Kamikaze Shoes

Paper moon made of aluminum.   The Night of the Harmonicas.   God climbs down from his limo talking on a cellphone, “I told the motherfucker not to look back or he’d wind up seasoning somebody’s french fries…”   It was summertime on the coast.

I could hear the tension being released in the secret yoga gymnasium as I passed by downhill on my way to the beach.   Tristan Tzara was drinking from a bottle of Night Train in the alley & a pornstar in a pink Acura swerved to miss a penitent in weeping robes who stepped into the street but forgot why.   There was music coming from every direction & an offshore wind sweeping in from the San Gabriels.

A warm wind that made the waves stand up on their hind legs, crosshatched in the doctored photograph hanging in the window of the Desolation Surf Shop.

Prophecy like pure chance resulted in Medusa & the two-way mirror, Moaning Lisa & her monkey eyes, Delphic shadows on the boardwalk ozone tarpit portal & the cigarette I didn’t smoke on the pier that night.   Opening the rusty puddle to get your fingers into that naked sand was one way to look at it, then again when your eyes have been folded into a Buick there are a limited number of options.

The graygreen surf tipped in w/dirty white foam.   The wet sand moving beneath my feet.   Moaning Lisa said she’d be my voodoo doll.   Her candy-colored lips assigned to a mysterious smile & her hair like dark water crashing against the jetty drenched in corrugated steel.

In Boulder, Colorado / June 6

At the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.

Tales of Brave Ulysses

Lost all I had to lose & landed in a truck outside of Zoorleans.   Everything looked like pictures cut out of an old magazine & they’d been tacked up in the sun & rain so long they were rippled & faded & you had to have some kind of imagination to figure them out.   I was knee-deep in emancipation & swampwater & didn’t have the time or the sense left to imagine much of anything.   I let the road reel me in.

Suffused in bygones, all waving & unused, I drove as far as that ’64 El Camino would carry me.   It died an untimely death in the Mississippi mud & I left it there.   I wound up selling my surfboard to a black lady in Jackson.   I think she was psychic.   I shuffled around for just about a month until I felt the Pacific calling me back & so the road.   A nightmare bus to Baton Rouge & the thumb from there to Houston & somehow further.   A badass vato on meth wanted to kill me in Las Cruces.   Maybe he did.   I can’t remember.

Albuquerque looked like Dakar at dawn, or Juarez at nightfall.   I remember spending a night in Tucson.   There were locusts as big as your foot wandering the streets & climbing the old adobe walls & cinder block.   The stars crashed down into abandoned Navajo pagodas where Keats died.   The plastic minimarts selling pulque & beef jerky & fuck magazines.   You just have to keep walking.   Bullet holes in the roadside saguaro, bullet holes in discarded beer cans, bullet holes in everything, including the sky.   The Aztec gypsy surrealist said, “You been gone a long time”.   “Naw,” I said, “Not so long.”   “Well, you will be soon enough.”

I had a long conversation with a lizard outside of Tempe.   His eyes were silver & he quoted William Blake quite a bit.   I got bored & started to refer to him as Jim Morrison.   He didn’t like that & after a while he scampered off into the brush & I caught a ride to L.A. with a drunken Mexican & a whore from Vegas.   They were in love.

When the seaweed was in bloom

She may have sifted down
thru the grillwork of heaven
but I’m still paddling thru the quicksand
as her spine recalls
the slight curve in the palm tree
which shapes the wind I suppose
whenever a herd of gulls flap scatter into empty air

The neon innuendo the
hosanna of broken glass the rubble
we’re buried in the complete english poems
& selected sunsets of Chinatown
underwater
                              I have stood on the street there w/my
                                                chow mein & notebook
              along with the bruise to prove it
despite the opium dream of every
blessed morning diluted with coffee
& introspection
                              & it’s like a grip of smoke
              where the strings of my
                              demolished harpsichord snap in the
              vast tidal sweep
                                                on a moonlight drive
                              off the end of the pier
gunning the engine
& chasing down the starlet who wears crooked shoes

I’ve got a pipe bomb in the tank
& she’s got black silk eyes

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 78)

We had rhythm and nerve, and had taken all the air out of the room, so all that was left was our sex, and everything contained in that room—the bed, my small desk, the altar, the window curtain, the scuba gear under the bed—all pieces of the four cautions ( a woman before, a horse behind, a cart sideways, and a priest everyway)…It was as hot with groove as hell with heat…the electrics in my body entire were off the grid, and the increasing sensation in the perfect 3-4-5 triangle made between my gut shakra, my cock tip, and my nuts was making my head spin…and deep in the testes, from 15 minutes of various positions, deep and shallow strokes, on tops, on bottoms, from behinds, standings, sittings, etc., came the inevitable flow of finish matter which I blew copiously into that condom she had made me put on half-way through, and Johanna met me right there with a thundering orgasm of her own, so that the amount of sweat and heaving was pitch perfect and we were fucking flying, hitting, banging it down and out…fucking magical, a checkered flag finish worth instant replay…right on cue…

It had been a long time since I had simultaneous orgasm with anyone and that delicious drowsiness made especially keen because of our black and white contrast…let’s face it, the taboo is still as strong as it ever was, for we both embraced the exotic of the other…I neglected to mention the array of dirty phrases Johanna and I traded back and forth, but suffice it to say we utilized the following vocabulary in max and match combinations:   cock, cunt, suck, come, rump, nightingale, steel pen coat, steamer, blossom, two with you!, two turns around the long boat, Japanese knife trick, jelly-dogging, copious weeping, the Butcher, Phiz, Phyz, Physog, and others…She favored the use of gerunds and non sequiturs while I chose the more direct preterit tense…all of this in Spanish of course…

“not bad, you are mr. American Mystery guy, you had some good practice with that girlfriend of yours, eh?”

I had no problem telling her right off “Yes, it’s true, I have this Ecuadorian girl, we just met a few weeks ago and she’s on the mainland with her ex…and we’re going to Ecuador in a few weeks when she gets her plane ticket worked out and dumps the guy…”   She looked at me with upturned brow…

“How did you know I had a girl?”

“A guy like you, with those moves you make and those eyes full of California and that wine-pan you got…ah, I could see you were trouble from the first time I see you.”

It was nice.   It was straight…the dark would have none of her for I was going to take her all for myself, this innocence, this straight on the core immediacy, proof of no American in her…sweet relief of that…I liked talking to her…

“So, you like my dance moves, huh?   The way I punta…never seen that in an American stiff before, huh?”

“Hah!, shit, you can’t even move those hips fast enough for my mother…”

- Michael Price

Tipping Back the Twilight

The world as such laid out before me
here to read through with prescription
binoculors & a crescent wrench
as I would compile secret inventories
minus any lyric disclaimer
with a Fuck Death harpoon tag
* * *
The Rusty Edge of a Night in Long Beach
Left a piece of my shadow there so that
I’d never find my way back
* * *
1, 2, 3, Next
1, 2, 3, Next
* * *
- Hey man, what’s up
- Livin on an island
- A sick island?
- Just back in town to help Frank put up a fence over in Swanton
- Great day for it
- Yeah, bronzin and working
- I’ll see you in the water
* * *
Judgement Day (The Sequel)
A lullaby rocker with electric cowbells
roars toward you like a tractor
with the high-beams on

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 77)

I move her shirt above crisp hard nipples, and it’s a surprise to find her small breasts, given the generous portions of pop on her ass…I moved my mouth to her nipples, which stuck out a good ¾ inch, and nuzzled with purple resolve, biting down at the final exhalation of her once steely resolve…she was now in a rhythm of deep breaths, tongue pressed firmly to the top of her mouth, legs coming up off the bed at the knees…meanwhile at the seaport back in Belize City, a violent storm is brewing but in San Pedro, all is like a final printer’s dummy—sexy and raw…I move my hand to her waist, then down over the sacral hump of her panties, into the wet folds… her hips rose up off the bed, swaying perfectly to my strokes and all I can think about is getting my mouth on her pussy in the quickest chain of events possible…before I could get there, Johanna stopped stroking my cock to pull down her now soaked underwear with a giggle…next, she tossed off the sheet and I got my hand on her puss again, the female pudenda, that black buttonhole pink marvel, and frankly quite shocked again at the contrast of colors there, I failed to notice at first the wetness, which now seems like the history of weather, a graphite slide wetness that I had not felt before…a slick, no a slide action, a compound made of silver and Lithuania, a tawny peach bliss…

So the beautiful syndrome of filial sexmanship was at hand… I got my mouth involved, down the hatch, nose-deep in fantasy, and her burning hot pussy was rocketing us both into Orion’s chastity belt, with the big dipper swinging between my lets…the thermometer was absolute 100 degrees and on the up…fearing Greek insomnia, for I could sleep in that space of hers, I came up, wet mouth and face, slid up her belly ‘crost the black plain to the breasts and onto her neck, through an ear and the coarse braids of hair, getting drunk on drench Belize smells and textures…to her full lips now with the taste of her sex, the rich coffee of her sex between us…she reached down and took hold of my erection, squeezing it strong in just that way that makes a man wince and gesticulate, grabbed it like the food for thought that it was…she pulled me in so that the tip was now immersed in that queen honey, then she moved it around and around, inching it in…

I had different ideas…I reached down and thrust it in with as much mustard I could without being stupid…it split the seam of her cunt and found nothing but magic…from her, a blue blue hope and exhalation, deep inside with all we call holy, buried up to the pubis in pussy, together, agreed upon, black and white fucking…once, twice, three times, rocking calm and assertive, on up to 100, maybe a quarter thousand…this many entrances, this many departures…

- Michael Price

Learning the Symbols

1.   A crucial love-in-the-tropics kind of deal

2.   Charm & exhaustion

3.   Other names for wisdom

4.   A nail driven like a shot of tequila thru the back of yr head

5.   I often think of the tear-stained pavement of Todos Santos

6.   Sunburned neon

7.   Air bubbles

8.   Ink on paper

9.   Torpedo moonwalk encantata (steeped in b-side vinyl)

Black Tar Palisades

pure blue       a deep breath       sea scum shine       rattle
bones of fog       the cantilever section       a swami hat
kool-aid bubble       heart like a hammer       radiator sand
turquoise rust       tears       laced w/shadow       strings
suicide clouds       sawtooth       silk       whispers       dark
Martian sunset       floodlit       palm trees       ripple
stutter-step       damp       lullabies       feathers of concrete

& I decline the invitation implied
in sheets of galvanized
pacific steel
rippling in the fadeaway

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 76)

Johanna never got more than two drink silly, and I managed only a couple more Belikans before we were communicating in doppelgangers and the wind died…light had passed hours ago and it was easy enough for me to say “let’s get on to my house, y’hear?”   And for her to take my hand and lead the way down the dock to the beach…Easier still to tell her laughingly that my mother would be home and asleep and that we would just be quiet and slip in through the rough and back door, this through her mock protest of respect and decency...but I could see she was along for the entire ceremony…I had long forgotten about the streak of Ramona guilt from earlier, and I had no plan to tell Johanna about it…not yet.

Once inside, we headed straight for my room and closed the door…with no ceiling, I just hoped my mom had remembered to put in her earplugs and was dreaming sprites, quivers, and handsome men with mustaches…it was moonlight dark and I could see the lovely lyre bird outline of this person pausing for me, pulling back the bed sheets in a quick movement that had her pants miraculously at the ankles and then off…she was in bed before I could pull a face or protest, call a rebuttal witness, or object…I took down my trousers and let hang my hard facts…I had been ready to go since dinner, through blossoms of words, teething and necking, and some close dancing, and Johanna knew this because she had been up against it more than fifty times…there was thick fornication in the air…breathing hard, I thought Johanna is easy, and by easy I mean easy to be, not make—she cared little for chestnut-colored ex-wives, for after the first death, there is no other…she had a pernicious sense of reproof, papal and weighty, making us sweethearts on the hour of midnight…her move to the bed, the crisp white sheets, and the severity of my hard-on made it all more so…

That which is unsayable was before me, spread black velvet so dark, of the color this much I know.   That which is black around that which is pink. Blacksploitation for a white rune at a time certainly not noon but black midnight, black evil midnight.   One black butt.   Two white sheets.   One top.   One bottom.   The pale yellow moon.   A gentle Barrier breeze.   A shot of sentiment.   One mongrol protagonist of blanch hues.   A dazzling and unpredictable sexual organ.   An unknown depth in her peerless eyes.   An honest encounter in a Samsaric play.   “Against nightsky black nature humps”

I look for her with my hands and find the tangle of arms and long braids, just like Ramona’s, which is a comfort and a curse…chills up and down the back and again to where they were made, the cleft of human pathos at the base of the spine, where her hands moved in a nocturnal gesture of tenderness…my hands have found her hips and the small swatch of fabric there, which I stop to navigate with a delicate touch…on down those legs, where tiny accommodating frictives of pure sex meet my prints, relaying the most hurried and excitable messages to my mind and organs, pushing further all manner of anatomical exploration…I closed my eyes and let Johanna’s will take over…long tongues, deep breaths, hands and more hands…

- Michael Price

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 75)

On this afternoon when I was waiting for none other than my Self to show up from a clutch of great minds watching from beyond the Singularity, conception was in the air like Texas humidity, a kind of immediate washing sound in the atmosphere of “I have no feeling because I was murdered”…turning my brazen head to the courtyard and past the pick-up game going 80, Johanna came brightly through the myriad elements of glass and water, so perfectly did her arrival equal a lyric couplet of classiness and fluid nature…we exchanged mid-range smiles and I uttered an alcoholic hello when she got up close, then grabbed her into my arms for our first contact, a secret wonder…black and white in the square of sun…On the rooftop bar at Freaky’s, with the decorous view and then some, we sat and took in the palm tree's dance with the breeze…Johanna continued to soften and soften from her original Iguana’s texture, so much that dinner was by all rights a humorous and gangviolence-free affair…I was determined to drop a bon mot every thirteen seconds as I felt my mind charging back and forth with recurring guilt canvas frescoes of Ramona and these new black and white photos of betrayal…dinner got on fine in spite of this, with chicken and squid and one two three Belikans for me, and jerk chicken and rice and rum drinks for her…it was a short time between sobriety and a light sweet buzz…so we left the place with everything but our shadows, and headed directly over to the long dock of dockside, where some version of a bouncer bounced and gave me a sly look that asked how the Belizian Black Woman had arrived with an exotic white peer ivory man of paved streets, a future heathen, war mongor, scene stealer, outright Justice of the Peace…how plainly tricky this whole little homage scene was…but I took it as the demons of chance and the stars of a landscape built to dazzle…the violence and craft of my petty sexual life…I was following the poet’s heart into the newly reincarnated Dockside to do some metempsychosis get down to Blacky’s hip-hop heavy rotations…There were seventeen of us instantly doing the shimmy…and a great thing started to appear between Johanna and I…rapport…we had it in spades, which took us through some of the same close-knit dance moves, except now we were talking, getting in close, and exchanging a couple smooches...

- Michael Price

Road Flare

Mojo Hand
Love’s recourse & apparitional
never so near as that faraway gaze
I thought trance-
like & in need of cigarette money

One Breath Deeper
She’s welding question marks
to the weather map
out where the shoreline is
shaped like a broken record
as my personal preference
nails the refrain
to the cross of her legs lifted
& she grinds her hips like it’s
the last time

Hollow Point
Her necklace of fingerbones
              & scarred Mexican blossoms
                                                                in the rain
falling between tears in Salinas
                              bleached by moonlight
explains less than her easy thighs
              when I’m gone gone gone

Mongolian BBQ

Shaking off the radiance
in the neon shade of a self-conscious sunset
              arc of cloud, palm tree w/a cam shaft,
abalone taco
                              & the blade of you breathing

I figure the light weighs more w/us in it
than all the grains of sand
                              on Nirvana Beach
              & my heart still clattering
propelled by an adrenaline seabreeze,
              a spoonful of gasoline, a blowtorch
& whatever it is you’re whispering
in my ear

not that I can’t hear every loaded syllable
the blue streak that runs from high tide to the
                              Forbidden City & back
              limping beneath the fortunate haze
                                                that claims the both of us

a web of blossoms lazing in the fade
                              where God parks his cement truck

Let It Bleed

              On a beach shaped like a
Martian dollar sign
                              we gently step the other
              side of the spoon
anticipating eternal
                                                lullabies
                              that hush the
                                                                broken valves
                                                of the sea
“But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space”
                                                                —John Donne
to toss a shadow across the sand
(the things you can’t remember like the things you
can’t forget
              raking the tide

Breaking & Entering

                        for Ainsworth

Floating a serenade in the
twisted rubble of a gunmetal tide pool
bleak two dollar polaroids
& a long line about paranormal bus tickets
When the Chosen One signals
from the platform
only the skeleton of a smile
could overshadow the leadweight alibi
but we won’t reduce life to claims of
righteous disregard
like anybody knows shit about
& the scratchy voice on the other end
fades back into itself
either way another takes its place
One dark spin deserves a rail of silence
running down the numbers
all nickles & dimes
as I wanted that vague assurance
on the wing w/uncontested rain

You’d think there was a soul

The dead don’t know so
              don’t bother asking the
ripple effect in your
                              ice cream eyes when you
              disappear
                                                in the mariachi fog like
                              Voodoo Chick or
              El Kahuna Grande
                                                picking up the tempo
                              in the Twang-o-matic

certain barbedwire logistics
              describe the plum blossom mist
                              that drizzles down when she
                                                                shakes her hips

                                                that’s her in the middle
              every heart-shaped molecule
                              like shadows on the cobblestone sand

& I’m over here
                              confessing my black t-shirt
              bleached by the sun

Should Have Known

                              for Miguel

A minor rumble of bad luck equals a siphon hose on my meager monetary stash but otherwise kicking slightly in the fog & drizmal of the last coupla days of sunless coastal damp.

I got an email from our mutual friend, the renegade poet, who is now ensconced in Mississippi thru a complex series of drug & alcohol related hijinx w/$20 grand scammed while circumnavigating the airwaves.

Not unlike you bracing the night air inside a hotel in Portuguese.

How long will you be doing the watusi in the Brazilian swamp?

Dedicate your prison lagoon sonnet to
Swine Flu Beach
                              & a banana tree
& give my name & address out to The Girl From Ipanema
              because when she passes
                                                each one she passes
                              rattles down into the dust.

Now Like Forever

Just as sleepwalking the palisades
anticipates your lo & behold
these comatose palm trees conspire
to sabotage your survival instinct

Only thirst could unwrap the air
around you like that parked inside an
obsidian mirror half buried in the
tideflat quicksand still ticking

like pavement in the sun bending
telephone poles on your subconscious
hypnotized by the inaccuracy of daylight
reflected on the ocean waves

Broken Clouds

Sky full of holes
fingers falling like damp feathers
of concrete
              upon yr uncertain lips—

Heart like a hammer

as I meant to explain the bones of a prehistoric
Cadillac w/pieces of rain
                              & a list of suspects
              only marginally personified
by a stutter-step w/Black Mazatlan,
Iggy Pop, Attila the Gun, &
Malibu Barbie
                              (half asleep like Mike Tyson’s fist
              & rocking the velvet indiscretion
pretending to remember the weight of a single
iron tear

Blood in the Water

Bombing the coast highway
              w/true love & a bottle of fear

like the birth of the cutback

              silken seas, Arctic flowers
                              hauled away in a Mexcan tractor
                                                                rattling past the
                                                Jetsons-go-surfing hamburger stand

w/a heartfelt Adios to all them sleazy
motel neon refugees
                              tapping their crystal eyes
              on one last sunset

Off Shore Drilling

A sheer see-through mist spills from
the dumptruck sky & I’m stuck here
w/a Norwegian surfdog harpoon
& a six pack of cough syrup
in the chrome hubcap mirror
7 miles from nowhere
all sheetmetal fog costa azul & crooked
A desperation tango nailed to the beach pavement
but the angel doesn’t dance here anymore
& the tide snaps off skygreen waves like iron
in the teeth of pale pink
laundromats & all-night drugstores
sinking in the dark sand
darker when the sky stalls out
along the iridescent horizon
as seen through cheap sunglasses