Make a List

for Edward Ainsworth

1. A slice of slanted sunlight
2. A black cat bone
3. Palm trees parked beneath halos
4. A tide book from 1998
5. A quarter-mile slab of pavement from the Pacific Coast Highway
6. 29 tons of beach sand
7. A wetsuit allegedly blessed by the Pope
8. Beer for breakfast
9. A Marine Band harmonica in G
10. All the money I never had
11. A nine pound sledgehammer
12. The Hollywood sign in braille
13. A switchblade purchased from Joe Lopez in the playground at
Saint Monica's High School in 1972
14. Thin veil of mist suspended above waves
15. Dark passage veering off the reverence
16. Something about her eyes when she turns away beneath the
stuttering neon sky
17. Wet sentences
18. White knuckles
19. Mexico City Blues

Temporary Tattoos

Thug Life, aka "The Poems"
          for Duncan McNaughton
I tried translating the inscription but
my Latin is rust & my eyes are blue
& if you read The Cantos backwards
it sounds more like a harmonica 
than a chainsaw does

Half Past High Noon
          for Noel Black
'The Code of the West
has the same zip-code as
the Heartbreak Hotel

Spahn Ranch Dressing
          for Ed Sanders
At McNeil Island Penitentiary
in the early 1960s
Alvin Karpis taught Charles Manson
how to play the steel guitar

High Noon at Medicine Beach

Pale turquoise in the shallows
gets deeper the farther out you go
paddling thru rusty tidepool sessions
w/trembling Spanish interiors
never learning to ask why

as it would be the Ocean's view of itself
glass beads, tinfoil & mother of pearl
assuming you can pick & choose yr demons
a Tijuana version of Chinatown
sublime & unreasonable
like Thursday morning wrapped around a
self-conscious 12-pack in the fridge

& you can shrug yr hips at passionate accidents
if you want
giving all that has been taken
as you might expect a mist of revelation
spun from aluminum samples & a variable compression rate
welding pink shadows to laundromats

& so lifting the dimestore glitter off the tide
wings of pelicans feather the surf
crashing the beach gate grillwork of
sea foam, sand & kelp
& whatever else it takes to download the shop manual
under ideal conditions