Desperate Measures

Flamingo Express
The suicide map in ocean colors with
roads traced like veins from random pages
torn out of a textbook on anatomy

Swamp Rider
Dark heavy clouds shut the sky
as eyelids of nightshade crush the curtain of
mist on the water

Liquid Muted Reverb
I run my finger across the green rust
& waking foam between tides

Sleepwalking on Water
Les nègres by Genet, but darker
than your eyes in the photograph I buried
in the sand leaves tracks on the mirror
cradled in your arms

Beach sand erosion from recent storms

A taste of the evening glass
the reflection like a faded tattoo
depending on a hinge of breath
silver & turquoise as woven strands of seawater
wheels in the heart
direct from Zion         burning rubber
recalling not the rain, not the Pope
but perhaps a moist halo bending above the waves

Is there something I should say?

plus or minus a clear liquid reggae beaten into sand
so many times before & after

alone in my sneakers I suppose it’s always been like this
or what’s the use as hula hoops consecrate alohas
among the slow swaying kelp in cathedral groves

in effect deeper bajo de las olas
than your sunken treasure might imply

Commuting the Sentence

Several gulls swirling in the early morning mist.   I’m keeping track of them as best I can.   It’s a prosaic exercise but one I feel comfortable with.   The beach is strewn with debris from the recent storms―driftwood, car parts, bottles, cans, garlands of seaweed, & wire.   We’re all stranded here somewhere between Yokohama & El Camino Real like Ponce de Leon in a wetsuit dragging his surfboard in the sand, doing the surfer’s stomp to a concerto for snare drum & steam whistle.   A solid yee-haw upsidedown & the pivot.   As though everyone’s been waiting to see you take yourself too seriously.   Indulging the medicine man’s laughter.   I have often been mistaken as a synthesis of Lee Marvin & Pacific fog, I said, standing in the rain talking to myself.

RAVE ON! by John Sakkis, WILD SCHEMES by Derek Fenner.

Lew Gallery/Auguste Press strikes again with a beautiful pair of books.   RAVE ON! by John Sakkis, and WILD SCHEMES by Derek Fenner.   Whatever these poets are drinking I’ll have the same, & double up on it.

We find consecretion
and supplication
in Humulus Lupulus
along paths
              hidden
by the misery of America. (Fenner)

Our sunset should be as muted as
                                                my apartment (Sakkis)

Both of these poets have the chops, the workshed rudiments, & the attention, as the line is drawn.   Whatever it is to be found, to be lost, to answer when your name is called.   Or not.   You can’t lip-synch your way through it.   Well, you can, but against the oblique desire, pending comprehension.   Here we have the songs & the risk taken.   If you’re lucky enough to get hold of one or both of these little bokes you’ll know what I mean.

Sound Waves & Traction

Inside this often
    variegated surf ghetto
the pale shadow I cast will
    repudiate any claim to
the wingless per diem

looking back thru the redolent
    haze sustained by your tears
my smoke & the disposable needles
    of the Incas         quick eyes
beneath the pavement & the
    narcoleptic lullaby implied by fingers
tapping on the lid of the tide

I never planned to be here so
    fucking long never read the small
print never heard the warning bell
    in the underwater diorama at lights out

echoing long before it struck
    humming in the wires strummed
by an ocean breeze

60% Surface

A dark sky
getting dark
in leaning whispers

count it down

1. The glass pelted by the rain

2. rattling like the bones of palm trees

3. You’re wearing a rain pelt

4. chrome foliage
& the damp stitching

5. Blood on the welcome mat

while back at the beach
Victory at Sea conditions prevail

all of it the same color
as the teardrop that was pressed
between the pages of a
book I lost a long time ago

Black Velvet Seascape

Another damp interlude
tapping out morse code jazz
but with pinpoint hollow eyes
reading Ecclesiastes

thru binoculars

while TV babies
set themselves on fire
somewhere else
but still too close

acquiesce the sacrificial evidence
& hydroplane right past the
odd latin phrase that can’t be
translated

Looking for someplace to unload the
hardware of the gods
& what that might mean

on the business end of a corrugated sunset
buried in neon
handwritten on the waves

Snake Dance

for Pamela

The beaches just tilt & crumble
pelicans slice up the sky
& the coast road veers off into
Bohemian rhapsodies
as imagined by a Japanese mariachi band
confessing their sins
every time you shake your hips

Aloha Tour

Trying to slash my wrist w/a spoon
I never staggered on the steps there
the wind hung up in the cypress grove

Women tumble beneath their tattoos
offered up to the god of medicine
several voices
                              (underlined in red)
              & a hammer of gulls
                                                ascending

              ocean colored eyes
              Aztec neon
              refrigerators full of opium dreams
              & seaweed

Adios

spinning your wheels you fishtail outside Neptune’s
Ding Repair Shop on the shadow side of the
pier

where I paddle a 9’6” Yater Spoon (step deck)
out into the final scene

                              feeling just like Su Tung-p’o
                              on methamphetamine

The Spanish Prisoner

Pink seas.   Windowpanes.   Gulls.
Rose petals falling thru a pale green sky
              flat & glistening in the hydrogenic haze
the way the light falls & the rain
                              translated from the Latin
              rides in on the pulse of palm trees
                                                conceding the cracked pavement
                              as if the look in your eyes could mean
                                                                something other than the
                                                                                      drop edge of yonder
              blinded by the silver on your wrists & the
azure reticence

bumming a smoke off the god of the dead

but like a harmonica folded into your seacloud halo
& no more dirty moon sutras dragging meander

sponsored by Pacific Foam & Pipe

w/footprints in the hollow
& a fadeaway reflection you can peel off
any time you like

Duncan McNaughton on Lyrics by Lewis MacAdams

The beautifully achieved line and tone, natural as can be―a 65 year-old teenager, best of both innocence and experience, perfectly fused into the third form of being, adamantly optimistic. Clean as a whistle with a ton of art behind it.
      There’s been so much bullshit for years re: “the lyric”―from all sides, friendlies and not.   All of it imbecilically ignorant, finally, of the real rules of the game.   LYRICS is a gift.   I regret that John Wieners is not around to read it.   Love poems that get it.   ―Duncan McNaughton

Get yourself a copy of Lyrics by Lewis MacAdams direct from Blue Press.

The Sea Is Made Of Steel

Beer Helmet

The clouds are breaking apart,
the sun slips through,
the floor needs sweeping.

Madame Bovary signals from across the street.

It’s like a midnight movie at
high noon
flicker of wings maybe
seashells & cigarettes,
eye shadow & motor oil. A pair of
rose-colored goggles for the night crew.

I am assuming a monastic recalcitrance
falling like an ornamental plum tree
when no one’s looking

which is why I am telling you about it

the x-factor like funk & circumstance

gathering up all your dark veins

Western Divide

Stampede
A sound of waves
crashing or horses
running (the rush of
blood in yr veins
& seagulls & palm
trees revving up their engines

Rodeo Beach
We sent someone out for
sushi & tacos & while we
waited we watched the moon
paddling across a rainpuddle
like the inverted shadow
of a gull

Appaloosa
I always wanted to
shoot Jeremy Irons
at the end of a
movie & then
ride away
as the credits scroll down
into the wet sand

Prevent This Tragedy

Nothing less than those days we
drifted thru our shared affliction
could stoke the rail inherent from the get-go
a winged arrangement achieved
as desire trumps need even before the last card is played

remembering something Jim wrote, & I was thinking about
                              just the other day on Seabright Beach
                                                                            in the rain
how to hold these things together when they want to be so far apart

as you could time the sequence of an eventual teardrop
                              like burnt orange kool-aid & compensatory
in the guise of description
                                                narrows the compilation
              down to 1001-plus
                              dark nights of the soul
to amp the verisimilitude
              w/subtitles in a kind of left-handed esperanto
                              & a soundtrack eaten up by static
                                                                & steam-driven guitars

Mission Statement

Just the way you peel the
sunset off the horizon like a decal
& your breath so indiscriminate
having forgetton love’s middle name

to lip-synch your way through
the terror of oblique poverty
days & nights of it swaying in the
light & variable winds

when you stagger out of the soul kitchen
in your kelp grove ensemble
remembering something whispered
on the stairs

All I know is that every other word was
“motherfucker” & seemed to me like
captions to photographs taken with a
disposable camera

dissolving in the smoke of a deciduous cigarette
beneath the camouflage palms
offered now for your astute repudiation

Derby Session 1/9/10

Opstedal & son.

Arthur Rimbaud to Ground Control

Two moons maybe three
divided by the window glass
but as it really was
back in reality
the air the color of wind
& your eyes
when you think about it
rippling like trees or
beer money
in Sanskrit
variations on a forgotten theme
in the rain
when it isn’t raining
along the spine of a
pale orchid moon
reflected in a nervous
tide pool
where the stuttering seams
in mirrored velvet
quietly embrace
the captive glow

Sea Engines

1.
Distracted by your chrome
bracelet & the clouds of smoke that
gathered there like pelicans
2.
where perhaps only your pearl lipstick responds
3.
w/the least bleeding posture & glance
altogether itching & proprietary
4.
knifing the drizzle
5.
from the terrace above a grove of miniature
palm trees so carefully choreographed
on the sunset pavement
6.
like your eyes but different
7.
was what I said tending toward a
derelict redundancy on the waterfall steps
of the monsoon palace
8.
swaying in the seabreeze
that is so much more cool than your breath
rippling like a burning building from which
9.
only the pelicans escape

The Albatross Flies Backwards

Everything is tumbling past
a steel guitar I had at first thought
looked like rain

the trial of true redemption slips a little
in the Chinese transliteration
as I guess a Kung Fu version of
Paradise Lost might

& skimming the silver that
drives the heart you could learn to
tempt the aimlessness we’ve worked so
hard to perfect
                              torched by blossoms
              deposited along the shore
                                                by seasick mermaids
                              on horseback

We succumb to these
barely sustainable indulgences
to compensate a re-purposed rendition of
ocean fog infinitely glimmering & damp
tattooed on your instep
like a nautical star

Steel Drum Song

Bumpy weather w/intermittent rain
& dark & chill factors
minus the disconnect
of rambling bird notes

Windshield wiper blades keep
another kind of time altogether

totally missing the tragic octave

although you prefer something a bit more
precious I suppose a tidal wave
w/mudslide tremors & gaited horses
that rustle like palm leaves against
the ravished pertinence of so many
bronze wings slashing the sky behind you

a pearl shell iridescence all amethyst & neon
yet standing in the eye like a fluorescent token
a decorative occasion that portrays all the clarity of
that damp & cloudy ethic

the random apprehension where
sea meets sky in the pretense & the vapor

at the mercy of accelerations

& the vicarious hips of parking lots near the sea

Skeleton Key

You can always trade your
carbon silhouette
for a sledgehammer of ancestral gulls
that is if your finger fits the pulse.
Not even pretending to know what that means
but swept away by altitude & lust
w/bundles of glass hyacinths
looking at last the very substance of
neglect.   You remained for me the
color of Sunday afternoon.   The light
stumbling like a tear.   The delicacy of remorse
pending comprehension.
It was Tuesday by then & gulls obscured your knees.
As often denied as not.   The landing below a
wall of Mexican beer where I kept an
ardent crucifix sometimes mistaken for a surfboard.
Across the street there were three palm trees
parked in the body shop.   One day, you said,
we will set them free.