Ukulele Feedback

Sean Penn will reprise the role of Jeff Spicoli in the movie version of this poem

2012-01-28T13:33:00.000-08:00

The ocean fog reads like a
Diebenkorn cheat sheet
slicing the weather
& tilting parking lots down
toward the beach
where the soundtrack’s an
instrumental for mandolin & tidal wave
A ripple thread creasing your heart
in the grip of madrigals & torch ballads
The way the wind confides in a steel guitar
shouldn’t have led you past the dazzle
The trees all lit up on whatever medicine was available
& everything you thought you knew
surrendered to a kind of tormented love I call “Snake Eyes”
but drifting as in a mist of haze
if only to to exhaust the delicate narcotic
of our perforated resolve

The wet pavement was as dark as her eyes

2012-01-21T08:07:00.000-08:00

It was like springtime in Abysssinia
& we were watching the rock & roll picture show
through binoculars
& the 36 chainsmoking buddhas in my hip pocket
were preaching a kind of punk compassion I
could really learn to dance to

My irreparable blue eyes
gazing down into the windows of your
(I don’t know) soul?

trying to find something to rhyme with
the wind strumming the eucalyptus

I guess waves crashing like shattered glass at sunset
would be the acoustic version

If I had a nickel for every time I crossed the beach
& never came back I could buy you something
nice to wear just so I could watch you take it off

Rusted puddles, ritual Viking filtertips, liquid silver & the time it takes

2012-01-19T09:10:00.000-08:00

The sea-breeze strumming the wires to inoculate a feather of drifting fog that just now starts to dissolve. No real choice but what darkens the blood seven miles from the vague notion that there ought to be twenty one steps from here to the beach (there are 32) & nothing follows you across the wet pavement except a few rogue rain-drops & the Lankavatara Sutra like a chainsaw throbbing in the ridge-bone above your left eye & whatever else was stashed among the needles & pearls that define this early morning ocean light

& as the fog peeled off
another blue sky that
no one’s ever seen before I said
Here’s one semi-brilliant moment in the otherwise
fitful swampage of the day

you only get one

& we left the motor running
when we walked out to the edge
as though there was a chance we’d
actually make it back

Somewhere Near

2012-01-16T08:12:00.000-08:00

Fog drifts past in the dream-colored aftermath (pale
morning light

it isn’t yours until you give it away

like something you
pour out of an empty bottle

I’ve got everything we need right here
except food & money but
there’s plenty of air
w/music in it
& blank sheets of poetry
to fan the flames
& keep the eternal cigarette lit

a unit of measure

none so exact or useful as zero
(that blank stare

out near the flapping
wings you can always trade in for a damp stretch of
pavement

the bump & grind of the shorebreak
windows in the sea
& her eyes…

her eyes like the lighted doorways to a ruined temple
which is her mind
interior designed by M.C. Escher
resembling a medieval parking structure

paved with clouds

Fire in the Sky

2012-01-12T09:23:00.000-08:00

The morning
wedged into a corner of the window
still dark but light enough to
shut impatient dreams
delicately entwined
The few lines I scribbled in the night
seem this morning to be written in sanskrit?
A leadpipe reckoning
A little coffee & kerosene at low tide
Interior landscapes where I don’t find you
& less than a mile from here
it all turns to glass
------------------------------------------------
Pacific Overture
The dragon in the waves is our
connection to the East

The East is west of here
------------------------------------------------
The Dalai Lama’s stoked
he’s got a California reggae garage version of
Mystery Train
going full blast in his head 24-7

I wonder how many sunsets it takes to
get that transparent

The wind whispers like wings in a dream as a darker, more subdued idea of time takes hold, inside

2012-01-09T08:20:00.000-08:00

Drifting past night stars, Ventura radio
& the turquoise narrative

I often think of the tear-stained pavement
of Todos Santos

but where I live it’s wall to wall ocean
thus to drift is character

& all them immensities of the sea
at dark of noon beneath your midnight sunburn

Only the tender caress of oblivion she said
can take the guesswork out of mercy

Saturation Point

2012-01-04T14:09:00.001-08:00

A FINE MIST OF HAZE
The wind backs down the
tide picks up & we’re no different
counting every ripple in the heart

BURIED IN WHISPERS
All night long the sea from which the rain is quote
Love made known
so that the Earth might speak, Ocean
sing

SUMMERTIME
Your daddy is a millionaire
Your mother is a contest winner

THE FLUORESCENT COAST
The sky turned a kind of
bleached blonde color that
stained our eyes

LONG PAST GONE
You provide the sleek shadowing
& stark exterior logic
I’ll handle the employees

Nothing (you didn’t already know)

2012-01-01T07:28:00.000-08:00

Some rationalize their lives
as if that might tip the mirror
but I shave while looking into a
photograph of Walt Whitman
sketching out the occasional parallel experience
it’s chronological significance lost now
the same way time spins to the ground 30 years ago
(if I could remember that far back I wouldn’t admit it
knee-deep in the raw damp serpentine
of sea-mist dawn
where concluding slumber knocks
to open
all that’s left
an instant so caught in a sip of breath
as would return my own redundant soul
in a spare white world alongside
as though you lived there combing your long dark hair
in the vague care of palm shadows, leaf shadow
night of the lunar eclipse
doesn’t necessarily ring the velvet
Her heart tuned to underwater radio
her watch set to Shangri-la
& that coral reef tango she did but only when the
lights were off as tears recede in whispers
the way the shadow of a gull clings to the sand
& though I cross the parking lot alone at dusk
when the wind strums bell-like guitar chords & the streets
haul-ass to El Paradiso
my heart remembers thin watery shadows
somewhere far off flickering like tongues of flame

El Camino Unreal

2011-12-26T06:19:00.000-08:00

I could have knelt down & kissed the
broken concrete
steps to the beach.
I should have known she’d been there.
The caption would be
a dark motel room. Her yellow polka-dot kimono
was like a crime scene listening at the window.
I might have driven her there
& back. Or paid for her bus ticket
down the eucalyptus alleyway
into the neon eyes of the sea.

GREEK TO ME by Michael Wolfe

2011-12-23T15:22:00.001-08:00

The classical Greek remix that underscores these poems serves as both a reference & a backbeat to the lyric resilience of the poet’s voice. Time is a measure, as is timelessness, & Michael Wolfe’s wristwatch is also a sundial. In these verses the light in the dark & the dark in the light create a stunning chiaroscuro, leaving you with the feeling that you’ve returned to a place you’ve never been before. Get your copy from Blue Press.

Make a list

2011-12-22T07:50:00.000-08:00

an ounce of winter sunlight
a black cat bone
palm trees parked beneath halos
a tide book from 1998
a quarter mile slab of pavement from the Pacific Coast Highway
29 tons of beach sand
a wet-suit allegedly blessed by the Pope
The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen
a nine pound sledgehammer
a Marine Band harmonica in C
all the money I never had
the Hollywood sign in braille
a switchblade purchased from Joe Lopez in the playground at
Saint Monica’s High School in 1974
thin veil of mist suspended above waves peeling over the reef
a dark passage veering off the reverence
something about her eyes when she turns away beneath the
stuttering neon sky
wet sentences
white knuckles
Mexico City Blues

I’ll take you with me when I go

2011-12-20T06:21:00.000-08:00

Heavy breathing with
irrefutable evidence
laid across the ruins where in other sentences
if truth was beauty it is again
but who will be there when the bell rings?

Aloha blue highlight reels played in reverse
on a surface of crushed aluminum & wet sand
as seen through seaweed & a pair of drugstore sunglasses

got the green flash
got ocean eyes
got the rip tide silhouette tumbling in bronze

Waves are heard & felt
but here even the concrete
ripples beneath our feet

Going Native

2011-12-19T08:02:00.000-08:00

Talk of (California) poets
Jeffers
Bukowski

Whalen, Snyder, Welch claim a piece of it

The only true poet of California is
Joanne Kyger

(William Everson might have known this
but I never got the chance to talk to him)

A r c h e t y p e W e s t

”There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by
experience. And then there is California.”
― Edward Abbey

The Alchemist

2011-12-18T13:47:00.000-08:00

TOPANGA RED - You remind me of someone I used to know down in Laguna
DUDE THE OBSCURE - It could have been me, my DNA’s all over that place
TOPANGA RED - Somebody must’ve changed your name though
DUDE THE OBSCURE - Those things happen I guess
TOPANGA RED - It doesn’t bother you?
DUDE THE OBSCURE - Naw, I know who I am most of the time
TOPANGA RED - Just a subtle change in phrasing turns everything around doesn’t it?
DUDE THE OBSCURE - Especially if you sing it in Japanese
TOPANGA RED - So you’re just staggering in the dark like an ex-champ in over his head?
DUDE THE OBSCURE - It all comes down to seeing what you’re looking at
TOPANGA RED - You mean hearing what you listen to
DUDE THE OBSCURE - I have lived along the frayed edges of a practiced distraction

I meant to tell you & now I never will

2011-12-16T07:40:00.000-08:00

“California is a tragic country - like Palestine,
like every Promised Land.”
―Christopher Isherwood

The late afternoon wind comes in off the water
quite possibly bells
ringing somewhere
as you & I turn to stagger
back across the sand

& your soul (if it even exists
I couldn’t say if any of us for certain but
something in the air anyway
besides this damp gray compression of sunlight
reaching down to rap its knuckles against the waves

But it’s night now, nearly night
& the invocation is a rocking number
conceptually challenged
the irrevocable left unspoken as contrast
spanning the pure instruments of sunset
on a street that was named for
1000 hungry ghosts

& meanwhile no one knows us
or who we might have been
had the sun lingered just a split-
second longer
above the edge of the sea

The Geography of a Neon Fadeaway

2011-12-12T09:04:00.000-08:00

If you listen close to Hawaiian slack-key guitar
you can hear the soft whisper of what could be
a rockslide out at the edge of your neural system
but is more likely just a wrecked hula girl
scooping out your brains with a table spoon
The waves all blown out late in the
afternoon w/the wind & that
precious blue reflecting
back off the dark sheet-metal sky

It was summertime & nothing was easy except you
& the Tibetan Book of the Dead way you parted
your hair. It made me want to barbeque my
surfboard & confess to crimes that hadn’t been
committed yet. The light that held you was like
lemonade in a can
while the black silk resolve
in your eyes would send me out for wine & road maps
& I’d return w/workgloves
& Mexican beer.

I thought I’d get me a tattoo of fog
the way it looks riding in across the water
& onto the beach
the last day of summer
& you’re standing there beneath it all
with your seaweed & pearls
the sky dark, the pavement still warm

Was you ever bit by a dead jellyfish?

2011-12-09T07:14:00.000-08:00

MIRROR SHADES
Not light, not dark, but in between
& proprietary
just as one thing
leads the other into the next
I gave only that which I could not take
walking in circles on Front Street near the beach
under the Slowtember sky
bleached blonde vato language
& a sea breeze to hear it through
on either side of your wanting something
whatever the reason
will rehearse your eyes against it
all lit up like an Ensenada drug store

BO DIDDLEY’S BEACH PARTY
Versus the relentless chiaroscuro I’ve got a flashlight
& a lifetime subscription to
the sky over Hermosa Beach
Versus the wild pink yonder I’ve got a full-scale replica of the
Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan
lifted from the blood red turquoise
handpainted on the waves
Versus an avalanche of steam-driven guitars
I’ve got a minute of silence
wearing infinite space like a cement kimono
Versus you just sitting there
waiting for me to say the wrong thing
I’ve got another chorus of
Cowgirl in the Sand

PLASTIC FLAMINGO
Aside from the fact
or because of it
the light falling
against the water or the
sand or pavement I thought was
our self-fulfilled prophecy
left on the beach for the tide to find
the virtue inherent in any vice
stumbling like a tear
(silken seas, cold crystal flames)
& the calculated risk her silk & lace describe against the
smooth continuum her skin
insists upon
to be random & percise
unaffected by exposure even
as those reclusive inventories
in the hollows
parallel to bent strands of pearl indulgence
snap back into the standard pulsing rhythm none of us understand
or really listen to anymore
& down the street from there
her shadow falls like a hammer
but the flickering celluloid sky
ain’t feeling it

The Name of the Rose

2011-12-06T07:21:00.000-08:00

There’s nothing there & back again
every darkwater syllable gleaming in the sun
as if the last breath of someone I never knew
Thus did I assume the vestments
air, water, fire
You could see the stain of the martyr emblazoned there
the stigmata & whatever else is left undone
just follow these damp footsteps
(wings too heavy to be of much use)
thumbing the concrete pages of some self-help book
like the Dhammapada or the New Testament
originally written by the women of Thebes
She said she knew the difference
could recite the tide tables from Genesis to Revelations
& every blood type from rose to rust
drifting out now past the reef
All that silver & jade drizzled in azure mist
an ounce of nightingale versus banjos in the eucalyptus
swept from the pavement
where my brain caves in to Hawaiian music
like Herman Melville in a grass skirt

(They call the wind) Cholita

2011-12-02T06:59:00.000-08:00

Wet sand from here to forever
and what’s mistaken for a dark white piece of the sky
lots of air the ocean the
Places along the way: highway wrapping around the coast-
1. Moby Taco line assumes a shape a memory
2. Desolation Surf Shop panoramic & in technicolor
3. Sunset Liquors my dreams are seldom black & white
4. Brew, Chew & Spew every footstep, wing-flap, fin-splash
5. Medicine Man’s Drive-Thru & a rogue bit of cumulus
6. Tidewater Auto Body strung with piano wire
7. Tiki Time Hawaiian Burgers
8. Snug Harbor Gas & Go kelp blossom
9. Pacific Pipe & Forge
Beer can
Their flowers
kiss death (gray pavement, crushed velvet)
on the eyelids

Needle Beach

2011-12-01T06:25:00.000-08:00

“Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach,
I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea
seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom
of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago.”
―Eugene O’Neill, from Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Before the miracles & the toxic aftermath
the synthetic profit & loss
drowning in equations no one ever bothered to
sleep it off & start over
but akin to the unrelenting appetite a near surgical
disregard infects the primal dissolution of the tides
whereof the memory runneth not to the contrary
“These are bottlecaps that were his eyes”
as the low-frequency neon in your wrist throbs to the beat
of an antediluvian twist dredged from the tidal swamp
that floods your heart
a heaving rack of surrender but deliberate as the parable
written in braille on the darkside of her thigh
& even if you can’t remember later
the meaning of its silence feeds the passion of your denial
with the usual consequence & valerian scripture
sustained by the vanity of shadows
that don’t register on the pavement
tipping the beach gate grillwork of sea mist & stone
to approximate the tone buried in whispers

Corruption

2011-11-26T07:19:00.000-08:00

~~The blue sky jumps off the~~
~~chipped tooth of eternity~~
~~within the confines of our souls~~
~~each to the other~~
~~curving away from a well-lit future~~
~~self-indulgent & tough~~
~~rocking the dark~~
~~corrugated Pacific steel~~
~~that nails your shadow~~
~~to the sand~~

Beautiful nowhere & the green sledgehammer light

2011-11-21T05:12:00.000-08:00

Tell me what it is & who it might resemble
so that I can learn to sleep through the
really important parts
assuming your reluctance is more like a made for TV sequel than
fog laying down
flat upon the water
on the darkest day of summer
in late November
lit up like a cigarette in front of a firing squad
which makes your Mexican silver seem even more perfectly timed
your wrists smelling of mud & eucalyptus
I thought of the bells ringing in your own private Tijuana
& what it might look like from a parking lot in Ventura
just before it rains
& everywhere you turn it’s going to be there too
no matter how you say it
The tide excavated by all the zeroes in hundreds of thousands of
millions of kalpas played in reverse & rattling
like the skeleton of a harmonica at three in the morning
which is why the sky tilts down into the sea every afternoon here
explains your moist eyes & camouflage lip-gloss
although I had to rename every blade of sand
from the jetty to the pier & back again
giving all that has been taken
as one untouched by tears might approximate
the lift & sway of palm trees
rocked by waves of nightshade turquoise
shattering the glass pages of a narcotic hymnal
you thought you knew by heart

Seismic Shift

2011-11-15T09:01:00.000-08:00

An ounce of perfume in $300 shoes
Her swan song’s a real rocker

My heart, my beach, my wave, my
aimlessness
beneath the pinwheel sun
(Chumash petroglyph)

sand castle rotting seaweed sun swarm
tentacle
clawfoot foam debris
salt mist breath
hush
open & shut
A biblical haiku in an underwater theme park
& the god whose death he died

left coast
last coast a stillborn radiance
lost coast folded into the
irrevocable haze

To reconcile the distance & the time it takes

2011-11-07T08:05:00.000-08:00

Shredding the opulent ocean air
she indicates the measure
of tide, of time, & the steps
that take you there & back again

riding in on her half-shell surfboard
a sea nymph I guess
she licks her green lips
with a silver tongue
as a million sunsets ripple in her eyes
lovingly soaked in gasoline

I still have the photograph
& the scars
& the silkscreened cover art
in full color
even black & white
with delicate rainshadow beadwork
so customized
except for the ritual
string of pearls

& the long tunnel out

Fluid Tidal Tendencies

2011-11-05T08:39:00.000-07:00

This one’s for the
bottle blonde with the suicide eyes
like what’s left when you drain the pool

bought out by Hollywood & Standard Oil
although the entire coastline still resembles
a Tijuana version of Chinatown

Will it still be here after eternity?
A man can play it that way for as long as
he can still unfold a map

or paddle out into the glassy
mid-tide sewage effluent
after a 3-day nocturne
littered with the leftovers
of some half-assed satanic
barbeque on the beach

assumes he can pick & choose his demons

Pale turquoise in the shallows gets
darker the farther out you go

Fro-Zen Pipes

2011-11-01T06:53:00.000-07:00

Caught beneath a late Mexican sun
I should be halfway to some ecsatic
break in the action

blossoming like a bloody nose

How long before your chosen mirror
reflects that tender urgency
& reluctance
where smoke meets desire
if only from her pale insistence
who whispers in a cardiovascular language
the kind of thing you hear only when you’re not
listening
& any other voice responding
spoken, unspoken
hell, I don’t know

There’s something there that will never change

precariously altered by the telling

All Debts Real & Imagined

2011-10-24T06:50:00.000-07:00

Knowing the indulgences
& the ripple trail in Latin
landing on water
sipping at the pale sunlight that
tunnels thru a thin layer of smog
to light up palm trees & pelicans
wrecked on adrenalin & perfume
too near too intricately woven into
what I suppose is my consciousness
or something close to that
tossed like an empty from the railing
as one could summon bare puddles
collapsing into their own reflections
like the relics of a failure you could never surrender
to fevered lips
stung by salt spray lifted from the marathon tide
& a couple million lightyears later
it shatters on the sunburnt pavement
outside the Moby Taco
a block from the beach
& you’re just going to have to wait
inside the shadows that strum the palisades
on the next to last day of summer

All Debts Public & Private

2011-10-17T07:08:00.000-07:00

Even if I didn’t mean what I said
the tattooed sky would still have tilted
the way an afterimage remains
like a star hooked on shadows
elicits that sad lookaway in the fading light
I figure would take at least 150 pages to
explain
some days seem endless like a Russian novel
others are more like a failed reality show
From vaulted cathedral glass
to tropic pavements
& sleek getaway
engines doomed to
mortal destiny
fuel injected
Aztec interiors
multiplied by degrees of Nowhere
I should have died in TJ that time
I had my ticket punched & everything
shuffling through the glass pages of every ocean
in the backseat at 90 miles an hour
& she was gazing out thru the windshield
inventing thermodynamics
pictured as a beautiful blue tide
rushing in beneath the burnt-pink windows
of forever

The one who knocks

2011-10-12T08:50:00.000-07:00

As though that which is non negotiable might
consecrate the distance
between your monsoon balcony
& the long way back
across the sand
Flicker of wings maybe
seashells & eye shadow
if only to articulate the damp strings
& suicide drumroll
& when they fish you out it’ll be like Christmas
in August
as you may hear yourself whisper
the air shaped by eucalyptus leaves the color of
gunmetal pearls
if there was any other way to say it
the blue girl with the orange lipstick
lit from the inside like a japanese lantern
so that the fog seems to genuflect
on the concrete steps above the beach
& I got there first
the light just easing in thru the mist
like the powder in my veins

Angle of Repose

2011-10-07T06:22:00.000-07:00

I love the way you bend in the rain
like a double-jointed palm tree
as the flashlight batteries give out
& you blink like a shadow in a
swimming pool

Arcades of black eternity in blue mascara
out there in the rippling seaweed
the meaning of time like a stolen wristwatch
described as silver
& lonely

& everything else the fortune teller
forgot to say
as gulls carve your name
into the clouds
leaving no doubt as to the intent
painted green
& handcuffed to a tidepool

I guess it’s just another way of not being seen
although from here it’s all beach pavement
& gasoline

& you can sing along if you want to
following these damp footprints back to when you
never knew the difference

rattling in the
tabernacle of silence like a whispered vow or
covenant
as though that which is non negotiable might
consecrate the distance between your monsoon balcony
& the long way back across the sand

Radio Silence

2011-10-06T05:16:00.000-07:00

Dreamed of Joanne & Donald
walking in Oaxaca
beneath a sky scorched by
turquoise flames.

The camera angle was such that
each step reenacted a
graceful sadness

usually reserved for a Japanese poem
read through binoculars
on the neighbor’s TV.

Long Trip Out

2011-10-05T05:50:00.000-07:00

You occupy a shadow
(the rain gathering above the beach)
That you were there at all should have been enough

“the forest primeval” / The Florist of Evil

(wouldn’t that be Baudelaire?)

I couldn’t find my sunglasses
& then I did
they were right there where the invisible
skeleton hand left them

Nietzsche―“When you look into the abyss
the abyss also looks into you”

Saying anything at all is difficult enough
without having to settle upon One Absolute Meaning

Explanations are
almost always a disappointment

The water was cold
the waves had a glassed-in purity
that shattered into white foam
with plumes of mist flying back

the Dragon in the Waves

I don’t know where we’re going but we’ll be there any minute now

Seems Like Forever

2011-10-04T05:52:00.000-07:00

The sky got dark
absentmindedly
& then the rain…

it was more like snorting meth
w/Jacques Cousteau
than reciting Sailing to Byzantium
backwards

& the Tibetan monk you resembled
in profile only
had a crowbar up his sleeve
which is just the thing when your
eyes snap
like a rubber band
& the shadow of your heart
wrapped in tinfoil
discovers a new use for gravity

Behind every lifesize replica there’s
a 12-pack in the fridge
& a revised history of violence
where the western sky
gets tipped on edge
& spills over the horizon
fading into the irrevocable
haze of your morturary eyes

A Spoonful of Day-Glo Neon

2011-10-03T08:03:00.000-07:00

like a door that
opens on the evening tide
& shuts on every
question you never asked
making you feel sexy in the
smog-lit parking lot
your heart ticking like a time
bomb
just a little something to set alongside the
octopus in the bathysphere
& you can watch
the ocean bending its blue-green steel
around the point
as the sky gets heavy
& there’s no exit but
the one
eyewitness account
buried in the sand

Leaning into it

2011-10-02T05:22:00.000-07:00

I was trying to throw a curveball
with a handgrenade
shaped like my life

but drinking from a puddle
at the bottom of the ocean
wasn’t the only way to
express my thirst

It used to mean something but thankfully you’ve
forgotten what that was exactly
& the hula dolls the
rings of saturn
whirlpools of smoke
& Christ crucified
w/his sunglasses on
can’t explain this
loaded question of reality
disguised as just another
day at the beach

Split the Difference

2011-10-01T05:27:00.000-07:00

You think it will never end

& then it does

Pacific Standard Time

2011-09-28T05:01:00.000-07:00

It’s dark down here on the sand
although the sky’s lit up like
Mega-Millions
gnawing on a lightbulb
above the crossed-up swell
that propels the pearl-handled
tide

& the way your breathing sort of
creases the air
makes me want to pull the shade on
a thousand years worth of
ocean sunsets

every single one of them
exactly the same

but I’m hooked on whatever
happens after
as the streets give up their
trembling denial
& the moon hauls out it’s
black velvet paintings
each worth at least a half-
minute of silence
pacific standard time

Valvoline

2011-09-27T05:41:00.000-07:00

PEARLY-GATED
Catching the stained
glass at dawn

AS YET UNWRITTEN
Lost myself in the
original translation
taking it as my own
& not as strung-out as I had thought
walking to the beach alone

THE WATERY EDGE OF FOREVER
Feeling the palm trees sway
in my heart
tuning up on the fog
the same way the rusted wings of a gull might
reach for frequencies beyond the
pale light
that washes up on the sand
just to prove that I can
& do
as often as you

Without vows or refuge

2011-09-22T05:51:00.000-07:00

Gazing into a mirror where
all I see is
reels of smoke
out along the beach road
where I don’t find you
leaning into the breeze
a half mile from here
Every wave wash foam bubble seashell pendant
changing shape before I can switch on the light
& catch them
to be turned into sand
& desperation
divided three ways
exhausted like Beach Street on Sunday night
so you no longer need to remember
the way the pavement laid down at your feet
nor the condensed
sea-shadows that
followed you there

Then As Now

2011-09-21T06:30:00.000-07:00

“Know ye that on the right hand of the Indies
there is an island called California,
very near the terrestrial Paradise…”
(Garci Rodríguez Ordóñez de Montalvo, circa 1510)
where you might remember wind
murmuring in the
leaves (eucalyptus)
The voice is familiar but
what it says is
something you never heard before
& rhyming the way it does with the early morning traffic
on Hwy 1 so much like the crashing of waves
out along the jetty
I know you’ve felt that same rush
in your veins
& the arc of sunrise on your lips
as you are fully aware that the myth of terror
lights up every third eye you happen to meet

A bend in the haze

2011-09-20T05:56:00.000-07:00

Sifting through the residue of redemption
hoping to find a few coins to get another
can of Tecate before closing time

Neon wrapped in a gauze of seamist
the pretense & conceit
better left for those who can afford it

Silence reverts to
justification even though it’s
true I may no longer cast a shadow
if I ever did
a random act at best

I can only return to the wavy depths that
I never left in the first place
& the compulsive imperfections
I have stubbornly
adhered to all these years

while those I used to know
& whose company I carried
concede the rhyme
in some other world
too far from mine

with words I might have heard
some other time

Circling the Drain

2011-09-16T07:34:00.000-07:00

Cutting the cards to the
blank of hearts
like trance music & sun stroke
to float the memory
sleazy but essential

tide shallows & the rocks there imprinted
with scripture of some sort
graffiti that predates any known language
or wireless reception
as maybe scarred with breath

& no more shipwrecked kimonos
to worship in silhouette
where we’re the only survivors left
to blink in the fog
& wonder why

Alien Presence

2011-09-15T05:37:00.000-07:00

Description: light
& dark
as if I really had a choice
other than a surfboard carved from granite
& these heartbroke lullabys

Something about taking a telepathic
chihuahua to church
or bumming a smoke outside the health food store
& dripping water & blank sheets of sunset
tying knots in your veins

Nobody ever read the disclaimer appended to your
suicide note
rhyming as it did with these allegorical sunglasses
& the rusted skeleton of a VW van
half-buried in the sand somewhere in Baja

I speak my father’s words I said in a language he
wouldn’t understand

as one always goes alone
drawn towards the empty waves which are
responsible to nothing
but the vicarious epiphany you’ve
chosen to decline
knee-deep in the shorebreak
on the darkest day of summer

The Force of Gravity

2011-09-12T06:41:00.001-07:00

Like a message in lipstick scrawled
onto a tidepool mirror
nobody knows what it means but
everyone understands it’ll break if you
drop it which is what keeps us
coming back for more

sworn to green scenes right out of the tide book
w/bubbles & like glistening
catalogs of subtropical flowers
as printed on silk sleeves of fog
& rattling in the heart of oceanic machines
that manufacture thunder & indecision

If I wasn’t there you’d have to
dream up someone else to talk to someone
else who wouldn’t listen because the song the
wind sings in the palm trees is cranked up to
10 on the voodoo dial & if you had wings
you’d probably make a similar sound

but I’m still here & you’re taking it an
octave higher than any dog-eared hymnal would
ever allow & I figured we were more like the light that
dances across a swimming pool cemetery
than stained glass windows in a ’64 El Camino
parked at the bottom of the sea

Spanish Blood

2011-09-11T06:12:00.000-07:00

The fog laid right down on the pavement
3 blocks from the beach

a September morning in Santa Cruz

The light is endless but it doesn’t have anything
to do with us
wherever we walk
holding up our end of Eternity
“Not to be sold east of the San Andreas Fault”

& learning never to ask why
I sold the perfect stranger a dime bag of wet sand
& candlelight

& draining the ocean from my eyes
I might even reconvene the
Mexican stand-off scene from Reservoir Dogs

but in church latin to appease
the god that wears the tiki mask

Sand Buckets

2011-09-09T06:20:00.000-07:00

PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, INC.
I tossed the I Ching every day for 20 years
as if that might clear the clutter of choices
made & not made
& even when the coins came up snake eyes
I still paddled out in my
catholic boy wetsuit
to charge one last mushy beach break
before the sun set & the world & you
plunged
into darkness

REMEMBER THE SHADOWS
The Chumash were one of the
few native nations to
bury their dead in a prone position
underground.
A single grave would be used for
more than one body
over the years.
The bodies were separated by
layers of whale bone.

PIPETRUCK
Reading Ecclesiastes backwards
if only to reinvent the central nervous system of
the ocean at dawn as a vast rippling
slab of cement you can hear rumbling
all the way to Jerusalem

Feels like Cinemascope

2011-09-06T05:40:00.000-07:00

Exiled on the PCH
with a black pajama death wish
sworn to the sticky radiance of
a shipwrecked resolve
looming like a twenty dollar bill at the beer store

I met my doppelgänger there but he had a moustache
& a favorite tune I didn’t recognize
along with a three day hangover that included the
death scene from Hamlet performed in blackface
by a Tahitian mime troupe

The ocean at my right
meant that I was heading south

The swell was not quite epic but close

& as the fog peeled off
another blue sky that
no one’s ever seen before I said
“Come with me, Blanca,
& I’ll show you the world on fire”

The sunlit haze that parked itself above the beach
was like love at first sight embalmed in kool-aid

September’s Song

2011-09-05T06:30:00.000-07:00

Did you hear about the bust on the
eastside? SWAT team & all
looked like ‘Nam, he said, but
I wouldn’t know…

He bummed a cigarette
& I watched him go

The fog was holding to the coast

The tide was due to rise an hour from now

There was a time I’d have known exactly
when to vault the fence
& hit the water before anyone knew
or cared & I struggled with that burden

to be the best that never was

& walking back across the sand
leaving no footprints or trace
that I’d ever been there at all

The Long Goodbye

2011-09-04T07:18:00.001-07:00

Last night I dreamed I was
drinking with Nettelbeck
he’s dead but can still hold his own against
a bottle of tequila

I kept calling him “Mr. Fred”
like the Indian dudes he used to
hang with in southern Oregon

I woke up to a morning threaded thru with
smoke & drizzle
had a bottle of Tecate
instead of a cup of coffee
& eventually made it down to the beach to talk it over
with the dark green shorebreak

When asked of their origins
the Chumash point to the west
out over the Pacific Ocean
as being the home of the First People
a place they call the Land of the Dead
where the Great Spirit lives
in a crystal cave
on the bottom of the sea

It’s okay to laugh as long as you mean it

2011-09-03T05:46:00.000-07:00

I didn’t know where I was going but
I figured I’d be there by noon
w/bells on & a big sombrero
made of smoke & concrete
like Eli Wallach channeling his inner vato
barefoot & doomed

You were already there
having read the movie & seen the book
but it took years before anyone realized
it meant driving around aimlessly
looking for a parking place

& now it’s me
standing face to face
with someone that looks like
the you
I never knew
but with the same grace-
ful disregard that
launched a thousand ships

WAIFS & STRAYS by Micah Ballard

2011-09-02T08:14:00.000-07:00

There’s a clip in the documentary Poetry in Motion where Ted Berrigan talks about poetry being something like birds singing. “Yes” he says “I lift my head in song”. I kept thinking of that while reading Waifs & Strays.

Broken silvergreen sentences sustained by the lyric instability of wet stones blinking in the foam

2011-08-29T05:36:00.000-07:00

She was stapled like a cloud
to a corner of the sky
the color of beach pavement
& I was a wine-stained tombstone cutback
as ominous as a shadow
falling across a bead curtain
in another room

The sunset glass made it a perfect setting for
a soul session with the drainpipe crew
& we danced on the string of a tropical memory
as she always preferred something euphoric
a tidepool with a fuse in it
for example
lit & sputtering
as long as it left a scar

I was as the wind whispering like sand
across the pavement
& she was a refrigerator full of adrenaline
rippling in the dark

Darker Than You

2011-08-26T06:17:00.000-07:00

There is lineage & there is volume
& the hollow sound of the parking lot
reflectingly damp
might pry the turquoise from your gaze
launching tears into the waves
ringing
like a Mexican alarm clock

That’s just how the Grecian urn crumbles
& I spend the rest of my life in a Polynesian igloo
on Beach Hill, studying
The Obliteration of the Self
As Evidenced in Wittgenstein’s
Surf Almanac
(a zen masterpiece
for windchime & pavement saw)

& although I have no idea what time it is
late & early
the orange girl in the sea-mist bikini
gathers kelp blossoms
somewhere beyond the reef

where I would love to take you some day
but there has to be a reason
each stares down through the other
looking for a way back

As rivers, flowing down, become indistinguishable on reaching the sea by giving up their names and forms, so also the illumined soul

2011-08-23T06:34:00.000-07:00

A winter’s day in August
dark overcast & damp
flailing about in the murdered waves

How can we not be dark & light & blank
98 percent of the time?

Bells in the tide all the way from The Odyssey
to the latest issue of Surfer’s Journal
& back again

a circular pattern

always somehow reassuring

erodes even the heavy duty concrete seawall
in time nothng more than sand in your sneakers

a dusty trace of haze in an otherwise
empty motel swimming pool

catching a pale neon glow off the
Upanishads like a puff of smoke

Death Rides a Horse

2011-08-21T07:07:00.000-07:00

i.m., for Jake

The great animal
having fallen
his massive head thrown
to the ground
The midnight eyes
when the light’s gone
reflect the
heaving silence as
death takes hold
& kicks to gallop
thunder in the hooves
like the shuddering
stop of the heart
& we go where
the breath goes
when it’s gone

Underwater Camera

2011-08-19T06:36:00.000-07:00

TRAVELS IN ABYSSINIA,
THE HARAR & MALIBU
It’s probably summertime on Mars
where the fog settles in & the surf is
more like a smear campaign than red dirt
in your sneakers

GREEN
“Outside, the offshore wind was rising.
The choppy sea at the foot of the street
reflected crumpled light.”
(Ross MacDonald)

DIMINISHED RETURNS
Ornamental pavilions of rust
consecrate the shoreline
caught in the glare of fishscale chrome
as far as the eye can see

DEAR OXYGEN: New & Selected Poems by Lewis MacAdams

2011-08-17T15:41:00.001-07:00

Just released by University of New Orleans Press & now available from Amazon. Get yourself a copy pronto.

MacAdams is essential.

"Dear Oxygen is a vivid lyrical romp through many tender shared realities, vestigial memories with poetry’s departed great ones (Whalen, Corso, Dorn, Jim Carroll) invoked here as well in heart & ear. Marvelous love poems, and poems in the company of friends. Conversations and meditations. Historical nexus Bolinas beckons and is a site of Outrider survival. MacAdams’s eye is sharp, his ecological consciousness astute, as he bucks the heartbreaks of modern man and takes on reclamation of the Los Angeles River. This is a welcome collection, so needed in these times, with a shout out of gratitude to the editor Opstedal who gets it just right. It is indeed the air to breathe."
– ANNE WALDMAN

“Completely absorbing history of a wise and chivalrous relationship with water, land, and humans. Intimately heard and phrased. Ardent, wild, and tender. A thorough romance with truth.”
– JOANNE KYGER

“The day doesn’t pass, 45 years since, but that the poems, person, of Lewis MacAdams are by my side. Art, spirit, heart and wit – classic simpleton’s job: ashes underfoot, misfitted for all but beauty’s smiling sanity.... crazy honor’s faith.... wonder’s fate. Speech good.”
– DUNCAN MCNAUGHTON

Strumming the valves & hinges

2011-08-16T14:01:00.000-07:00

“I could feel the weight of the wave in my head as it moved”
―Dale Herd

The mystery of a late summer morning
threaded with fog
enough for you to kick up the highbeams
on your Manson lamps
burning a hole through all that damp nothing

There’s a reason you can sit that still for
a minute or two it’s real nice when we can
both suffer like that
adrift in the River of Souls
tidal river
ocean shore
I woke up & I was a black man but
why was everyone calling me “Blondie”?

S l o w g l a s s
all green all gray & prehistoric
lifts up & crashes in on itself
dark white foam along the jetty
a lifetime measured out in moments like these
carving across the face of a Tijuana pipe
like bending silver spoons in your sleep

Spanish Antennas

2011-08-12T07:24:00.000-07:00

Time stops & starts it doesn’t matter
who you are or where you’re going
you can drink beer & watch cable TV
until you forget your name
& the early morning fog sits on the pier
in full lotus posture
smoking cigarettes
w/Dalai Lama bumper stickers attached
It was all so real I wanted to
set fire to my shoe laces
I said Love makes the sidewalk crooked
I was thinking of you
but it was a secret
a tape measure shot
I never knew where it landed
dark motel room throwdowns w/plenty of ice
If you’re in the right place at the right time the
sunlight sparkles on the waves like the face of an
unknown god who speaks only the language of gulls

From Now On

2011-08-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

Most of the time I don’t want to know how
old I am or how much money I don’t have
El Segundo in flashback loops to Santa Cruz
by way of the Ventura pier
bloodstains on the water-
damaged map of my feelings
& thumbing thru a book of matches
choking on the wind that’s coming in
off the water while a pale neon memory floats
between your ambient denial & the
watery edge of forever
where the mirror bends & the pavement
as yet undefined begins & ends
LEANING AGAINST THE RAIN
Jimmy Reed
Tsongkapa
William Carlos Williams
& some clown waving a psychosomatic flashlight
from a swimming pool filled with a million dollars
in IOUs
I guess there is a resemblance but
from now on I’ll take this stretch at 85 mph
with the windows rolled down & the radio tuned to
a steel guitar version of
everything you always wanted

The Proximity Effect

2011-08-09T05:54:00.001-07:00

“Bring me my Yater Spoon, the eight-six”

WANTED: Unlimited Everything
palm trees in the wind
wave wash foam bubble seashell pendant
mother of pearl

the meaning of time

plaster stucco Mediterranean-style Mexican facades
I swear would crumble at her touch

sledgehammers in the fog

The ocean slipped past the window just now
nothing can be done about that
Hawaiian music. Souls returning damp from
beyond the foam...

I wouldn’t take western mysticism too seriously
the Wisdom of the East likewise
depending on the time of day
& who is or isn’t listening.

One step in any direction
& you’re someplace else entirely

I forgot to mention the waterproof mascara

2011-08-05T13:58:00.000-07:00

She was a Sunday night sci-fi adventure
& I was a true crime docudrama preempted by the
evening tide
My thousand mile stare
buffered by dark sun glasses
& the kelp grove in the mirror
simulcast as the bare shoulders of her indifference I thought
just as smooth just as relentless
& when it all rattled down she could still claim a corner
of my heart
like the inverted cloud cover
smeared with lipstick
when I’m six steps from whatever
dissolving in the shorebreak ripple of turquoise
& she’s a Martian landing party stumbling from a spaceship
shaped exactly like my life

The reading, that was...

2011-08-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

Two hours in commuter gridlock 880 traffic to Berzerkeley. Joanne & Donald waiting at Moe’s, having just arrived after a 45 minute walk from the vicinity of Shattuck & University where, for some mysterious reason, they had parked their car. We strolled down Telegraph to a little Thai restaurant for beers & food & the latest news. Then back to Moe’s though we were nearly a half-hour early. Pamela & Joanne browsing amongst the books. Donald & I talking to Owen & drinking beer. A typically small audience trickled in, notable for the absence of “the eternal company”. I guess the company ain’t that eternal. About 12 or 14 listeners, certainly enough to bounce the truncated iambic off of. Owen intros, Donald reads first. I’m taken by the Canadian vowel sounds rounding off the sly Edward Gorey effect (as Pamela noted later) of the incandescent prose pieces of Blue Chips, then nailing the early rhythms that carry the poems in World at Large. Altogether a great, solid reading. Thanks Donald. I stepped to the lectern & read, alternating between California Redemption Value & Drainpipe Sessions, tossing in a few loose poems just to keep it interesting (for me) as I could hear the miles of surging silence that ate up the lyric intentions that have relentlessly eclipsed anything as prosaic as reason. Two perhaps interesting out-takes: 1. After reading Walk on the Wet Side I read it again in the voice of Ezra Pound, 2. The spontaneous applause after I read Liquid Sky. It all went okay I thought, but who really knows, or cares. Surprised to see Alasatair Johnston, Tinker Green, Christina Fisher & Cedar Sigo there. We all hung around yakking afterwards, but Joanne & Donald wanted to get back to their “small coastal community in Northern California” rather than moving on to the traditional post-reading bar gathering. Pamela & I drove them back to Shattuck & University so that they could retrieve their car, & we headed on through the night time traffic of 880 for the hour & a half trip to S.Cruz & a final beer & sleep. I had dreams that were like random chapters lifted from an abridged version of The Golden Bough as interpreted by Iggy Pop & The Stooges.

Muleskinner Beach

2011-08-01T13:19:00.001-07:00

I knew I must have been blessed
because I managed to step in every puddle
between here & there
counting ju ju beads & every mile
like chapter & verse, i.e.
the Seaweed Sutra internalized as
“What do you want me to bring back
that you haven’t seen before?”
& the crab crawl duckwalk
off the end of the pier
meaning more at the moment than
any near rhyme in retrospect
as one could tip the light entanglements
with a chorus line of drag queen mermaids
performing a modified can-can
in the kelp grove just beyond the reef
dissolving like the Tijuana Slough
into a turquoise sacrifice
on a gray marble slab
to defy the grace bestowed
as only a remnant remains
turned inward compiling
an index of beach pavement
for eyes like crushed beer
cans on the silver side of the tide

Spanish Word

2011-07-27T05:29:00.000-07:00

It’s mid-morning between tides
& my heart’s another nickel in the
jukebox. I’d like to break off a corner
of it on that mushy left dropping in on
the lip of bowl. That kind of passion digs
in on the dark side of bliss like an aquasonic
boom rattling the cathedral glass that lines the
tide pools just north of here. I felt like I was
embalmed in the ocean haze. A bar of
tombstone wax turning into candlelight
in my pocket. The sky wasn’t the color of
your eyes although it blinked & turned away
as you do when I’m being stupid.
My resumé fit nicely onto a grain of sand.
A grain of sand the size of your fist
your left fist which is roughly the size of
your heart.

Opstedal/Guravich Reading at Moe’s Books

2011-07-26T07:18:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, August 2 at 7:30pm.

Donald Guravich will read from World at Large. I’ll read a few poems from California Redemption Value and Drainpipe Sessions, and maybe a couple of new works. It will be something.

Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley.

Somewhere beneath the beach

2011-07-23T12:33:00.000-07:00

The late summer sun
as it might have been in counterpoint
guitar & bulldozer
You remember the middle of the
dream
the beginning & the middle part
as it doesn’t matter how it ends
if it ever does
end & when
as anticipated
the ending
loops around bending eternity
before everything goes blank
there’s maybe a primer gray ’56 Chevy towing the tide in
………………………………………………………..
I wore the commemorative t-shirt
while seagulls were busy slicing up the haze
pelicans paddling in the water near the end of the pier
in meditative posture
predators are more inclined to meditation it seems
& your heart already vaulting condensed sea shadows
where with ever moving thereby in measure to the tide drops
a saltwater hammer
lovingly soaked in gasoline
___________________________________________
A sea nymph I guess
she licks her green lips
with a silver tongue
as a million sunsets ripple in her eyes
………………………………………………………..
TELL-TALE SIGNS
the pale blue octopus
& the pearl-handled squirt gun

Under the Volcano (darkslide to pop-shuvit)

2011-07-21T06:18:00.000-07:00

Something about the late afternoon breeze

takes me back but I’m still here

hosing down a westsuit in the backyard
or cooking tortillas on the pavement
when I ought to be drifting
like a beer can on the tide
donating my sunglasses
to science

& whatever else the wet sand opens up & swallows

& the chrome grillwork of the summertime sun
like the consolation prize that got
lost in the mail
as I guess one more dented fender of surf
more or less
tucked away in a corner of my brain
along with the phone numbers & names
whispered in the rattling palm
leaves like a haiku
with a hacksaw in it

& what is your piety compared to my deference
when my wheels lock up on the wall of the
snake run & the sky tips back
& everything you thought you knew
is gone

EXCESS SPACE by Christina Fisher

2011-07-20T16:21:00.001-07:00

Grace to be born & live as variously as possible (saith Frank O’Hara) & I believe that means as singularly as possible as well. Which is something Christina Fisher strums in her often ecstatic Excess Space, a terrific new chapbook just published by Micah Ballard & Sunnylyn Thibodeaux as part of their ongoing Lew Gallery series. Christina’s poems are often awestruck & always carefully turning on a pinpoint pivot that might be a place or a moment or a word or image that catches in a halfbeat what several volumes of metaphysical inquiry can only hope to explain. These poems run on the smooth rhythm of interlocking gears along with the shiny wrench she throws in here & there just to keep them honest. The subtelties inherent in her capable attention, the light in the dark & the dark in the light, elicit a rare music. Excess Space has "Room for everyone". Check it out at Auguste Press.

One day I may truly learn to drink like a fish, but in the meantime

2011-07-18T06:15:00.001-07:00

We get that golden aura off the
late afternoon sun & we’re several bottles past
the trembling blue agave light
as at Playa San Pedrito
previously breathing fire & sea-mist
the initials carved there in the half-light
explaining nothing as I can only remember
the taste of her lips & the smooth transition
strumming the wet sand the precious stones
& the smoke even if only reflected
in the dark mirrors that are her eyes
sworn to an almost perfect thirst

Slipping the Glimpse

2011-07-16T05:47:00.000-07:00

My favorite color
a full-rail cutback
wind dragging the slope
the terrace also carved from the rain
& ringing at the center of it
as a shadow would remember some former shape
on your right a waterfall
on your left the glow over China
& one last rusty pipe where you score an 8.5
on a floater that nobody saw

The green silver ripple sound
from the eucalyptus in place of memory
por favor
from nerves, with meaning
north of the point
if you say so
emerald & chrome
not to be found in chorus
or psalm alone
but that it lit fire in the tidepool
& the sunlight bending that way at Venice pier
no different

I still have the photograph
& the scars
& the silkscreened cover art
in full color
even black & white
inked on a wall in the fifth chamber of my heart (the
echo chamber)

No More Nothing

2011-07-14T06:27:00.000-07:00

How often have I answered the call by
consulting the tide charts to
preempt the shimmering liturgy
with a slab of beach concrete
from what substance contrary
running the same tropical diversion
under the influence of wet sand
but to carry those bare oceans in your eyes
lingering like a puff of Papal smoke
an inquiry into the motive of the wrong-way driver
no comfort to take & none given
edging out the better angels so as to claim your
corner of despair with something like gratitude
& always the same answer flickering
in the shape-shifting haze of
an otherwise empty sky

Limited Edition

2011-07-13T07:26:00.000-07:00

Because the rainy season eclipsed the spring
this year, the garden spiders got a late start.
It’s July & the little guys have got their tiny webs
set up all around the yard, perfect concentric
circles, so classic & reassuring. Last year there was
one garden spider the size of a quarter in the fuchsia
on the side of the house. A most venerable spider
to be sure. His web was so hardcore & sturdy I thought
he could snag a hummingbird. Maybe he did.
But winter locked down & he checked out.
This new crop has got quite a way to go to
attain that kind of majesty. I note their
progress every morning before I head to the beach.
The garden spider has eight eyes, each of which
glitter like a moonless night at the bottom of the sea.

A Shade Past Turquoise

2011-07-09T11:03:00.001-07:00

Late & early
sea-mist & shadow
thumbing through the glass
pages of a narcotic hymnal

babbling (silence)
inside a veil of metallic palm leaves
transparent medieval tapestries of
claustrophobic beach scenes

The sun burning out like a cigarette
I wrote the tune
a duet for dyslexic seagull
& steel guitar

Except the flapping damp wings
& neon eyeshadow
my job is to remain semi-conscious
for a little while anyway

counting every blade of sand
blown whispering across the pavement
beneath an alka-seltzer sky

Poems in Good Times Santa Cruz

2011-07-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

The local weekly paper Good Times Santa Cruz printed a few poems from California Redemption Value. It's online, but the online version fucked up the line spacing & layout. Alas. Fortunately the poems appear as they should in the print version.

Slip Stream

2011-07-07T05:35:00.001-07:00

The sky dissolves
ocean whispers
something I guess I thought I heard
paddling through a bead of mercury
as the standing moon
rattles like glass fingers
in the early morning fog

I’ll never be here again
although I’ve never left

knowing every ripple in the pavement
& where every shadow falls & when
with tattletale bells & pipes
carving your name on the wind

Marooned in Sunset Rust

2011-07-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

Nothing like nada
a drip of blue be-drizzled
of green
& galvanized steel

beneath the dark of the summertime
sun
bombing the coast highway
where I get paid in cheeseburgers
& Mexican beer

Thinking about the seagreen Yater pocket rocket
& the baby Yater spoon
in Dale Herd’s basement
in Beverly Hills

relics not of this world but the next

& from there I drove my mom up to Zuma
for a late lunch wondering how many times I’ve
taken this road or has this road taken me?

All those times I drove it with my eyes shut
so as to feel every bend in the pavement
as it coincides with every wave that curls
in around the point

rippling through the file of polaroid snapshots
in my head the palette of faded colors
reaching from there to here

Painkiller

2011-06-29T05:08:00.000-07:00

Nine seagulls spinning in the sky
random swoop patterns maybe
not so random after all?

SHUNRYU SUZUKI
“The world is its own magic”

OCEAN WHISPERS
This is your one-way ticket
to the Golden State
………………………………………
1. It Came From the Sea
(a giant octopus ripping the hell out of
the Golden Gate bridge)

2. “I’m going to sit in the sand
& listen to my beard grow”
―Kevin Opstedal

QUO ME CUNQUE RAPIT
TEMPESTAS, DEFEROR HOSPES
The wind off the water speaks
church Latin
only us former altar boys
know what it means

JACK KEROUAC
“S h h h says the Holy Sea”

Opstedal reading on The Poetry Show (KUSP FM)

2011-06-28T06:40:00.001-07:00

Last Sunday, June 26, I was on the radio reading from California Redemption Value. You can listen to it online. God knows what the chatter sounds like (I'm not going to listen to it myself) but I did read as many poems as I could. The Poetry Show.

Built for Sunset

2011-06-27T06:26:00.000-07:00

All them immensities of the sea
at dark of noon beneath the midnight
sun
candles burning in red glass jars on
Mexican voodoo shrines
underwater
iron saints, Bhikkucitas,
& left-handed martyrs attending

a beach scene as rendered by
Picassos of Duchamps,
Diebenkorns, Ruschas, and
O p s t e d a l s

Even the pavement is eloquent
if you listen

North of Malibu
ocean spills over edge of sky
all at once
in B-minor

Return of the Creature

2011-06-25T06:32:00.000-07:00

Amazing Grace, where is thy sting
As she slept I whispered
dulce nadas
to the avenging angel
tattooed on her ankle

Los Lavalamps
reinventing the light as it would
seaward reflect
the walls of a tidepool clock

Sultans of Swing
Whatever drowned indulgence resigns
the threat of remembering obvious
intentions the beach road humming
like a wire exhausted all lingering regret

New from Otoliths—"Drainpipe Sessions"

2011-06-22T06:39:00.000-07:00

Just released.

Drainpipe Sessions
Kevin Opstedal
44 pages
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN:
978-0-9808785-4-7
$10.00 + p&h

Beneath the relentless surf ghetto aura that pervades these Drainpipe Sessions there is a place where nothing is revealed, acknowledged by the grace of having been there at all. It’s the catch & release method of poetic composition, the B-side of a once and future flashback, stubbornly adhering to a lyric drive where the measure is meant to be taken in a single breath. “If poetry is the Atlantis of the arts,” writes Noel Black, “then Kevin Opstedal can breathe under water, and each poem is a pair of shades for a beach blanket apocalypse.”

Available here.

“There is a fathomless light”

2011-06-18T08:21:00.000-07:00

The shattered chrome drainage mirrored on air ripples the mainline stem to float the memory. Your reflection on the surface of a burnt spoon like the face of Jesus on a tortilla, with redwood stringers glassed in, & diesel sand driven beneath the foam. We were on the outskirts of an ancient city, like Jerusalem, or Tijuana. I was there to learn the measure, I said, lighting matches beneath the tidewater architecture & shattered pipes, drizzled in turquoise, in silver, & rust. Recalling empty parking lots, fjords, & a history of violence, contrary to the haze (my legacy), with mudslide tremors & gaited horses that rustle like palm leaves against the ravished pertinence of so many bronze wings slashing the sky behind you like a kamikaze hood ornament.

Theme from the Unknown

2011-06-16T13:47:00.001-07:00

I never learned the art of patience
& at this age I don’t suppose I ever will
the check is eternally in the mail
so that I hear myself say
“Look out for that which swoops down upon ye
in the darkening,
darkling…”
I knew what I was doing
even when I didn’t (know)
as it might be superimposed
the light strumming the valves & hinges
spacing themselves more gracefully than
I would have expected
out along the edge of a drowsy numbness
that was easier to trust than understand

Glass Harmonicas

2011-06-13T08:10:00.001-07:00

Whatever is going to happen like it already has. To what purpose then a late turn in the drop explaining less than that unwritten equation with palm tree silhouettes carved into the sunburnt sky. I’m holding on only so that I can feel it slip away.

Phone It In

2011-06-10T05:30:00.000-07:00

The wind sings the ocean’s anthem
reaching way back to when you first began to fall

“Who swallowed the pearl of wisdom this time?”

some undifferentiated motherfucker…

silver water
ocean beads
Tsunami Shotgun
“When it’s your dice or mine, all
or nothing,
that she be there in all her splendour”
(Charles Olson)

& nothing else, a blank page, wiped clean
Desire continuously, or at least driven off the
end of the pier

“When you do something, you should
burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire,
leaving no trace of yourself”
―Shunryu Suzuki

Tropically Distrubed

2011-06-08T06:09:00.000-07:00

“Was you ever bit by a dead jellyfish?”
___________________________________
clairvoyant alcoholics from Downey with buckets
& flashlights (grunion run on Venice Beach some-
time in the mid-sixties
--------------------------------------------------------
Turkey buzzard gliding over the coast
highway
quick moment
1. think of Lew Welch
2. turn the corner
___________________________________
UNDERWATER THEME PARK
part of an actual pattern the synopsis of
several dreams I’m still listening to even when
I pretend I’m not (dreaming)
--------------------------------------------------------
I hear every footstep wing-flap fin-
splash & the Heart Sutra played backwards
on a surfboard strung with piano wire
& just left of the sun there that’s
a rogue bit of cumulus
26,000 miles from home

from The Varieties of Religious Experience

2011-06-06T06:09:00.000-07:00

Extended Forecast

Reading the thermometer in Latin, half past Topanga, Santa Barbara & Nagasaki. A leaf slowly turning yellow, then maybe orange, & later becoming almost translucent? It’s later than you think, but four hours earlier than that in Samoa, glowing in the dark, a dark like silver, & damp. We can no longer submit to a compromise so inconclusive, whatever relentless details inform the beach pavement, tilted in the rain, with your picture on the cover. A cut-off low will bring variable high cloudiness & gusty winds overnight. The weekend will see monsoon rain & winds riding in on the Pineapple Express, whipping up the waves, channeling the voices of the ancient lost Lemurians. Begging indulgence without vows or refuge, sinking deep into the underwater pavement, dissolving pearls in gasoline to justify your margins, betrayed by space & time. The random apprehension where sea meets sky in the pretense & the vapor, to reconcile the distance & the time it takes, steeped in heavy breathing, designed to lull you past the coma. The lost continent of Lemuria was first discovered by the Vikings during their annual Kon Tiki Barbeque & Surf Competition in the South Pacific.

Stomping with the Lemurians

Augustus Le Plongeon claimed that ancient Mayan writings proved that the Maya of Yucatan were not only older than the later civilizations of Greece and Egypt, but were descendents of a civilization that had existed on the lost continent of Mu (later known as Lemuria). An Anglo-American explorer named James Churchward, a close friend of Le Plongeon, wrote that the continent of Mu stretched from the Hawaiian Islands to Fiji & from Easter Island to the Marianas. His findings were set down in the five main volumes of the Mu series published from 1926 to 1931. By studying various ancient texts Churchward believed he had discovered the existence of the long lost continent that had sunk below the Pacific Ocean after a cataclysmic earthquake approximately 60,000 years earlier. According to Churchward, the Hawaiian Islands & the Pacific Islands are the remaining mountain peaks of that lost continent. Madame Elena Petrovna Blavatsky described Lemurians as the third root race to inhabit the earth. They were egg-laying beings with a third eye that gave them psychic powers & allowed them to function without a brain.

Moment’s Notice

Early morning aerial shot zooming down on a beat-up ‘64 El Camino parked on an empty stretch of the PCH overlooking the beach. The El Camino is overall a pale sunbleached blue, the hood is bright green, the driver’s side quarter panel painted with rust primer, passenger door black, rear gate white. There’s a surfboard & a wetsuit in the back. A man & a woman lean against the front of the car, gazing out at the sea.

MURIEL NITRATE - The ocean is dark like the blood of fuchsias
BENNY IGUNANA - Dedicated to an articulate (though incoherent) neon you might find scribbled onto a spoonful of wet sand

Less the remnant of a half-forgotten tune

2011-06-04T09:23:00.000-07:00

The sunlight filtering down thru a bend in the haze does a rhinestone shimmy out on the water that backpedals to Yokohama. Pelicans dive into the pavement & come up w/beaks full of hubcaps. Nothing adds up. If it ever does I might get hauled away from here in a day-glo blue velvet Cadillac El Dorado w/Eddie Poe behind the wheel & a couple cases of opium-spiked Tecate in the back seat. That kind of carelessness, it isn’t so easy to master. Standing on the steps of a more classical rendition of the same war of attrition as my smog blue eyes go blank like the slick rock of exposed tidepools, but slowly swaying like a grass skirt underwater, with hand-carved flames.

from The Varieties of Religious Experience by Kevin Opstedal

As If I Have Seen All This Before

2011-05-30T07:30:00.000-07:00

--------------------------------------------------------
One more “Aloha”
mid-tide, like
the extended version of I’ll Be Your (Broken) Mirror
all fucked up ( D E S I R E )
drizzle. splash. trickle. blink.

kelp blossom.

Beer can

gray pavement, crushed velvet
so customized
(except for the ritual
string of pearls)
Morning, noon & night
(a shadow carved in marble, granite,
steel, ink,
in six different languages
___________________________________
each one the same)

Horizontal Shift

2011-05-27T11:03:00.000-07:00

Dark blue (green) of the sea
beneath a stainless steel sky and
I’m feeling eventual behind dark
sunglasses waiting for your
violin solo to pierce the tide
where even now the stained glass
shatters on rocks older than the
survival instinct Mexico
disguised as Japan swimming
closer than the gull-wing mist
that tips your eyes it’s true you’re
already counting the stars
& I’m whatever reaches back across
the moist shadow of your breath

One More Fadeaway

2011-05-25T15:10:00.000-07:00

leaning against the rain

The Rapture the Next Time

2011-05-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

I was gonna hoist one to all those
motherfuckers left holding their dicks
when the rapture didn’t
happen
three or four dollars left
in the bottom of the bottle
one beer can with a fuse in it
The True Meaning of Time
& wireless reception
Tell the orange girl
emblamed in the turquoise bikini
the roach of “whatever”
like a chained dog
panting for more
”we which are alive and remain shall be
caught up together with them in the clouds,
to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we
ever be with the Lord”
Do they ever read their fucking Bible?
“But of that day and hour knoweth no man,
no, not the angels of heaven,
but my Father only”
Truth is I, for one, never paid it any mind
although if it ever was to happen
I'd really dig having a ringside seat

Invasion of the Body Surfers

2011-05-22T13:58:00.000-07:00

We lost it all in a
curled up corner of the sky
tucked like blue velvet over the palisades
but we’ve got the ocean to think about
& an empty parking lot to hold hands with
when we leap beneath the wave
as lit with carbonated sunlight
like beer bottles hurled against the crumbling sea wall
Your inexorable eyes
bend no more than the cycloramic tide
obliquely sequined although I
never thought its prophetic sequel would be
drenched in sunset
lavished with impartial tears
veering on azure blades above the splintered
paradigm its strings recast in silver
unlike the shadow painted on the sand
already rusting in the salt mist that drops like a chunk of concrete
ripped from the page of our
next-to-last last tango

Leave a Message

2011-05-19T06:09:00.000-07:00

BIKINI COLLISION COURSE
Water beneath the ocean
for the sea urchin, for the abalone,
for the suicide’s bath

SOURCE CODE
I never noticed until someone mentioned
there was blood all down the side of my face

CATHOLIC BOY
wiping the rain from his RayBans

“WE NEED HELP, THE POET RECKONED” (ED DORN)
on the flipside of a delta slide version of I Wanna Be Your Dog
with subsidiary barking harmonicas
& tide charts in the upper register

A REAL HEARTBREAKER
beneath the ripple patterns & regret
tombstoned in the palomino sand

A surfboard in every refrigerator

2011-05-15T05:41:00.000-07:00

Smacking my lips at every pantomime shimmer
that ripples on the surface of your tender denial
(a delicate architecture comprised of fishbones & concrete
or a distant memory of civilization
like spilling seawater on the ocean floor
pelicans of copper & of steel
& silk things that rust at the edges of tide pools
when you’d just as soon park it in a barcalounger on the beach
half buried in the sand)
Such passion skids out of control for those who disregard
true romance
like a lull in the action plastered with million dollar bills
which is why I’m loading the squirt gun with tequila
& rocking the mortuary RayBans at midnight
with knocks & pings in the terza rima

Illuminations/Rimbaud

2011-05-14T15:56:00.000-07:00

I was in high-school when I bought a copy of A Season in Hell & The Drunken Boat at Martindale’s Bookstore in Santa Monica. It was the New Directions edition translated by Louise Varèse. I still have it. Shortly afterwards I picked up a copy of Illuminations, also published by New Directions & translated by Louise Varèse. This was the beginning of a long association with Rimbaud. Over the years I’ve sought out every translation of Rimbaud that I could, since my French is pitiful. I really needed to understand what he was doing & why it worked & kept working for me. That has yet to be adequately answered, so I continue to read & re-read Rimbaud. Relentlessly. I’ve kept the Etienne Carjat 1871 photo of Rimbaud (clipped from a book) on the wall in every room I wrote in since 1974. It is on the wall above the desk where I’m typing this right now.

A few years ago Duncan McNaughton visited me here in Santa Cruz. We sat outside drinking beer & shooting the shit. I told him that I felt Rimbaud is more & more important to me the older I get. I wish I had immediately written down Duncan’s response. It was brilliant. All I can recall is that he said “Of course…” & went on eloquently about the passage in a May 15, 1871 letter to Paul Demeny where Rimbaud famously wrote “Romanticism has never been properly judged”.

Last February when the poet Simon Pettet told me that John Ashbery had done a translation of Illuminations that would be released in the spring I was cautiously stoked. Now that I’ve had a chance to read it, I say it’s a good, solid translation, but I still prefer the Varèse.

Here’s Ashbery’s translation of section 3 of Rimbaud’s poem Childhood —

    In the wood there is a bird, his song stops you and makes you blush.
       There is a clock that doesn’t strike.
       There is a pit with a nest of white creatures.
       There is a cathedral that sinks and a lake that rises.
       There is a little carriage abandoned in the thicket, or that hurtles down the path, trimmed with ribbons.
       There is a troop of child actors in costume, seen on the highway through the edge of the forest.
       Finally, when you are hungry or thirsty, there is someone who chases you away

Compare it to the Varèse translation—

    In the woods there is a bird; his song stops you and makes you blush.
       There is a clock which never strikes.
       There is a hollow with a nest of white beasts.
       There is a cathedral that goes down and a lake that goes up.
       There is a little carriage abandoned in the copse or that goes running down the road beribboned.
       There is a troupe of little actors in costume, glimpsed on the road through the border of the woods.
       And then, when you are hungry and thirsty, there is someone who drives you away.

To my ear the Varèse translation just scans better. Her version of the last line has always hit me hard. No other translator has nailed it the way she did.

This is the poem Departure—

    Enough seen. The vision has been encountered in all skies.
       Enough had. Sounds of cities, in the evening, and in the sunlight, and always.
       Enough known. The stations of life.—O Sounds and Visions!
       Departure amid new noise and affection!
   (Ashbery)

    Seen enough. The vision was met with in every air.
       Had enough. Sounds of cities, in the evening, and in the sun and always.
       Known enough. Life’s halts.—O Sounds and Visions!
       Departure in new affection and new noise.
   (Varèse)

Varèse captures the urgency & speed of Rimbaud. “The vision was met with in every air” is direct & fluid, where “The vision has been encountered in all skies” just stumbles over the troublesome use of the word “encountered”.

I could go on & on, & I often do, & will. Just my personal take on it, but I’d say if you only read one translation of Illuminations make it the Varèse. If then you compulsively need to read (like me) other translations, I’d say check out Oliver Bernard’s literal translations first, then Ashbery, Wallace Fowlie, and Wyatt Mason. That’s a start. There is no real end.

Radio Alarm Clock

2011-05-13T11:24:00.000-07:00

There was music coming from every direction
& an offshore wind sweeping in from the foothills
A warm wind that made the waves stand up on their hind legs
crosshatched in the doctored photograph
that hung from the rearview mirror

From here it’s a clean shot to the ramshackle
tenements of Shangri-La
steeped in ruin & candlelight
Who knows what other vicarious redemption
holds a rail of saltwater to the floodlit street that cuts like a wing
into the damp night air

I thought it all resembled a tragic misinterpretation of Baudelaire

as intimations of fiscal responsibility dogged my unerring
sense of dread
To walk the streets of forever as they slope down to the sea
was all I wanted. Palm leaves mumbling in the wind.
Beneath the beach concrete I guess maybe Chumash boxsprings
& faces carved into obsidian mirrors
as if any proof was required. Anyway you didn’t have to
follow me there to read the soft sky repeating itself above
the wet sand moving beneath my feet

still running the voodoo down

I thought I knew the latin phrase for this
& the green sledgehammer light that filters down to the
ocean floor

If you can’t skid past the diamond light etched in the sky you could always torch a palm tree

2011-05-09T06:20:00.000-07:00

…à toutes les tarentelles des côtes…
–Rimbaud

The light & the dark were perfectly balanced & I staggered through it wearing sunglasses. It takes a finely threaded stone & a feather of regret to slip the noose aside the pink velvet & tsunami warnings
scanning the dial for the sound of gulls
cemetery shadows
mother of pearl
The Ruins of Time
…all the tarantellas of the coast…
gilded sheetmetal icons with glass eyes & sacrificial beer can huaraches
Han Solo rainwater with a morphine drip
A spoon the color of the sun almost crosses into cool territory
(Tijuana, New Jersey, just south of Zuma)
crippled dreams
bloodshot smile
Egyptian bird head
mythological liquor store clerk
“There wasn’t anything as spooky as those shadows on the pavement”
costa azul
glass beads
raw silk
leaves
“leaving & branching”…

From drownpool carnage to neon inscribed I kept the level gaze intact. The least silken but reed brown greens of kelp-lit eyes & secret watery extensions were my guide. What daydrums of cypress parse in sonic platitudes along the gypsy string breeze got snagged in high tension wires before I could ascertain the categorical echo. Dark passage veering off the reverence. Revelation still a kind of threat with the light streaming through it. A two-headed pit bull nailed to a prop-driven crucifix drowning in the empty pool of sunset if only to rattle the bones of your heart. When it’s over there’s still a flicker of wine-colored silk & skatewheel tremors receding in the rearview mirror with dactylic precision. In another century or three all is forgiven. From the ruins we’ll watch the fog slip in beneath a subliminal sunset following the zig-zag line that runs from low tide to adios as you anticipate a velvet mirror fadeout with that number 4 expression on your face & those empty swimming pool eyes like six pound shadows.

(I Think I’m) Surfing Japanese

2011-05-06T06:49:00.001-07:00

Prophecy like pure chance
resulted in Medusa & the two-way mirror
Delphic shadows on the boardwalk
& the cigarette I didn’t smoke on the pier that night

Her hair like dark water crashing against the jetty
drenched in corrugated steel

& with dripping steps up the ruined concrete stairway
back to the overlook parking lot
a heel of sidewalk groaning with albatrossian hang-time
to hold abeyance with sunset hardware
& a grip of dreamless blonde sand

All the baptismal vestments
& drugstore sunglasses required to perform ablutions
pouring water from a plastic gallon jug over my head
before peeling off the black neoprene & throwing on
t-shirt, shorts, sneakers, sweatshirt against the chill
rips & blades of cold air knifing the damp

Who did it matter what incumbent gloom attends
with plumes of mist tuning E-strings in the eucalyptus

Dusty murmur of ragged palm trees attending

& whoever they were they knew my name