Port of Call

To know that you can walk away is enough
in time the colors fade
you fall to your knees, hear voices, see God, etc.

revising the concrete (surfstyle)
a few more scrapes & bruises to add to the collection

ie, THE CODE OF THE WEST

& a beer can sonata for the Jesuit surf team
paddling out at the Lane

or remember how someone else may have said it
& how easy it was to forget?
The Code of the West is not a dream
unless cormorants & pilot whales dream

as if to say I will do the watusi on your watery grave
as shown in the hydrostatic surveillance video
offered as evidence
this morning
beneath the ragged, cathedral palms

from Mike the Poet

Check it out--
From Venice to Santa Cruz
by Mike Sonksen.

(Some kind words re Opstedal & Blue Press towards the end of the article.   Many thanks, Mike.)

Surfacing beneath the pipes

Everything you can’t remember equals everything
you can’t forget
strumming those mile long shadows
in the poorly dubbed kung fu movie
now playing on every screen in the cranial cineplex
& I’m trying to find some way to reply in the dialect of sea shells
already sworn to True Hollywood Fiction
& the pavement that stretches from the Inland Empire to
Venice Beach
must have it’s own memories to deal with
                              Kuan-yin in ocean mist
Our Lady of Wet Sand             & the dance she did
when no one was looking
              is similar to that performed by palm trees
swaying in the wind

A Wave Pattern Cut In Stone

She was drenched in the kind of light that
just melts in the air
bending sea green eucalyptus
in the diesel mirror of newly mapped coast
lines like torn photographs of someone
you might have loved once
Eyes like suicide calypsos walking away
beneath a psychosomatic sky
& you’re digging your way to China
with a plastic spoon
& I’m lighting matches underwater
between a rock & the myth of Sisyphus
with live streaming video
The key to the motel room was a metaphor, right?
& the bloodred sunset folded into the muffled
roar of the surf
like the voice of God echoing in an empty
24 oz. Tecate can
smeared with lipstick

Harmonic Diversion

on St. Massacre’s Day

Saturday night is the loneliest night
except for Sunday night
I mean there’s room in there for all the dead
even when they don’t show up
thirty degrees sideways & panasonic
like the gong-effect in a doppler profile

You can always blink & miss it
because it hurts
just a few dark syllables from where
all this was rationalized into silk

tipping shadows in your wake
the other end of dreams
moist lips press stained glass
begging if you want me to look

Oop bop sh-bam

Demosthenes listened by the sea
with a rock in his teeth
                                      ―Kerouac

Nothing is something you ought to remember
all drizzled in turquoise
That was me a dozen lifetimes ago
& so that last visit to New York
when Sweet Jane started up on the juke box
how could you expect me to hear anything else?
although when Mike pointed out that the girl by
the door was possibly a hooker I glanced & confirmed
but shifting 5 years ahead to Mexican rock & roll
in a dirt floor cantina in Baja while shooting 9 ball
with Pamela would the fact that I could recite
Catullus in Latin buy us another round of cervezas?
The Federales must have been bored in the parking lot
late in the day the sun still hot the cactus & palm trees
have golden thoughts I said reaching all the way back to the
PCH near Topanga in 1971 wherever I may have been
going     Difficile est longum subito deponere amorem
difficult but essential           don’t kid yourself
you had to kick the 8-track that hung beneath the dash
before you could even begin to lose yourself in that music

As if it was anything like forever

True Romance
Dismantle the heart
& put it back together
in some half-ass way
it still works
clanking, grinding gears

What it felt like
Tumbling inside a washing
machine on TV w/god doing the
voice-over bumming a smoke

The Parking Lot Sutra
I’m down with the mysteries & harmonies of the universe
just don’t fuck with my car

Paddling off into the corrugated sunset
like the hammer of dreams
                              in the shape of an albatross
              wrecked on plumes of alluvial steel

Concrete steps to the beach below
I’ll take you there
if you really want to go

Like it never happened

Shooting the pier
Flow measure, underwater acoustics,
the freight train blues (“we was ethereal”)

Add 10 more levels & a vert ramp made of bone
as perhaps the inside of the skull would be the
perfect bowl section

All your visionary accessories
relayed along the rusty curve of sunset
like a convoy of razor-pink flamingos
& stolen hubcaps

Everything else crumbles
in the crush of gray-green avalanche
ocean landslide thunder
on the darkened sand
one more time

Live from the Impact Zone
just spit the blood in the sink

Everyone Needs A Plan

The last time I had a plan
I woke up in San Francisco
& someone had stolen my shoes

I’ll be damned if I have to explain to fools what I see in their eyes

Never mind the
the lunar mist
salt air, sea air,
heavy breathing

The weight of hooves
or is it wings? in the night
it’s hard to say

love or drugs
either way I learned the formula

Her breasts
in black lace
              black as the blood of sacrifice
                              which is dark red

The irrevocable left unspoken
as contrast

like a grenade exploding in a field of grass skirts

After the Late Show

All’s quiet in the sub-domain
You walk in the front & walk out the back.
The resulting silence is profound
unutterably decadent
& choice
w/a tendency towards mysterious disciplines
heretofore unacknowledged.
A dirt road takes you through the marshlands
along the slough & thus to the sea.
Let us get back in the game.
The jetty is composed of rotted pieces of cement
removed from the ruins of what was once a city.
You can still hear footsteps & the whine of rubber tires
within these busted pieces of manmade stone.
Places to go. Things to do.
Big engines revving it up at the stoplight.
Some of these broken slabs of roadway
(still bearing the painted white line)
host colonies of barnacles & mussels,
others with exposed re-bar rusting
garlanded w/seaweed.
This is how it is going to be.
The ocean however is relatively unchanged.
The tides still ebb & flow.
The fog rolls in the same way & dissipates by noon
to reveal a sky blue sky much as we remembered it to be.
Waist-high surf curling in around the
edge of the jetty offers a blue-green promise. Nearly translucent.

Midnight doesn’t ring a bell
There’s a red house over yonder
with a sky above it that just won’t quit.
I had found this plexiglass
bulletproof point break not far from there
where mist lifts like smoke off the water
feathering the edge of waves.
All that silver & jade
scattered on the surface of the water.
Reflections abandoned like unfinished business
printed on the surface of the water.
Just the ache & tremor of it
with kelp forests peaking
that is rolling in the pulse of waves
that are older than the day
god changed his name.

Splashdown
Feel it in yr knees when the wind rips
thru LAS PALMAS (elegant green plumes
revving their engines

                              (A dark like silver & damp
                              where you part the drizzle
                              & I hop in the car & floor it
                              all the way back down the coast
                              in reverse

The empty circle, the vacant lot, the
beach deserted & the horizon

              too dark to see it but if you could you’d
              know exactly just how far you
              have to go