Steel Trap

The blue sky rakes the pavement
littered with palm trees, surfboards, & footseps
going nowhere but with an
at-risk determination

& there’s a dark blue green
fish tank aura
              extending from Santa Cruz, down to Malibu
or maybe Bora Bora to
Shangri-La?

I don’t know but I’m sure of
two or three things
each of which are water soluble

The days drag on, up to a point, like dengue fever
any minute now
& the beach folds in on itself
              like a kind of wet sand origami
with wings

BOLINAS POEMS by Jim Carroll

Poet Jim Carroll, who died in September 2009, moved to the small counterculture enclave of Bolinas, California in 1973 and lived there for 5 years.   Bolinas during that time was home to a remarkable number of poets, including Joanne Kyger, Lewis MacAdams, Robert Creeley, Duncan McNaughton and Bill Berkson, to name a few.   Of his time in Bolinas Jim said “I was a total recluse, just using the landscape”.   He was also attempting to kick heroin.   The 10 previously uncollected poems now published under the title Bolinas Poems were written during this time.   They offer a lyric window that opens and shuts on a landscape that is both external and internal.   These are tough, beautiful and essential poems by one of the purest poets that ever snapped off a rhyme.   (Available from Blue Press.)

The Bride of Frankenfish

The shadows in this town are all wrong
              but what does that say about the light
stalling out in the heavy ocean haze?
                              like me I guess another sea creature reciting
              the tide chart confessing to everything
                                                pure blue turquoise & slanted
              green sea beach pine logistics
as they pertain to the drum machine in the pavement
                              set alongside the spaghetti western sky
              like the jewel of denial

Live Acoustic Rust

 
Traffic out on the El Camino Unreal

              Waves down at the beach

Wind in the palm trees…

                              I thought it was applause

                              I thought I should take a bow