Steel Pier Freeze-Out

Welcome to Wrecking Ball Beach & the space between your swami hat & your skull.   Whatever is going to happen as though it already has.   A day & night of reckoning.   Blue dark with turquoise bleeding pink along the horizon.   Cowboy bulldozers & black eucalyptus & archaic filter-tips y motores debajo del mar with torch ballads & coffee cups.   Say whatever you want it’s all true even when it’s not & there’s 20 miles between you & your mind (a distance you’ll probably not cover today).

The wheels of that lostitude, shared, still running the voodoo down.   It seems the signal’s faded completely, sometimes, & who’s to push it on but the few that still carry a glowing spark from there to here.   A scrap of rhyme, maybe a handful of musical notes, & then the blank spots that you fill in with whatever you can find.   A reprisal on the sunburned pavement where they gather patiently waiting for you to fall.

I would step that much closer to a silence.   A lemonade somersault in the diorama.   If you can’t skid past the diamond light etched in the sky you could always torch a palm tree.   You’ll never have enough fingers to count the ways nor the x-ray eyes to gaze past the velvet armor.   Pieces of glass that gulls slash their wrists with.   Setting out then into the cold streets I thought I knew the latin phrase for this, the scribble of sanskrit, the chords of a long forgotten tune, the secret handshake, the ritual wraparound logic (as when she took the time to explain what I had meant to say all along) & in that stirring of the ashes the timelapse rail of her eyelids, the ruins of breath, & the ransom bleached black by the rigors of what the ancients called the leadpipe tango.   The difference between echo breeze flowerheads bending to the whistle buzz & the moon in a space suit at Disneyland.   An almost lucid rendition, tempus edax rerum (Ovid), as perhaps Shakespeare (Sonnet 19) “Devouring time,” no doubt Golding’s rendering, an ambiguous rhyme as the culpable by extension ( inflicted by/essential to) inside a pearl gray aquarium lit by pale flickering neon & the green sledgehammer light that filters down to the ocean floor.