Xmas in August

Feels like you’ve been relegated to a walk-on role in a Bible movie throwing glass houses at stones.   Who knows what other vicarious redemption holds a rail of saltwater to the floodlit street that cuts like a wing into the damp night air w/Zorba the Freak reciting the uncut diamond sutra behind your veil.   The zing strings & heartbreak & the samurai of forgiveness exfoliate like bent pieces of moonlight.   I thought it all resembled a tragic misinterpretation of Baudelaire.

I drove north along the coast past an iron church bell arrangement & former vaqueros & illiterate experts rolling the dice to tempt a nylon wall of silence as smoglight highbeams, drumshots & jangling guitars harken & decline.   Had to make that epic exit with knocks & pings in the terza rima.   I became bohemic in my neglect & intimations of fiscal responsibility dogged my unerring sense of dread.

To walk the streets of forever as they slope down to the sea was all I wanted.   Palm leaves mumbling in the wind.   Beneath the beach concrete I guess maybe Chumash boxsprings & faces carved into obsidian mirrors as if any proof was required.   Anyway you didn’t have to follow me there to read the soft sky repeating itself above the parking lot crime scene cordoned off with yellow police ribbon.

So into the early morning fog drip hauling a full-scale country western replica of Beowulf.   You’d think I’d know better by now. Muriel Nitrate bumming a smoke from a Chuang Tzu lookalike holds her hand aloft like a broken statue.   “It’s not my time,” she says, “time not it mine” & the enriched uranium in her eyes singing like a train wreck in the rain.