Flashback

                    i.m. Albert Hofmann, 1906-2008
 
I made my way thru
the undulating brick walls
& vibrating neon colors

watching the faces of those
around me freefall thru
a kaliedoscope of distortion

beautiful, horrific & eternal…

I always found it to be
rather charming that you
denied having anything to

do w/turning on an
entire generation

Another Shitty Day in Paradise

No more lost than any faded
x-rated postcard misdelivered just as this

sky kind of slid down past your
subconscious gridlocked turistas

in a past life that you never could shake
all pastel & turquoise w/blood-stained lessons

up against it when the squad car bears
down string them along real polite-like

but don’t make it too obvious the mother-
fuckers are always ready w/the riot stick

upside the head like Sullivan he never did talk
quite right after & his eyes would vibrate

at times as he stared intently at nothing
in particular caressed by the golden light

that all of us took for granted

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 35)

I was being swung on an idea, but it wasn’t an ideology...I continued to sit mornings, chasing thoughts, watching erections, feeling cramps and dream pains, letting it all ride in the empire purge...

And that didn’t stop me from moving out of San Francisco, right in the heart of merry old December, after a Thanksgiving visit from Gabriela and her Father...Three days she was there and three days I spent time with her, and not once did I end up alone enough with her to even entertain the idea of sex...but I didn’t care, I didn’t want that because when I knew in the chest that I didn’t want to invest blood, there was no chance that I would want conjugal matters...

Sure, I told myself, it will all make sense soon... sure, Gabriela came to visit and I missed a connection by seven miles because I was afraid of raising the troops on guilt and the articles I read on faggotry, misogyny, and a tincture of sperm, all being closely tied to mental illness...and I had the next few days to think about how I might get myself out of my own created Dante rut, and so I went to work with the I Ching trying to put something together with as little pain as possible...in the meantime, along came Tanya, whom I swindled on and on about 100 pages ago...

The Universe was picking me up by the chin hairs, a daily shaver to put me somewhere away from the epicenter dandy/pinky rotting honest-to-God death tier... I told my supes at the college that I needed a break, which was the entire, shattered truth.   I said I needed to get away for a month at short, and maybe as much as three...I was ripe for the tropics, I was half in my mother mother’s lap...In short, I’ve now recounted episode # 3 of Thermocouple Ball misfire, meaning, Tanya and then the Jewess, and now, in a fit of friendly plaything slightly soused nerve-angel fooling around, with Gabriela on the eve of my departure for the tropics.   One last time we had dinner in her living room wherein we found ourselves nearly naked and to the point of senussi rising, coincident with the entry of Bulgaria, me threatening her on new flanks, she threatening me with nothing but her beauty, and we all but sealed my fate by nearly but then calmly, she steered us away from a climax, and I was going away with nothing but goodbye and tersely swollen balls...and then Boom!   I find myself in the air, screaming across Texas with more terrifyingly good thoughts, more submissive relaxing airs about me, ready for my mother, ready for the blue ocean, ready for the twenty year Dardanelle Ramona and her Constantinople hair and skin...

-Michael Price

50 Devas in the Driveway

It’s no different
              a minor
                              tearing of the cloth
or that other time
              ripped on the Cuervo
                              a wavering dance thru
machetes & blue light
              I had expected nothing
less
                              tore off a corner of it
for a rainy night
              when you’d need it most
aesthetically arranged
                              over that way
beneath an off-brand palm tree
              stigmata, enough
to surrender this moment or the next
                              ever to follow that

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 34)

I rose to the surface, then swung my port around in the direction of Gabriela’s face.   It didn’t occur to me that I was repeating the same pattern which had brought me to my present lowly presence, which had actually brought me most of my suffering for my entire life, that same pattern of look, pursue, flirt, romance, eat out, and fuck.   That was it.   A simple recipe for torture that I had alone perfected, of course with the consent of the woman who was undoubtedly working on her own similar torture pattern, laced with insecurity and a few hours escape from boredom... “For every bodily pleasure brings joy at first, but at length it bites and destroys”...and here we were, Gab and I perched on that precipice of atomic desire, me with my cock an inch inside, she with her mouth agape and her historical, Mediterranean face aglow, her womb pulling the inevitable and perpetual part of me close...

I had forgotten what it was like, this uncertainty, this moment where a decision is both born and made...I hadn’t been this close to a major life move in nine months.   And then we made it with not so much as a few words, by driving into hips, by letting go into the carelessness and coldness of these times we live in...a coward’s choice but one covered by universal love and blunder, a guarantee that there is no one who is not a breaker of rules, and that Gabriela and I had made no mistake for bright, roving observers and friends...we simply exchanged bliss and heart and we did it for at least an hour...and Gabriela could make a man feel like a sexy mother fucker... I want to say Italian Film is Great!   For the women of Italy!   Passion is their pose and they strike it perfect...

I have one image alone of the night and that is of the cold winter window open to the tip stars and the blue repose, while under me and with me Gabriela had her own visions and memories, probably minute details of a touch, a look, a particular breath...Women’s movements are the more shocking by contrast with the quietude of male ignorance...their convictions are by instinct, and their activities intentional and their memories exacting.   The man’s spontaneous, clumsy and loose...their failures they keep to themselves and so they appear weaker...

So I left.   Gabriela and I left it where it was.   Which was an intense condensation of confusion misted over a shaky premise.   A premise built on projection.   A premise acting like a promise, already broken, already regretted.   A weakness, not oral or traditional or expressed, but a convulsion of truth that would need to be ferreted come soon...but i was gone from the Centennial state and back in the orange kiss western edge of the western world...So I continued with my plans to move back to the place of my birth, continued to discuss things with a candor too simple, too palpable, and resumed fucking my ex-wife whenever I got the chance...I was a coward at best.   There was the same tired old and familiar guilt, guilt for needing the cunt of my ex, guilt for not being honest with G, guilt for barely writing poems, for wearing glasses when looking into the vision of the unity of God.   I was a man apart.   Apart from the gilded poet fakers I worked around at the college, apart from my own season of refuge and rhythm, apart from the two women I was carnally unworthy of apart from a family...

But by god by jesus I look back now and I was not apart from the path...a path with signs now coming swift as the thunder that peals, and what I could see more clear along this trail, like a mountain fire road cut between the stands of pine and looking up like a night to see the arms and hands of them, what I was beginning to see was my own budding perfect contempt for the world, how each and every manufactured and merchandized moment, object, and thing mattered less and less...what mattered more and more to me was the annihilation of the demarcation, of the effulgence laid over each aching moment of living, like the grey dusking light coming on to snuff the pulsation of the self, the drowning blue sun, the true self, Atman, the self-effulgent witness...Like sight in the eyes, like hearing in the ears, like smell in the nose—so too love in the heart and so too, the true self in the false...

-Michael Price

Medium Blue Vinyl

Outside there is a world.   A word.
It doesn’t mean anything.
Out, up from the
waves, the sea, say what you will,
reconvene that last
finger of cypress.

Insoluble gray-white vistas
              returned to silver, to smoke
dependent upon a parallel vocabulary
                              the shuffle of glass cards
on the horizonless horizon
              that later you can’t deny
hardwired to the pavement
                              driven down
into the sand

I let it all fade into the sound of
waves
              humming out there like
silk-weaving looms
                              in the opium dream I
never had

Beyond Repair

The sun is shining.   Rigorous criteria.   Crystal & cement.   The
          richest country in Africa is skipping across Walnut Ave.
I had it figured out.   Falling from a great height.   GOLDEN.
          Turned upsidedown in Kansas.   A blank space, a few
          numbers, a ripple thread creasing the tide.   Look.

In yet another state the music continues.   Without you.   Trees
          drop into their own shadows.   Shade.   Dancing skeletons.
The short cut loop down the alley across the vacant lot tiptoe
          debris.   Weeds & thistle.   Gravel & pearls.   All of it set
          into mosaic sessions.   Body art for lost souls.

Particle Accelerator in Overdrive

suicide attack
murder suicide
standoff
                            hostage situation
suicide mission
suicide bomber

I’m going to take you with me
when I go

peeling out on
Kamikaze Blvd where we can
plunge to the depths
or fuck it up all golden-like
guaranteed

(Better spell-check that suicide note)

suicide blonde
weak in the knees

suicide squeeze

There is one knows not what

spinout WHOMP altocumulus
descending
                    something else than
                                        restlessness perpetuates
running out the blood
                    never so gently (waves)
                              the other end of the beach
SOMEWHERE for certain
              birdsong splashdown riptide cutback
                                                  falling upwards
step into silence
                    whomp awash
                                        “Silent cities in the sea”
(howling in my skull)
                    tumbling as well
                                        any minute now