Deep down in the groove

for Lou Reed

From the lounge act’s raucous

serpentine

to the last chance tango

across the bare concrete

You were there

when I wasn’t

& I needed that then

the way I need it
now

Autumn, Rilke, & the First Winter Swell

A scrap of paper tumbling across the pavement

driven along the gypsy string breeze

I wonder where it’s going

                                                where it’s been

but then doll-like syllables

falling  past the lark & seagull sky

painted in colors I couldn’t begin to describe

distracts me like pebbled glass

in what appears to be a peep show mosaic

they should sell tickets to down on the pier

Summer was very great but now it’s gone

& I’m holding on as best I can

when I should just let go let the surge take me where it will

fog spilling in from Japan on a satellite hook-up

preempted by a late-breaking tide

You Don’t Know What Love Is

I had cut the deck to the Ace of Tentacles.  Don’t look back they say but we always do.  The road to Playa de las Palmas was arduous.  I was riding the clutch & she was commenting on the tuck-and-roll upholstery. There are things that are meant to be whispered like seafoam across the sand & I told her so. We had been running on fumes ever since we crossed the border, & we’d gone too far to turn back now.  It’s late at night & it starts to rain.  Windshield wipers slapping like a metronome keeping time.  It’s difficult to see in the blinding glare of oncoming headlights, but is that Janet Leigh hurtling through space towards the Bates Motel?

14 Movies : A Sonnet

for Edward Ainsworth

The Wild Bunch

Cisco Pike

Vanishing Point

Two-Lane Blacktop

The Getaway

Repo Man

The Long Goodbye

The Last Detail

Blade Runner

Chinatown

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Dog Day Afternoon

Big Wednesday

Apocalypse Now

Like a trick you can do w/an ordinary deck of cards

The spaceship touches down

on the bluff above the beach

but I’m not worried I got

1) a machete in the car

2) a bottle of pharmaceutical grade tequila

3) & you

looking like Ava Gardner

in The Night of the Iguana

Today is Thursday but it feels more like Taco Tuesday

diving into a puddle of wet sand

& surfacing like the Jack of Hearts

while stolen shoes & a hand-carved contingency plan might

alleviate the symptoms

we’re still hollow-eyed lifers

testing the water on the last coast on earth

& we’ll be here as long as the gods keep sending us these

postcard sunsets signed with love

which is something you find reassuring somehow

but it’s not that kind of love

Something for the girls back home

Waking up on the bottom of a swimming

pool just in time to take a little siesta

if it wasn’t for the thunder of your eyelashes

fluttering

& the fierce undertow at low tide

stepping off the sunny side of your gondola

onto concrete damaged like Mike Tyson

or me

w/a bloody nose & a greasy blonde

beneath a sky melting like a box of crayons

in the Painted Desert

That’s what made surfing The Cage so tasty

back in the day

The resurgent blue cut with foam

could be your formal invitation to

death by drowning

& it would be just like

dying of thirst in a monsoon

riding in on the shattered chrome drainage

of a single tear

Alien vs. Predator, or The Last Days of Disco

She was there when I got back & it was easy to see why she stood sideways with her sisters in every snapshot pasted into her family’s photo album.  The engines in her eyes were designed for another purpose, one that had yet to be exploited.  Her neon lip gloss gave every word she said a luminous presence that made me think of lights along the pier on a foggy night.  She claimed her mirror engaged her.  It was the kind of dance St. Vitus could appreciate.  I responded with a pipeline tango to music performed by a surf punk band called Horse Latitudes.  My shirt got torn in the exchange of pleasantries.  Love is not a dream returning, she said.  A puff of smoke dissolving, leaving a feather-shaped print on the wall, like the shadow of a wing in flight.

Two Wave Hold-Down

The steam-driven calliope churning underwater. 

Bells in the kelp grove. 

A slab of concrete rotting on the beach. 

I’ve got a hymnal full of the stuff. 

All tricked out & rationalized

like a full-metal bikini swamp anchored to the reef

            slowly swaying like a grass skirt beneath the waves

                        with hand-carved flames

as a classical rendition of the same war of attrition

ripples the mainline stem

to float the memory

of bended knees & cracked radiator hoses

                        on the rusty side of the cypress grove

                                    where the tide plays Topsy on a drainpipe

which is never enough it seems nothing ever really is

you had to be there

from the froth of Ocean crossing

to layered transparencies in the book of the evening sky

& I suppose the appropriate body art

which highlights the memorial slideshow

that begins & ends

right here

Rust never sleeps

Numb w/the relentless details

you could bounce a quarter off the sky

or break an eyeball in a Mexican stand-off

w/the Three Graces

which is reason enough to invoke

Tethys, Amphitrite, Kalypso,

& various lesser sea nymphs & mermaids

cascading vertically on the steps

of an extended vacation

sharpening a southern accent w/a book of Latin

verses & a coping saw

mumbling like no one I know

on a streetcorner in Venice Beach near Sherman Canal

saying “The Egytians built the world’s first

canal almost 4 thousand years ago”

a fact that inspires visions of the pharaohs carrying shovels

& walking sideways

& who knows what desire sleazing up w/the late

afternoon breeze stirring the dust in yr brain

like a black pajama death wish shuffling through beach sand

which could be a

heroic tragic flaw if you’ve got the lungs for it

but with pinpoint hollow eyes reading Ecclesiastes

thru binoculars

in the grip of your own personal endless summer

with all expenses paid

except one