Wrong for Too Long

“Poverty, my dear friend, is so great an evil, and pregnant with so much temptation, and so much misery, that I cannot but earnestly enjoin you to avoid it.”
                                      – Samuel Johnson, to James Boswell

Stepping out into the sun-
light & the wind
              to revise the architecture of these ritual implements
beer bottles, rusty nails
                              inevitable acoustic sledgehammers
& the steeple of a submerged church
              propped against the window glass
I drove all the way there
                              under an assumed name
thus did I occasion the homemade electric
              mandolin w/Arabic footnotes
while struggling to ace the
                              penniless, blah blah, woe is me, etc, chorus
              in braille…
Asked for one word that describes my poetry I said
relentless
                              I knew those mirrors needed proof
beyond the bend of the tide the
              floating mosaic drift of sea & sky
an unsafe & impractical guide
                                                like divine scripture
                              begging for more

A particular moment, here & gone

Her eyes tell me more than perhaps
she would ever want to say
other nights & days beyond
the soft light fluttering against her wrist

like bells rippling in the rush of the tide

remember the difference
(between this one & that
one)
              “All scatt’red in the bottom of the sea”
a separate realm of existence
                              I never noticed until someone mentioned
                              there was blood all down the side of my face

carved stone kelp blossom
concrete veins of rust

Lost Angles (El Lay) on either side of the
sliding glass
              (several palm trees of unknown provenance
              attending

Global Warming Party

We are a part of the
late morning fog
in B-minor

ripping up the
coldwater sludge
at the rivermouth

tunneling thru the swamp…

It was April because
tomorrow never comes

reflected on the wet sand

the washed out lemon sun
stirring up the dust
the palisades (in flames)
the motel neon eyeshadow
the tattooed waves & the telltale
signature of foam

PALM TO PINE by Sunnylyn Thibodeaux

As I read this new collection of poems by Sunnylyn Thibodeaux I kept thinking of something Coleridge wrote in his Biographia Literaria –

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake – Aye, what then?”

Where these poems go, where they’ve been, & where they take you, is that place of lucid wonder; an engagement with the eternality built-in to a fleeting moment of recognition.

Check it out at Bootstrap Productions.

The Forfeit

The sign reads “VACANCY”
& it blinks
                              on & off
to remind you
                                                tiny bubble notes
                                                from a long way off
              each bubble contains a word

There are clouds in the mud

              You are wearing a seaweed kimono

The streets belong to another place, another
time, set on fire in the yellow tree as the story goes
& where I used to drag my knuckles through the sand
expecting wisdom to replace the white powder in my blood
any minute now...

This song & dance is dedicated to
José Throwhammer, Jenny Staccato, & Tina Damp

(you know who you are

Sunset on Sunset

It was summer then―
a glitch in the highlight reel
slipping past yet another lost horizon
with Hawaiian guitars echoing
intact
              as you sip your coconut milk & tequila
through a straw
& the voodoo buddhist catholic witchdoctor
speaking in sign language says
              “Your thoughts should be pure
              no matter what you think”
& I thought an authentic life-size sea monster
deposited in the backyard by the early morning ocean fog
(Michoacan)
                              with delicate rainshadow beadwork

All my life I danced it that way
                              the loop, the wedge, the hook
              one foot in a watery grave & the other
                                                on the edge of something really vast
like a vast undiscovered continent that
disappeared
                              long before I was born

Southwest & sideways

incense, piano, drums
(underwater)
                              A HISTORY
                                                several blank pages
“that’s as close as you get”

              What is now imagined
              was once merely fact

a state of seige
a liquid state
trance state
the Golden State (California)

a state of calm yet transcendent detachment

“Please be unreasonable”

sometimes the waves take you there

On the darkside of a Martian beach scene

You see them dancing in the waves
naked beneath their tattoos
out of the sea
ascending the steps of the submerged palace
their lips the color of wet sand
slashed with X’s
              “Do you know at the offering of which libation
              the waters become endowed with a human voice
              and rise and speak?”
I guess they were playing with needles
              & watching John Wayne movies
dubbed in Spanish
                              as I would beg indulgence
                              if only to aggregate an equivalent
                                                somewhere between Santa
                                                Cruz & Sri Lanka
so that entire summer trimming the blue from my eyes
downwind scraps of silver light edged in smog
& later (mas tarde) a single cold diamond flame
& I realized
              I hadn’t even been born yet

Source Code

We need help, the Poet reckoned
                                          ―Ed Dorn

Bikini Collision Course
Another cruel April
how many has it been since? & the beach
revised several times over
depending on who you talk to

Catholic Boy
wiping the rain from his RayBans

Tombstone Blues
In honor of National Poetry Month
I gave 6 friends an engraved invitation
to my funeral
                              (that’s a lie
I’ve only got 4 friends
              & 2 of them don’t
talk to me anymore & the
                              invitations were hand drawn
in crayon
              on pieces of cardboard that
I immediately threw away