Summer of Our Discontent

Wild Pink Yonder
The roadside palm trees turning gray in this light
              smogged & eternalized in my poems

The Premeditated Answer To A Question No One Ever Asked
like a low-fi sledgehammer in your veins
desire overrides even the purest abstraction

Chapter & Verse
A rip in the fabric of time
                              through which angels pass
& gods so old no one remembers their names
              or phone numbers

Reading Ecclesiastes Through Binoculars
I spend these days like a foreign currency
                              no clue as to the exchange rate

Always a step or two behind the slant of violet tides where even now you cultivate the rust of dreams

The fact of the water’s
edge
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the point & click corpus deliciti easily dazzled
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(PAINTED luminous
                                                but tilted
              Aztec steps
              buried under-
              water
                              the sky
                                                & the shore
of a certain age
              comparable
                                                Desire as perhaps the way
                                                she literally walks
rendering the lyric equivalent
                              I suppose the pavement in
front of Taqueria Las Palmas
                                                                begins & ends
                              as the tide measures
the difference
              which between the two
is all that matters

Seaweed a go-go

1.
I was talking to you she said (in the rain)
& so what color is “kind pity” I wondered
as precious tears lit up the sand, the wave break,
& the Indonesian bikini scorched by 1000 sunsets.
It was Tuesday in the palm trees
floating away on silken waves the color of
retribution.

2.
She said she said         all lit up & floating away
her cupped hands inventing the rain said
& the light in the palm trees scorched by
precious tears the color of Chapultepec
in the rain         Who says we’re not bleeding?
kind pity rakes the sand         I was talking
to you.   The cold green steel surging beneath the
pier, wave breaks in the line-up washed in foam
the color of Indonesian milk glass, I wondered if she
said “silk ass”      (neon lit the beach
precious jewels in the sand

3.
1000 sunsets, give or take, & washed in foam
floating away beneath the pier like retribution

Chewing on the Foil

Midnight lights up the ambulance in your veins
tunneling through the ozone

anorexic palm trees that genuflect on the pavement
suicide priests on tropic balconies in the fog

with blonde wings out of forever
                              slapping up against the concrete sky…

Transcribe it light or dark, almost pink, fading
the way my heart does as these rocks juggle the tide

raining power chords down upon the jetty all
x’d out in the wet sand of your eyes

Nothing but a shadow on the sand

It’s raining at the beach
                              flickering           ocean smooth pebbles
& the consequence
                                                a deeper blue regret
prolongs the pantomime Q&A session

                              ala Rimbaud, or Spiderman

& every memory a scar
being 10 months into a habit yet clear enough to
catch each tear
                                                before it gets here

if you want to know where you’ve never been

Light succumbs to its own listening
              just as the burden of that mechanism
is reduced to breathing marks
                              scored on the beach pavement

              where I dodge silver bullets aimed right at my spleen

                              Keats called it negative capability

& I watch each wave flickering
              as in a grainy gray snuff film

currently playing at the bottom of a rainpuddle

Taco Tuesday

A lot of nothing fills in the blanks.

Dreamed last night that my body was covered in poorly rendered petroglyph tattoos.   It was disheartening.

Fog machine working this morning.   Streets look like a scene out of an old Lon Chaney Jr. Wolfman movie.

Luna Tiki

It was only the breeze I guess
gargling a harmonica on the beach at
Topanga
                              perched on an elbow of concrete
The shattered plate glass implicit in her
mortuary gaze
              The I didn’t ask & she
never told me latitudes
                              ripening in the blue smog later
slowly grinding her hips
              inside an adrenaline kimono
underwater
                              on Pico near Omar’s Tacos
something no one will ever remember
or forgive

Blood on the Remote Control

Dealing lost time on the moon in
someone else’s shoes
could put a dent in even
my own sunbleached eyes
                                          & by 3pm the fog
somehow shuts down the sky
                              though it’s still warm

“Earthquake Weather” they
used to call it
                                                when I was a kid
                                                                                    in L.A.
The distance from there to here
                                                                  I’ve decided
is what lifts the dimestore glitter off the tide
sworn to faraway eyes & a few choice tears
like drifting sand in the Paleolithic diorama
in your head

& I said take a walk with me
              ten thousand years from now
like it was yesterday

G-Force Twang

All night another day
strumming the coast highway

I left a crease in the mirror
to save my place

while out on the beach
each wave folded into itself
closer than that hazy distinction might imply

the homage of incessant obligation

crushed veins & all the immaculate details
empty the rain from violet tubes of sunset
into unanimous tidepools
spiked with silver beads
strung out along insect balconies

beneath the bonsai fortune palms

That Beatnik Spirit Just Ain’t What It Used To Be

While the US did nothing about the USS Cole attack
bin Laden read a poem about it

Not for Nothing

Whatever’s lost, strictly from silence
& a weary fuck you salute tapping the jugular
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L   o   o   k       A   w   a   y
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The rocking hips, the dark, the
long lost field of poppies in thumbprint neon
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COORDINATES
On the left bicep―a wave inside a circle
                              Inside left forearm―“The Poems”
              Inside right forearm―a nautical star
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All of it gone & this one as well
never so gently
the other side of the beach
not even the charm of a doubt
w/midnight wings of albatross
befeathering the heavy coastal haze

Stuck in an Elevator

Moonlight sun-
shine prying mist from the habitual swamp
of me trying to ace a corner of eternity

Egypt doesn’t work in this translation
Babylon, maybe
like a trial balloon

It was all a dream
like a haircut
Sister Morphina in the wraparound tide
taking the acid bath for all los sinners

I wanted to be the one to smear her rust-colored lipstick

knowing what it all was going to mean

& her eyes were wet stones
cobbled at the edge of the sea

Tap Dead Center

Facts like the late show
burning out in sunset colors
including all the dark mist lifted from
strangled candles
& I thought reliquary
the disparity which makes
her hyped crucifix glow in the
dripping alleys of consecration
& from the sleave of midnight
solicits obituary bells

not that I’d tank the hallelujah
alongside a bloodstained cadillac
but with damp ocean eyes attend
the shadow of her native tongue
& map the tropic of every barefoot pirouette
landing like Ensenada pavement
torched with neon
shimmering the way the tide does
inoculated by milkfed needles

Hula Roach

Alone as now feeling like a dented fender
I buzzed my way back thru 19 beers
defining the way the fog reacts
on both sides of a loaded steel guitar

She was waiting for me when I got there
her name’s Epiphany
she was wearing a Peloponnesian bikini
two sizes too small
              & it’s like a contest winner’s tears
                              starting fires at the bottom of the ocean

for a split second there it’s so beautiful
                                                                        nobody notices

but one remove from the look away tango
& my lungs pump sand beneath the pier
cradled by the drizzle tide like Saigons of
parkinglot disdain & lamentation

hoisting the amphetamine pez dispenser
in the elegant wreckage of yet another
bloodred turquoise sunset