Mr. Zog’s 3-Month Weekend

Woke up to a
                              thin layer of fog
              in a pack of Marlboros
                                                w/a beer can shadow
                              & an unpaid electric bill
only to thread out later
in the blood shaped afternoon
              all staggered & camera-ready
beneath scrap-iron windchimes
                              rattling in the eyes of the perfect stranger

Once you felt just that pure I know but time
              chips away at your carbon footprint
while your dreams are nothing more than
a landing strip for seagulls
                              exhausted from hauling the
rusted sky up the coast
                                                day after day these many years
                              while you keep score

              like a true revolutionary
behind the wheel of an awkward
                              silence leaving skid marks on the
              needle whenever you
                                                drift past your favorite tune
                              like the moon in a puddle of
                                                kool-aid on the beach
              & I guess it’s that euphoric
                              drumroll the wet sand remembers best
where your heart’s
nothing but a ripple trail of maybe neon fading
                              against the incandescent haze

Smog Alert

More than a few
decompress
having several edges
garnished with feathers
& cracks in the pavement
luring you back

“The weather will change”

sapphire emerald ruby chrome

in the damp
embalmed

La Playa Negra
beneath the street
or in the sky

a thermal inversion
(your lips against the glass

smeared across
an 8x10 glossy
of the deep blue sea

Huntington Beer Dance 77

Wrecked green shorebreak
throwdown rips & dreams
              catching the grilled glass ripple
                                                off the tide
                              the shadow of a rainstorm
                                                                twisting on the sand
I feel relentless, I said

meaning like a steam-driven guitar on the
darkside of the beach

coral blossom
seaweed
drifing sand
foam
broken glass
rust
sludge                   the offshore winds of time
gull wing               & your acoustic alarm clock

Never underestimate the luminous dial, she said
as the credits scrolled down into the flickering green
neon

rain

Zulu as Kono

As if you could ditch your own pale shadow
the way a snake sheds its skin like parking your
reflection in a tidepool mirror & walking away
down a deserted stretch of highway beneath

a cloud that wanders like a rust-colored palomino
eclipsing the drugstrore window the low ceiling & the
feeling this has happened before like timelapse blossoms
unwinding in your pinned eyes

but lost in a dream
say one that features Patti Smith, St. Augustine, & an orangutang

in a motel room outside of La Paz

To reconcile the distance & the time it takes

 
Cross Reference
Diesel sand
driven beneath the foam

Plus & Minus
I can trace the slow
dance within
the shadow palms like
the Mayan alphabet
random & damp
w/blue walls & a questionable
need for whatever
conspicuous sense of
balance bends the pavement
to its own inarticulate
desire

Time
It’s later than you think
but four hours earlier than that
in Samoa

The Measure

for Pamela

Out past the glass wall of thunder
in your veins
caressed by the half-forgotten shadow
of a palm tree

hauled away I guess too often
by the light & the waves

              I mean the streets

& the disinclination

                              a realignment of
              the flowers of Oaxaca

could tip the measure
when the sun is cut in two by the sea
& the Hollywooden pulse of
sunset recurring as in a loop with your eyes
like gulls wheeling above
a herd of nightshade appaloosas
the day that you were born

One moves slowly within

From this one diverted & later
the folds that stomp the hollow as if I
knew anything at all
                              meaning or not
wearing my sunglasses backwards
              in faded neon w/surfboard dings

Early fog highlights the otherwise chronic
sky tilted like a concrete slab into the
unquiet sea, up-ended,
so that the day kicks from here no nowhere
in a flash of unreasonable intent

all day sometimes
if only to be the one who looks into your eyes
& lies to you
              glowing in the dark

a dark like silver dissolved in a tidepool

quick tide / ocean eyes

above the he slanted pavement & palm trees
even long after we’ve gone
like the shadow of a wave that has yet to
break
              as the voice-over in rainy esperanto evaporates
from the iridescent scartissue
of one last kiss

The Movie Version

Staring straight into something entirely beyond

37 cups of coffee & the vicarious thrill
of sniffing the fumes off someone else’s menthol cigarette

and centuries later learning the sky is opaque
tending to lean a bit more towards the dark

picks up where you left off

page 112, second paragraph & the thought
that this personality defect could be parlayed

into an asset if you only had a sense of timing.

Banzai Run

Air Bubbles
It’s the year 1425, daybreak, at Mount St. Agnes
& you are writing a devotion entitled The Labyrinth of Kindness

Yes, the day is new & shiny like the bathroom fixtures at the
Lava Lounge in West Hollywood where tonight the Blue Hawaiians
tune up for the deeply sedated
                                                snake-dancing across the linoleum to claim
their little packets of salvation, Jim, you know the old song
lest these portentous clouds part

You wear the avalanche & I sport a fashionable swamp disaster

It is monsoon season


Transition Ritual
The coast is clearing
your sorry rainbow bends
& the moment is too full of
tarnished spoons
strange birds
dogs
sharks
& windswept aimlessness

Night parting the white brick gesture

eucalyptus (a sound)

long silver interludes you empty & reuse on wet Sundays
waiting for the buzz to set in


Banzai Run
listening to Hawaiian Music by
Warne Marsh & Art Pepper circa 1957
in the Tiki Room off Pacific & Windward
Playa del Rey
                              & sippin’ at bells betwixt the nightingale riffs
of El Paradiso (no resistance whatsoever, dig)
& in my head there is this sound as of a basketball
being dribbled across the blacktop on a hot August night in 1969
& the moon was a tambourine
laying a little jingle-jangle upon those who would disregard true emotion

29 Southpaws

Alexander the Great
Billy the Kid
Leonardo Da Vinci
Yogi Berra
Lenny Bruce
Julius Caesar
Charlie Chaplin
Napoleon Bonaparte
Marilyn Monroe
Sandy Koufax
John Dillinger
Bob Dylan
Jack the Ripper
Michaelangelo
W.C. Fields
Albrecht Durer
Albert Einstein
Kim Novak
Eugene Opstedal
Cary Grant
Jimi Hendrix
Pablo Picasso
Pamela Dewey
Steve McQueen
Harpo Marx
Babe Ruth
Cleavon Little
Ludwig van Beethoven
Joan of Arc

Surf Music Hall of Fame

 
Cooking with gasoline
I was back on the coast
juggling a set of 27 ginsu steak knives
              feeling highly biodegradable
Winter was in the air but
        not quite there yet
Silver hung in the balance & jade
& a rare shade of azure I'd like to pencil in here
              alongside my heart

I saw you in yr reality
                                Insist on a hammer & then a
              walk down the street a ways

The sky is the same with a couple dings in it

                                                                cloud
                                                                star
                                                                pelican
                                                                time warp

I'd transpose the obvious if I could
but my mind is like bone

High Tide at Zero Beach
What I hear isn't just water but sand
        & rocks, wind & a low-frequency buzz
I figure comes from a shark's brain
        because sharks never sleep
& their brains have been known to flutter
        like butterfly wings

450 Mile Bus Trip

The passage a bridge
from one to an-
other
                              & in that transfer the
broken syntax
                                                & a final exit in
Odessa fucking Texas

as it was given him

A tough-ass place
for a tough-ass one-
eyed son-of-a-bitch
poet
                                                or else that grace to
be relinquished & why
not lift a shot to-
night
                              throw down a few
against the darkness

for love

Anthem

Each wave’s black as a field of dahlias
w/a wicked drop reflected
                                                back thru silver bells & whistles
in D minor
                              carved white marble inside
like dawn’s early light

He Wanted To Know The Names

Naomi Shakewell         Loretta Spank
Dean Purple           Muriel Nitrate
Beverly Drive           Bikini Sunset
Lefty Heyerdahl         Ape Jackson
DiDi Lupus           Jim Scatter
Nadine Lapdance         Frenchy Gomez
Leon Tidewater         Traci Bungalow
Little Joe Bloom         Torn Clipjoint
Sally Parkinglot         Benny Earle
Tyrone Nod           Yolanda Pipeline

alternates:
Jenny Toothpaste
Europe Johnson
Jimmy Catullus

To exhaust the delicate narcotic of our perforated resolve

 
Leaning into it
The ocean breeze makes a sound
like an albatross
hanging from the neck
of a harpsicord

The ocean is dark like the blood of fuchsias
If you’re in the right spot at the right time
the sunlight shimmers on the waves like
the face of an unknown god who
speaks only the language of gulls

Lights on the pier as the fog rolls in
At the mercy of accelerations
& the vicarious hips of parking lots near the sea

Beneath the camouflage palms
My eyes like pins
stuck into a pair of voodoo RayBans

Down to the Gold

distilled from a conversation w/F.A. Nettelbeck

A friend from the old days
Got his number a few years back
called & his (new) old lady answers
― “Where’s he at?”
― “Surfing in Peru”
or some shit didn’t get to talk to him lost the number

Lost out skin-popping Ripple & those sentences we shared
when Hermosa Beach was blue sky titty

He said “It don’t GET no better than this”

Well, he was wrong

cocksucker

Give me back my hat

A Wave With No Name

To be conversant w/the tides
as the requisite desire

sense of motion

Love in her silken armor
as light as dark-
ness

The voice-over could be wrong
in its spiral (downward)
carved from an apparition speaking thusly

A heart that is no longer in compliance with
the regulatory guidelines
                                                                as the wind is
                                                                in time (with us)

That place we have gone to
going to as well
                              a bird then as punctuation
to be told in three shapes
              its substance & accumulations

& this is light to shed

Desire is its homage

The night I torched the lifeguard station

The sky fell over itself
                              tripped up by a cloud
              or a guitar string

& I was staggering beneath that weight
like a leather bound volume of cracked concrete
buckling your knees

                              the long way across the sand

the silver shimmering out there in pieces you
                                                can string together & wear on your wrist

a shadow among shadows
beneath a miniature bamboo umbrella
              w/bruised knuckles & a book of matches

My heart all shattered by this & other things I’m
sure I’ve forgotten by now
                              the sting of euphoria
                                                                them dark stars these
                              ragged flowers
                                                                                    spell death in Cantonese
                                                                when no one’s looking

              Reason enough for the Jesuit resolve
                                                like haze to powder the dark beach sky
                              so given to cold
                                                                                  sapphire flames

Relentless Details

She had eyes like an oil spill
waiting to happen
& I was seriously considering alternatives
wearing my sunglasses backwards
before the LORD
in faded neon w/surfboard dings
a name & a word as she would lip-synch
the Moonlight Sonata & I’d nod
like a 14th century pope
ordering the taco plate at Las Palmas
as unto jewels a flame inscribed
where previous sunset in rust expended
a preconceived notion of fate
the off-rhyme & consequence her
breath denies yet
assumes the prototype can’t be
trusted anymore than these
black tar fingers
tapping on the lid of the tide

from THE NOTEBOOKS (20)

Correspondence

I was wearing a tombstone t-shirt
& a pair of graveyard shades
when I pulled in to the Dream
Diner outside of Barstow

The waitress showed some mileage
but poured a good cup of coffee

There were prairie oysters on the
menu & I asked her about them
“They’ll put lead in your pencil,”
she said,

“if you got anyone you
want to write to”