To Our Lady of Wet Sand as she swims down from the parking lot naked beneath her tattoos & silver

Martian blue eyes
hypnotized by the sea
I guess beauty can only
cop a plea as the sky bleeds
like a jelly doughnut
& my sunglasses don’t
hide a thing
 
The Heart Sutra
inscribed on a grain of sand
reminds me of sipping a Primo
while listening to reggae music
in the Aloha Island Grille
on a dark night in February
with water in my ear

I may have looked like the
shroud of Turin but I felt just like
King Kong on a bender
teaching the nuns how to
cheat at liar’s dice
& bragging about surfing Todos Santos
w/a girl in my fist

 

Mark It Zero

Did the tribal stomp & shuffle on the bluff
above the beach as the swell rolled in

heavy green water cut with foam

Dromedary days on the drought-stricken

central coast only make me thirsty

Hummingbird interrogates the red flowering aloe

Is there an answer for everything?

I didn’t think so
 

Slow on the Draw

1.  "True poetry is born out of the very
despair that the word is useless
and poetry is to be abandoned."
Shinkichi Takahashi

2.  The right word is as good as any other
if you say it like you mean it.

3.  Written language was invented by merchants
as a way to keep track of their wares.

The Confessions of St. Valentine

for Pamela

I used to calmly converse with the
vatos & their sisters
then reverse the charges

            Tequila w/salt tastes like blood I thought
                      & I never told that to anyone but you
                                 after first making sure that
                                             you weren't listening

& the way you return my dreams to their default settings
always careful not to spook the horses

            I never think about where you've been
                      although I often wonder where you are

your eyes catching the light just so

            like sun-dazzle on darkwater tide pools
                     when the seaweed is in bloom

This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps

It was the season of our savior’s

temptation in the desert

–he never could lay off the smack

The tai chi on the beach only confused me

I thought they were doing a slow motion watusi

to a Roy Orbison record playing backwards

I was dragging the Meister Eckhart Signature-Edition Longboard

through the sand feeling like the Ottoman empire in decline

yet somehow loaded with Chinese bells & whistles

& the warmth of the late winter pavement beneath my feet

felt like a debt repaid beneath the hazy blue sky where

gulls decide who will be left behind

& just the rumor of a breeze

gives the eucalyptus trees something to talk about

Mollusks at the Gate

The sky is stomping grapes

& bending the silverware into interesting

shapes                       

            the light returning

e quel remir if you want to get

hung up on it

The leaves full of voices

murmuring & disconsolate

& the light as it might reflect upon an alabaster nude

(choose the sex that works for you)

The eucalyptus leaves trembling in the wind

full of voices

a carefully shattered attention

disconsolate, perhaps

depending from a thread of smoke

Seaside diorama, surfboard in a bottle, & the light

suffused in haze

lamplight

thru a near transparent silk curtain

silver in shadow

la luz de Oriente

in a sharkskin bikini

Prior Consent

I found that the aesthetics of the

phoned-in confession

tended to disrupt

the purity of my dreams

Nothing that a fresh coat of

paint wouldn’t cure but

given how relentless the sky can be when you

need a place to hide & the sea-

breeze stepping it up in the ancestral cypress my

preference would be to watch the sun

set rust into rust as the medicine man’s daughter

said You can lead a horse to water but you can’t

make it dance

just as dying of thirst is the

drowning man’s curse a

shake & bake resolve can’t break down the door of

compassion anymore than these tinsel

strands of seawater can hogtie the redolent

haze that

seems to have settled in for the long haul now

That irritable reaching after fact and reason

– What does that poem mean?

– It means what it says.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
                                      & so Whalen, 1975,
a reading with Ginsberg at Naropa--

          "Quite often people are so busy trying to figure out
          why I'm saying it, that they don't pay attention to
          what it is I'm saying."

Side Effects

Watching the next tragedy unfold on live TV. 

Happy it wasn’t me.  My dream

a recent coversation between

Amiri Baraka & Ed Dorn in heaven.  Tuesday

started out silver but faded on me.

A day late & a dime short.  Green

scenes straight out of the tide book.

Love could be another way to say it.

Paddling out on a stolen surfboard is the

most common symptom.  Side-effects may include

invincibility, a trick knee, the hully-gully,

& a feeling for leaving.