Why I Hate the Sonnet, Jimmy

It was just after dark or just before.   I couldn’t tell & it didn’t matter anyway.   The light felt pure for about two minutes & then just kind of crumbled.   The tide began to slur.   I thought I heard it say "Lonzo Sinatra".

All of it dancing into sand

Tomorrow might just be
lost sunglasses
              or a rain dance
in the middle of a monsoon
                              w/the vatos out there
              dealing chrome-trimmed starlight
                                                to the blonde pavement
                              as bullets of mist tumble
              from the ocean sky like
                                                fistfuls of phenobarbital
                              washing up on the crest of a
                                                                              last wave

Them That Know

You shed your silken
expectations
& stumble through whirlpools
of cigarette butts & barbed wire
inside your buried fingerprints

It’s as easy as the cruelest month
frying hubcaps
when all I wanted was a glass of water
& the reassurance of a
rent free grave

to be taken in by that dark flowing
nada (the ruins of breath & the ransom
bleached black by the rigors of
what the ancients called
the leadpipe tango)

When you finally come to
your bronze eyes are hooked on wavering
pillars in the kelp forest & the green
sledgehammer light that filters down
to the ocean floor

Cross the Line

Every scrap written left behind
Paper helicopters versus the pathology of
breakfast
              (a piece of egg, tortilla, cheese, cerveza
& the blue sparkle beckoning
                              edged in milkwhite foam

Some impulsive homage I suppose
within the stoke & not to be written is perhaps
a proper legacy
              navigates the slow moon kelp pipe tide
gatorade pools tobacco stained algae
                              the rubble of Carthage

or Hermosa Beach & that same lost
              look an undersea gaze all ribboned w/turquoise
in the tsunami shorebreak diaries
                              sketched upon pages of wet sand

Clockwork Guacamole

tempus edax rerum (Ovid) as perhaps
Shakespeare (Sonnet 19) “Devouring time”
                              no doubt Golding’s rendering
an ambiguous rhyme
as the culpable by extension
inflicted by/essential to
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“Boy Locked In Refrigerator / Eats Own Foot”
(National Enquirer, or parody of same)
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L U N C H   T I M E
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Has the internet superseded all previous media
access & manipulation reduced to hidden hyperlinks

Project X might be THE FALL OF AMERICA
Ginsberg’s poems electrified as intended?
How about THE CANTOS?

[meanwhile I’ve got these retro mimeo chops, as in
paper, ink, staples, thread & the biological or
neurological linkage that almost seems pre-Jurassic now]
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mañana y mañana y mañana
(as I heard on the radio in Baja, late night
Shakespeare broadcast)

Full Nelson (Limbo Rock)

The vacant Oriental Motel stigmata in that emblematic neon script invites a casual witness.   Of reality as it is so measured.   As those wet kisses recede or snap the heart stem to the subdued tabernacle, vault, crypt, or pickup truck—any of which could be parked just outside.   This desire to dismantle each prophetic hassle & take the stain as deep as you can.   The middle of nowhere seems specific enough to me.   A coastal conditon tapping the mainline dustcloud refuge of disembodied cypress secured by the arcane laws of perspective.   Were we to argue the passage or trim the rain to reconcile painted solicitations.   Isn’t everybody, she added, as I expected the lineaments of an impossible alibi to shed an ounce of ambience.   The luxury of that option would prove to be enough later when the fading Mexican light misspelled the delicately threaded ripple of smoke that bent to reach & exit through the open window.

Desolation Point

If the wind shifts the swell hollows out if you’re
tuned that way if morning climbs from
The Iliad into The Odyssey if those wings were
carved alabaster & crumbling surf
if every gateway drug lived up to its name

Even if you never knew the silk-driven close-out
if there were places you could hide if time could be
unwound if you knew the steps

but if the deluge & personal desires flew commercial
on plum colored tattoo mists in sharkskin tuxedos
if gestures like crime uproot the purpose if iridescent
fingernails pointed the way the sex & content of regional
failure if you wanted that if it could translate into
an overwhelming silence as if it was all that I could give you

Planktone Tango (Take 2)

Just the light pissing of rain
with California plates
inside a pearl gray aquarium lit
by pale flickering neon
The whispered denial the speck of blood
clipped from an ancient text (the future
started yesterday maybe ended the day before
as I recall yr shadowheart slamming the door & the wind
lifted as the clouds thinned out an almost lucid rendition
years of song & palm trees
I couldn’t imagine it any other way
a nail driven like a shot of tequila thru the back of your head
whoever you are mistaken for
gull wings slashing the last rays of sunlight
that the end hath given
might have been coiled in an improbable spanglish curse
I never checked the reference but Baudelaire or Joe Strummer
& a few steps away from the wavy thick green depths
to which love exaggerates in evolutionary terms
listening without really listening
smoking a recombinant Martian cigarette craving
the weight of her breasts

Black Tar Palisades

No reason the sky should be
rinsed in bleach
but slanted so the
runoff splashes Ocean
Street

The difference between
echo breeze flowerheads
bending to the whistle buzz
& the moon in a space suit
at Disneyland
spanks the silver dust
that fell upon us

given to bent wire parables
that ride w/the tide
when the night swamps her eyes
& I decline the invitation implied
in sheets of galvanized
pacific steel
rippling in the fadeaway