Underwater Ballet

I had some other place to be.   There were complications―
the rooms were too large, the stairway too steep, the walls
were caving in around me.
I had a rope-ladder in order to exit via the window
which was only about 3 stories up but slanted out at a 45 degree
angle over the rocks & the sea below.
Halfway down the ladder I realized how ridiculous all this was.
I stood in a darkened parking structure smoking a cigarette.
A woman approached me to say that she didn’t need any matches.
As she walked away I noticed that she had a tail like an alligator
dragging on the floor behind her.   In Mexico I
looked down from a stupendous height as a group of children
gutted & skinned some kind of water buffalo.
In the room next door it was a rainy morning in Seattle.
A naked woman drank coffee from a very ornate antique cup
made of a mysterious metal that changed shape as she sipped from it.   It was distracting but I still wanted to fuck her.
I was accused of a crime I knew that I didn’t commit
but the evidence was so overwhelming I began to
question whether I had actually done what they said
& inexplicably forgotten all about it.

“Moss Landing, no I mean Mussel Shoals”
I kept confusing the two.
I had a job shaping boards at a surf shop in Ventura.
My skin was coated in a thin layer of fiberglass dust.
I had just won the Nobel Prize for literature.

I’ve never had a dream in which I could fly.
I know that many people share that dream of
flying bird-like high above the earth.
The closest I get is a kind of levitation
where I rise up only a foot or so above the ground
in an upright position
& with an extraordinary amount of effort
manage to glide forward for a few yards before
dropping back down onto my feet.
It’s a very difficult & exhausting exercise
& although I must have dreamed it hundreds of times it
never gets any easier.

I’ve had dreams in which others fly.

Sometimes they sprout wings & take to the sky,
other times, wingless, they just seem to
swim through the air.

Test Drive

The lasting legacy of CASH
(vapor) among other wisps of
NADA de la Cruz
spilling over the pink
end-of-days
into a dusty shade of
gray (morning for a moment
then a pure pacific blue later
slicing the day in half

2.
What I think is veins of sand
                              plumes in the heart
              marble light hook grooves
                                                older than the sky
              beneath the pavement

3.
The prayer flag caught the wind
& held it there

as a rare species of tropic
something-or-other
settles in for the long haul

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 68)

We took ourselves into the open air of night once golden sun now silver moon...Dean had lined up a swanky hotel room just down the beach through some family connection, and we informed the women that we were heading back there, with their approval, to wind things down, leap without leaping from anywhere and sleep off what was sure to be some kind of hangover...The place was dead empty.   Sharpe found his night clerk connection and the girls and I made words in the lobby and felt some relief when he appeared again with a key and a grin... “top floor for the guests, nothing but pomp and circumstance for us tonight...” “Woohoo” said Candy, flashing me a sly grin and grabbing the gymnast’s hand in ascending the stairs...we piled in a large square room made of Mennonite wood with two queen beds right up alongside each other and a tiny table and lamp in between...we were in the interval between idea and action...no booze, no smoke, no television...

I guess it was New England obvious what we were all there for and from the way the girls jumped to the respective beds (me too Dean too), there was only one thing left to do: kill the lights.   The gymnast threw her legs up over her head and smartly closed the wall switch with her toes, leaving the room hued over with a tender wooden sadness...all clothed, we slipped under the bed sheets and the hands got handy, mine finding Candy’s bobbins under the undershirt, quite smashed in by a coarse lace bra...she in turn took turns at my buttocks and back, stroking and scratching just enough to get a hair-rise on the neck...this was accomplished under the bedclothes to ward off Dean and his solemn games of ducks & drakes, who’d love nothing more than a live porn played out in a circle of clucking admirers…Meanwhile he was getting his dong serviced by the gymnast…and dear Candy was ready to move on...my mouth was slowly having hers and moving down to the her myrtle hedge with a smooth and slick shift into masticulation...she was in agreement to a full extent, pulling the covers up over her head to create a safety ¬cocoon around us, and keeping the probes of Sharpe seeing white..I earnestly gave her privates a good whipping... the torrents were swollen and I was up to my ears in a tropical cocktail of our making...it wasn't long before she had pulled me up to her again and quickly returned the gesture, sliding down my stomach with the perfunctory treasure trail teasing, ending up with a mouthful of cock and creating all kinds of physics, from action/reaction, friction, vacuums, etc...

To the melancholic this would seem melancholic, but it was an action attuned to the vast, and my part of the action/ reaction principle was the latter, my reaction being a quickly manifested batch of the glorious semen, whipped from my exploit and deposited into the insides of candy's mouth and throat ...I was admittedly fast, coming off the Ramona failures...it was a relief to spill my guts and look at my actions without tremor...but it was rather fast and I had to believe that I could muster more compassion for Candy, making a strong go at it later, which I explained to her, that I needed some rest before I could build up the enemy, being a much advanced old man in the boudoir and knowing it ...shame...I had a powerful urge to sleep…next door, the still active Sharpe and gymnast circus was in full swing, which at this moment featured Sharpe on top, the gymnast in some rather crab-like receiving position, and him taking deep and long strokes into her...But I was exhausted and quickly fell into a deep nod…and the thought of fair innocent Ramona rolled over me like putrid fever...This jarred me awake, eye wide, motionless, disorientated, with the usual reaction of silence…and the room was quiet and asleep, the gymnast snoring slightly, and Sharpe turned away in a fetal position towards the dark other half of room...at these moments there is no cerebration, some ripped mind caught a-wares in stupor, from tragic dreams, sysyphusian, and strange, into a room that bears no marks of familiarity, wanting to lull backwards into sleep...But erection! I had one! The dreams, like death, extraordinary for their recuperative powers...Candy, candy...To awaken her I slid my hand down to the pussy...and she awoke and demanded that we French kiss...soon enough I had myself inside her, stroking smooth and slow, thinking “to love is to die” all the whiles inventing my future, my favorite escape, my fucking...and dying little deaths each time......Eat candy:   Sugar baby.   Marathon.   Fun dip.   Big hunk.   Sugar daddy.   Fuck Candy. Faster.   Look to your left.   See Sharpe through the solid black air.   Notice his enthusiasm.   Keep fucking.   Shift down into deep ignorance with a heavy rocker arm.   Become furious.   Don’t finish.   Roll off.   Say some sweet guilty things in the ear of candy.   Slip away.   Jujubees.   Jujubees Jujubees...The insidious red Sharpe told me the next day that I fucked like the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland…and I laughed and said he fucked like Bella Lugosi…

And off we went in the morning—girls one way, men another...to my bed I crawled and that was the last time I would see Dean in this blown down spring...and I couldn’t have been giddier about it—his plane left the next day for the states and the two women were leaving together that afternoon—and I couldn’t have been blitzier...I really couldn’t have been even if I was being eternally blown in the summers and the brightly dressed pastel colored boys and girls with chalk piece smiles were showering me with Maker’s Mark, Parliaments, Raybans, cocktail ice, smoke and sideways glances...these are the things I dreamt about that morning, spellbiding and sidewinding from tequila backlash and damn near sicko-ness...and rhythmic guilt that came and went like a stiletto in the ribs, saying Ramona, give me all your Ramona you motherfucker, and I reach down my throat towards that heart and try to pull her visage and there she is plunging the blade in towards my spleen and back out and in again at the other lower vitals and it’s seeing situations as they are you howl and howl at your stupidity and your one-eyed monster who says “we have to learn in order to unlearn,” the cunt when all I needed was the Practice of Purification, hence
1. The power of regret
2. Power of the basis
3. Actual application of opponent forces &
4. The power of resolve
...instead I woke up in my dream drumming on bamboo, calling the tortoise, eating jade mushrooms, plucking the lute, summoning the Phoenix, and drinking from an alchemical crucible...

-Michael Price

Artificial Horizon

 
                              telescopic underwater haze
-----------------------------------------------------
              a sand chorus falsetto
                                                fading into the
                              fine lines behind your
                                                                fever dreams
-----------------------------------------------------
                              Mexican hubcaps
-----------------------------------------------------
                              a harpoon

Pipeline Blues

You can follow me there but you’ll
have to find your own way back

tiptoe across the broken bottles

The air waves woven above
in cloud-colored silk you
wear to camouflage the
puddle of smoke rippling
at your feet
                                                (something I heard
              tumble {through the
                              pages of a book
                                                bound in concrete}

Nothing so quite so pure
dark (knocking at the kitchen window)

                                                feathered acetylene
                              gloom & havoc

an adrenaline-fueled lullaby

              (like listening to you bleeding

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 67)

Let there be doom and rain and recon, I thought, as I climbed into the junior high needle spray of the shower feeling a thousand tiny pricks of clean hitting the back...I could hear Dean talking but only making out few words I had no idea what leaps he was making...I feared for my life, my new randy and ribald life...now to describe here how many phone calls he made in an hour’s time would be terrific and strange but I can’t do that because it was many, in fact, it was at least 7 to one hotel and then the next, transferring to dining rooms and talking to Belizian waiters who had no idea what Dean’s hack spanglish was meaning......I made myself choke down a Belikan while he just kept working the phone, and I felt that old feeling of a big night on high, a party with loads of girls, cruising amongst all the freaks of a Friday eve in a small town when suddenly the night breaks down and the key figures vanish, the libations run out, the drug wears off and you sink into a trembly swoon of letdown when the best cure is immediate and lengthy sleep...”Price it’s not looking good...they said they’d be at Capt. Morgans eating with the parents but that we should meet up with them after that...but the bobbysoxers are hiding...No one can find ‘em...I’ve called all my contacts and no one’s seen ‘em...let me try the hotel and then we’ll see if we can mess up some party favors.”

I had heard that we could get some from the dealers who hung in the shadows near Fido’s...because we would need some kind of chemical booster to make us explode from the center...we were weak, stupid bastards writing our classic work for all of night draggers, those who want something, anything bad enough to deny the sense of the body which asked to bet let down gently after the sun/beer/wind and wave of today...be kind to the vessel for it takes you places...cherry...apple...death.

Dean had reached the females at some resort restaurant by describing them to the waiter, and to my growing fascination, had arranged to get his water taxi connection out of bed and in his boat to pick them up and deliver them to Fido’s dock......so we tripped our way down the beach moaning and laughing at our miserable possibility...Things are as bad as we think!   I was particularly bent, dragging tired authority and simple manners along with my weary legs and red scalp from old tropic helios and somehow it was beautiful, that Dean and I, two miscreants on different paths, found ourselves in Central America in the year of the mother up to our old tricks of chasing drugs and cunt...It was warm as any healing bath and I was starting to feel home and the guises of a wonderful project, the study of my very freedom... I was on overdrive test burn mode, docking near Fido’s to try out my burgeoning drug theory, eager to feel that whore rush of X and be awake and alert and not have a mind that agrees and disagrees but one that deals in raw pain and cooked pleasure… Sharpe, with his cormorant distensible sense, found the connection lurking behind a tree just down from Fido's...

“only drug I got is coke man”   No coke for us.

We both retreated from pharmaceutical dreams and resolved simply to get boracho and let the fermented anthropogenic hearts of our women dictate style, geographic location, temperature, background noise, and ferocity of said previous copulation visions...So we went straight to the dock and watched the single blue lighted skim feather darkly into the dock and off-load candy and the gymnast in a two drink minimum stumble.....and if the girls seemed down (because they were) then our fatigue did nothing constructive to change that condition and we started, as it were, on the wrong foot by asking them where they wanted to go, showing our lack of planning and ingenuity and furthering the burgeoning opinion that we were not mighty senses put upon sensuous bodies but numbskulls as narrow, bigoted, conditioned, anxious and tawdry as the men who made us...

Taken by all this misery, I suggested Shark’s bar two docks down, where we could avoid the noise and skullduggery of clubs and start in on our demise to get it over as quickly as to become vital, make merry…with ideas failing to materialize for anything else, my offer was accepted and we made it there just slightly looser than the previous minute...”Four Shots of Tequila and four Belikans” I said to the sweet woman barkeep who recognized the inescapable glow of vision in my request... “Price you remind me of James Caan…but for now let’s concentrate on turning this cold engine over, huh girls?”
“Whatever you say is fine with us”
“Right, and here’s lime and salt and bottoms Up you navy seals...” Four shots went down gullets and gasps of fire breath concluding along with Sharpe’s whoop and gurgle, girls swallowed the poison down better’n us, I a red-faced resolute man with just enough fire to cease yawning, ditching at that very moment any remnants of obscure dread and instead firing up the intense desire for something deep with candied candy...Dean was thinking the replica and we all had about enough gas for a few more shots and a beer or two, which were administered in relative obscurity while behind music drove fast with boom boom and everyone’s hands touched unabashedly each others’ bodies...it reminded me of singing melancholy ballads on a snow eve in Boulder drinking red and missing city friends for no reason at all...We had gotten past the prelims, all of us, and now it was time to do what was wanted epistemologically—that is, fuck.

-Michael Price

Kind of Turquoise

I just now woke up an hour ago
spilling out of lousy dreams into the
dark

The last of the rain signaling
from beyond the treeline
                              like Eli Wallach
beyond the reef
                                                where even I would just
                              throw in the damp bandanna
                                                                the sunset flaw
              the brick wall of endless sky
                                                & a few lyric tire-irons

to resolve the pearl-driven tooth of midnight
as yet unclaimed

Smog Lines

When Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo spotted the brownish haze of Indian fires hanging above the hunting grounds of Southern California, he gave the name Bahia de los Fumos (Bay of the Smokes) to what was either the bay of Santa Monica or San Pedro.   Four centuries later, on July 27, 1943, under the front-page headline: CITY HUNTING FOR SOURCE OF GAS ATTACK, the Los Angeles Times reported the fourth assault of a “smoke nuisance.”   A year later, on September 18, a new word passed into the local lexicon when the paper, using an expression common in Pittsburgh, referred to the bronze pall as “smog (smoke and fog).”

An itemized list:
1 BUSTED SURFBOARD
9 ALLEGORICAL ALLUSIONS
12 RUSTY SIX-SHOOTERS
4 SYRINGES
7 EMPTY CUPS
3 TRUCK TIRES
56 TOGGLE SWITCHES
19 CROWBARS
278 HEROIC COUPLETS
                              & a particular moment otherwise collapsed
among the pale faint water-flowers
                                                that pave the memory

I ended up with the bent spoon
& a lifetime subscription to
the sky over Hermosa Beach

              (some lives are meant to be
              w a s t e d

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 66)

It felt like some kind of temporary uppercut knockout that one stumbles from at around six thirty a.m., when the sounds of big Al willing the day to work emerge…but no, as I rolled over and knew by that drowsy numbness and thick head I was in trouble—I knew even before Dean made it down to warn me to rise that pain is the constant companion of pleasure...but we did our best to abate, taking motion sickness pills, a Mexican form of Alka Seltzer and two Ibuprofin and gulping them all down with as much bottled water as we could stand...this is why, when you feed it pills and exilirs, the ego becomes a terrific monster...!   So we made coffee, talked a little with Judy, checked the radio, gathered our tanks of air, regulators, fins, wetsuits, stocked two coolers full of icy Belikan all the while Al and Rear readied the boat out on the dock, warming the two yamahammer 225’s to run fast and sure, Dean and I taking every chance we could to sit on the beach and come alive...

So we left the house of prompt service and Big Al steered the vessel southward towards with rear and Dean both nervous for the reef and Al’s tendency to see poorly and drive quickly...but we made it to our dock not too many down from my mother’s house, which I espied as always from the water because of its glitter silver tin roof that stood out like a skinflint among masters...we were picking up Enrique the diminutive all-skill local who would drive us, guide us, master us, bait us, and cook for us as well...he was a soft and noble heart...he took over the boat as if it were his honored captain father and I felt a sense of grace and manifest destiny colored brown and repeated God send you nine beers or fish if you prefer so happy was I whose hangover was replaced by a feeling of well-being on open water with the breeze as warm as napalm and Dean now handing me my first beer right in the plain sight of his dad which I couldn’t really believe but old Al, he and his offspring were on vacation and beer it would be...but 8 a.m.?   I picked up that bottle and gave it a couple silent kisses and laughed and said to Dean next to me in the fore of the ship “son of a bitch.”   We clinked bottles from top to bottom in what had originated as a Sharpe trademark and braced ourselves for the open ocean which was fast approaching via the cut...I put on my headphones while the front of the boat bounced many feet in the air and crashed down on the back of every wave with a resounding thud, making much communication near impossible …

And I could tell hereof quite a number of things, amusing and remarkable though they were, which transpired on that boat that day but suffice it, in the interest of short wind to say that we A) drank all the beer B) Dove for forty minutes and speared ourselves about ten fish C) Had a beach cookout masterfully created and located by god guide lost at sea abandoned island in sun with beers while big Al bone-fished in the straits within eyesight and D) Deep Sea fished out about twenty more pescado of all variety... making for E) an incredible and exhausting day trip...when I finally rolled home at five thirty and showered, all movements like the walk of an elephant, sure and perfect, the bed in my east facing ocean view room felt like the other side of...Valium.   God did I pray that Dean would fall down and not get up, find his own sweet bed and displace the drive to lay and conquer…and the house being empty of my mother, seemed to be holding me in its arms allthewhile sighing and closing out the grey dusky light of obstacle...three ceiling fans whirred and groaned their Sisiphusian fate, the breeze did its work on the curtains and the somnambulant angels were drifting down on my black horizon...I was falling and falling and falling...never had I been so relieved from a day’s drubbing...

And there was Ramona, whom in all my reverie had faded some, eyes open and dim, then closed she came upon me—words are not the experience and most-so in the drowsy claret of exhaustion. She was prancing in front of me in the now legendary sarong, turning and turning, towards me, away, then back, stopping to her whimsy while I stumbled along boracho and with half control of my movements, losing her into the distance, the bleak future...I couldn’t catch her, much less my balance nor my wits or the particulars of joy, it was sheep, dip and barnacles, molasses, carnival, the guts of New Orleans, Dreams, dreams, all of it!   I stood smiling halfway in the door, it was surely a dream, I must’ve drifted off into some near-real self-luminous cognition and a hunger for something rousing my wits, lifting my boozy carcass to the front door where I couldn’t really see and I think I was naked, yes, this was one of those naked dreams and my teacher was at the door, Rishi, and in the distance I could see a dovecote full of what appeared to be lusty ladies, arms and legs and breasts in their skin and moving with a break-beat audacity...and in front of me there he stood, with his alms bowl, tattered cloak, and blu-blockers, the venerable Dean Sharpe...it was the devil I saw, and there was no dream, only a cold reality buttressed by the pivotal face of him, and my dumb visage staring back in disbelief...after a day like that he was there, bright-eyed and smoked. “Price, you ready? Huh huh huh huh...C’mon Price we gotta harumph harumph man, y’know, these ladies are out there waiting for us somewheres!”   I had been backing up as he naturally stepped himself into the house, smiling, I think, at his unbelievable audacity, rather tenacity and stamina but did I wish him gone at that moment and I wry-smiled it back at him—“Amigo I’m spent like easy mexican pesos against the dollar man, I’m fucking tired… Jesus are you serious about this?   I’ve been hallucinating and am sure delirium tremons are due to arrive any minute...couldn’t we do this tomorrow night?   Aren’t you tired?”   “Price man, I’m so worked too, I haven’t even slept, not a wink. Al put me to work cleaning fish and digging holes when we got back.   Those chicks leave tomorrow morning so this is our only night Price, this we gotta do...C’mon, take a shower and I’ll call their hotel...”   “I said I’m dying here brother...and enlightenment doesn’t mean dying you fool...”   “Price get wet while I do some reconnaissance and find them bitches...”

-Michael Price