom.   It is a gift.   Poets know this.

If I am lavish in my praise it’s because I have no fear.   It’s too late in the game to hedge my bets.   Salerno, when he doesn’t second-guess his heart, sings as true as any poet can.   What more can you ask for?

ODALISQUE by Mark Salerno, Salt Publishing, 2007.

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 25)

I couldn't bring myself to doing cock exercises, but Chia said there was a pressure point that could be manipulated to cut off the flow in the area known as the taint, as in “taint yer ass, taint yer balls...So, rub a dub I did and achieved a steaming hard on to the vision of Tanya’s sexy resistance...I placed the middle finger on the spot and I wailed away ...and the orgasm came like the denouement in Shakespeare, close to the mystery, on the heels of near destruction, with the permanent cells of my body each standing up and shouting “shitbox”!   All the same sensations were brought forth and my abdominal muscles contracted in leaps and fits and I kept my finger steady and it was magic.   Not a drop.   Nothing from the fount, a dry orgasm, an abortion of nature herself!

I shouldn’t have believed my eyes, ‘cause they were habitual liars, those eyes of mine, but I believed them this time, and I lurched and splashed and celebrated and my face fell to the water and I prayed like a fox in a forest fire, half fucked and crazed...had I found the first of a thousand steps towards seminal cornucopia and the massive genitals of Jahweh?   The Tantric mastery was to be mine!   If nothing else, I had cheated my way to the desired conclusion without going through the necessary rungs of trial and error and that knowledge sunk deep inside me ...I knew that there would be a consequence for taking the reward before handing over the bounty...and forgetting

“How good and right our conduct is when our testicles are empty”

I practiced this technique a dozen more times before losing interest...but not before I had done some pretty good temporary damage, which I would experience with poor Ramona, whom I have left half-loved on the bed in Central America with my limp cockus.   I will get back to her soon...

But first I must tell of The Jewess.   The Jewess became the second of three women, with Tanya the first and Gabriela the last, whose involvement with me, along with the book on Tantric love, led to my first and second failures with Ramona.  This was all hitched and bound together like a tranversalis muscle in the stomach, a muscle so-called for the fibers woven together to make the seat of worry, or the stomach, the harbinger of intuition and doom...


The Jewess was otherwise known as Kelly.   I had met her through a common friend at the Sundowner, local biker bar gone pussy, with yupps and frat lords alike...Kelly stood out like chrome on shag carpet...sexy voice, big bright eyes...lithe frame...I don’t say much to Kelly because I’m watching her as an anthropologist would wonder about libraries, or something, and I’m taking in her wonderful sexy confidence, marveling at it really, cause it’s there so palatably, and I wonder if that’s because she’s Jewish, tho’ at the time I didn’t figure this, it’s only now, in the ambrosial later, that I know her passion is the result of her people...confidence and a get-start sexual prowess...and Kelly was classic...beautiful and New York to the bone...of course with the winter in Flaaaarida thrown in...she would take no shit and could, that is to say, would make one feel small and embittered if the need was felt...and so it was that not much was said out loud but the nuances of small movements and looks, like the small dog warnings during tornado season in the Midwest, that Kelly and I had done a fair amount of scoping each other out so that from my notes I could pick fairly clean that I would have some sort of future with this woman standing before me...

-Michael Price

The Process of Elimination

I carried a .45 caliber bullet
around w/me
for an entire year once

I had carved 3 crosses
into the lead slug
& I would often set the

bullet on the table
& admire it
as the evening slipped away

from both of us

Providing Leverage

Improvised explosive devices
could describe saxophones,
trumpets, pianos & drumsets

thick fingers slapping the big bass
in a dark, smoke-filled room
60 years ago

Thelonious Monk presiding

Japanese Lanterns

An empty afternoon the day
before Doomsday

about 30 summer vacations ago

I was given to coked-up knuckle games
shaving while looking into a picture of
Walt Whitman

What was it glazed yr eyes?

love or drugs
either way I learned the formula

although I couldn’t make it thru the
approval process for
a sub-prime future exile

I could only sit there & stare
at a stand of eucalyptus in the distance
shimmering in the sun

to me it looked like the broken
silver blue surface
of the sea

Poem to be Spoken into a Hawaiian Payphone

Inclement fog / wind / mist / “night air”
at noon

                              (start over)

say whatever time or light
              waiting for the other shoe (death)

What you hear’s an echo
              windy nada
                              folded concrete seacliff lament
the wraparound road sewn shut
(repeat after me)
              which implies the blank stare
              (what I want)
                              to scope & gauge the tides
along that blurry line between
              what they told you was real
                              & what they told you was not

the conglomerating silence
                              the heat of heaven
a latin beat
              or the beat of a palm tree
                              sidewalks sloping down to the sea

the vacant lot rattles with pigeons

              snaps back into some kind of shape
as you pass
                              on your way

1000 Tattoos

Diving into puddles
if they were there

just that far gone

Aimless passions broken in two
the mind as such thrown off balance
or resort to difficulties
when doubt would do

I paid for everything
submerged
no matter who you
might be this minute or the next

the needle made that a
flawless transition

to attend to a thirst, say, & let it go
cross this room, this street,
every step you take
in time or attention

painted eternity sunset
& a fistful of nickles
against the dark
two-lane landslide

back among those mile-long shadows
bronze-edged in memory now

making it easier to forget

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 24)

To make testicle matters worse, there was the book by Mantuk Chia on the arts of Tantric love which I had been given only a month before by Gabriela, Italian siren, mother of two, friend of Ryan Stefans, my best childhood friend...Gabriela and I had caught each other’s attention at a coffee shop meeting arranged by Ryan that included her gracefully Italian father Tavio, a man who loved poetry and the Romantics, Italy’s own Giacomo, and the odes of John Keats...and I loved this man instantly because I too loved Keats, and the beautiful, fertile, and sagely odes of the short man torn by his consumptive kin and the evil naysayers of the time who couldn’t see beauty for the trees...Percy Shelley, who had been critical of Keats, (who returned the criticism to Shelley by saying "that he would do well to load every rift with ore") died in the water with a copy of Keats’ poems in his pocket...I love them both dearly for their courage...What Keats understood about existence, and this on a cellular level, because he had lived tuberculosis through his mother and brothers’ deaths, what he understood about time on earth or rather the stargazer mantra mucous was this: Once you realize the false needs time and what needs time is false, you are nearer the reality, which is timeless, ever in the now...If you need time to achieve something, it must be false. The real is always with you...

I see Keats on the Isle of Wight writing hundreds of lines a day of Endymion with his bust of Shakespeare and thoughts of King Lear in his head and all the grace of a palsic child but on he went and how he dominated the ascendant years after his death and how the mimes revere his treatises on beauty! So to have that period of the odes with the splenetic knowledge that his own demise was not only certain but incredibly near...to have those words fall together, to be born again with each muse obeyance...Keats how the muse loved you!

Chia’s book was mainly instructions in the new age for the retention of seminal fluid...I held hokey thoughts in abeyance, I put away my manifesto on flake theory and I remembered I had recently become a student teacher of the I Ching in my spare time...I had to have a wide view of the interrelationships of life, such as only unusual men attain, and so this book...this book told me that losing semen through ejaculation was like pissing away gold from a Fort Knox urinal...that the majority of all men were unquestionably fond of pulling their pork and/or screwing their chitterlings off, that in doing so were losing the energy--and this is spiritual energy mind you--which cannot be explained properly in logos, by a thousand loose meat sandwiches, or the genius of a couple Confucius...needles to say it had to be known just by knowing...

I had gotten far enough along in the book to break through the bombast and theory and into some of the actual practices for seminal retention ...and mostly it came down to breathing, patience, and various cock muscle building exercises meant to train a relatively unknown muscle to turn off the flow of a fluid from the vas defferens to the urethra, thereby giving the feel and body pleasure of orgasm without the discharge and release...Now, mind you, there a was of the problem of what the body was to do with the retained manna, how it would process this pure energy of a diffuse tbomb of ejaculation because this is a tremendous amount of energy to suddenly be putting somewhere it wasn't used to being...like in the ankle or the knee...The basic theory of Chia was that the stuff had to be steamed and moved up the spine, along the energy highway, weaving nerves, synapses, ganglia pia mater, white commissure, foramen, and ligamentum denticulatum...up to the pia matter of the brain, to the center of nirvana dream plexus & Kundalini midway-to-enlightenment holding pen...supposedly, when the human began to access the supermundane, the energy in the balls would move to somewhere behind the eyes, giving existence and phenomena their rosy glow which many yogi's have claimed to bear witness to...which is why I began to practice seminal retention in the latent light of my San Francisco bathroom ...

-Michael Price

The Next Survivor

The worst case scenario is
                              bliss azul for the jailbait
in rubberband bikinis
              who don’t even know they
stepped out of the 1st book of
The Metamorphoses
by Ovid
                              (whoever he was)

The sponsor believes in
drain cleaner
              but that barely creases your
consciousness
                              as you switch channels to
the Eyewitness News

just in time to catch the replay