Did you hear the one about the owl who married a goat

e  a  r  t  h  q  u  a  k  e
                                           "Did you feel that?"
            a blip on the Richter scale
                                                             tectonic shift
an interglacial hiccup prompting a tsunami warning
bearing down on a
                                         Bikini collision course

          (not the two-piece bathing suit
          but the atoll in the Marshall Islands where
          the United States detonated 23 nuclear devices
          between 1946 & 1958 imagine
          what kind of surf that must have generated)

Nothing out of the ordinary
                                                       Rocking the boat
High seas at low tide
                                         (operatic)
                                                              Calling down the thunder

Mumbo Jumbo

It was a 20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea meets Sailing to Byzantium situation
seen through a Ziggy Starfish prism
on Topanga Beach

Footprints in wet sand

The sound of waves in a bottle cap

but like all the hydraulic lifts & power tools it takes to
fully equip a karma repair shop
& the Dalai Lama drops by to have a beer at closing time
all the angels, demons, hungry ghosts & sad-eyed buddhas
slip out the back door into the lemon light of a midsummer sun-
set filtering down through the abracadabra palm trees that
bow & sway in the parking lot

& you were there pretending you weren't
as the sky tipped back like a bottomless cup of kool-aid
& I almost forgot to breathe

Shiva's Little Grind

Silver-green eucalyptus leaves
shimmering in the wind
like a school of sardines in the shallows

         Another day it might be like the way it felt to
         read Confessions of an English Opium Eater
         in 1822
                              the fog rolling in from the beach
the sun an opaque disk of tarnished 
silver nailed to the sky

         & maybe she walks in beneath it
                  as I reach out to her
                           with two or more hands

Her eyes like dark stretches of intertidal static
raking the dust of Darwinian succession
in blue suede huaraches