Residual Sapphire Clouds

Slow blue pale blue aquamarine
Carburetor Blues
smog light haze decomposing
distantly
I realize I’m farther away than that

bluish greenish

SMACK UP (A ROMANCE)

you drag your knuckles in the sand

order the cheeseburger
& 7 beers

dignity

or the best case scenario

heavy duty engines running underwater
offshore breeze feathering the shorebreak

rippling darkwater testimony
as opposed to a sunstroke aqualung
your eyes lit up like an Ensenada drugstore
your pockets full of sand

Chrome & Water

The fragile
off-balance rhyme that buckles yr knees
              the long way back across the sand
kind of ringing in yr bones
                              a surly tango in the parking lot

sunlight grazing on seagrass
              the tide nuzzling up against the cliff
the silver shimmering out there in pieces
                              you can string together
                                                & wear on yr wrist

In the earliest maps California is
depicted as an island
              & as it turns out they were right

Tracks in the Sand

              Tapping in now to the
slurred speech of waves (this time
                              dusted green submerged
                                                rationalized into silk
like an excerpt from
              Lao Tzu’s lost thesis
                                                on oceanography

              I have a shelf full of seastones & shells
                              I picked up off of beaches
                                                from Baja to Bolinas
              & I could tell you where each one came from
                              but maybe it would be better if you
                                                asked them yourself

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 63)

So we sat around, the missus and Dean and Kurt and his wife Joy and talked and mused of Colorado and Big Al would saunter in full of sweat and talking excited like the boy he was and on to further projects but he always called me Price like Dean did, like he was just one of the thugs talking across an even table...”Price what are you doin’ these days?”, with that horsey smile and funny delivery...but he always listened with interest to what I had to say…maybe big Al was a Buddha in roebuck and grit showing us some wrongs that we might do right and smiling that 40 hand horse smile... and while Dean and I secretly planned our meeting with the coeds by individually digging the possible scenarios while carrying on the subtleties of casual idle-speak, it was decided that tomorrow we would take out the boat with Manny, their do-all local guide at the wheel…We’d do some diving, fishing, and beer drinking along with a seaward picnic lunch of some kind... big Al was going to do some bone-fishing and there was going to be a couple cases of Belikan consumed…which could bespeak a certain vanity but like I say when it is appropriate to be abstemious then be abstemious but when the tables swerve just indulge, veil your light and manage to shine…

Mrs, Sharpe would stay at home while the hombres were being hombres, running the two-way radio to keep us in radar range and safe should there be some divine question to ask or freak storm to avoid...we would set out at the red hour of six, ours being a two hour journey… it was decided that I should stay in the great downstairs guest bungalow in order to be steadfast and boot-shined by the time Mr. Sharpe was ready to roust... “In the day of prosperity be joyful”

I could see Dean getting antsy for our now fully-developed plan to travel by four-wheeled moto-vehicles down to the resort where Lydia and Candy were staying…excitement was beginning to get under our skin and we both felt the holy anticipatory rendezvous cum shot lightning in our ears...Dean got up and proclaimed that we were heading out, and by now it was early evening and the birds outside squawked and the light drooped down upon our eyes like great Los Angeles, the hazy dream light and heavy wet air loitering like street corner bums without reason, without soreness, that only southern clamorfornia sundown weeping-hour feeling was out there...this white manila canvas laid over with blue red orange fuchsia and green emotion, oh art, for hell, it's the beauty of beauty of course, getting my gun off this a way or that a way via color, and color being nothing more than refractions of light and this hincty L.A. light had delusional refractions, see, maniacal bendings, light creating the colors but also creating moods that no other light could, you see, because Colorado light for instance is sharp and vivid and lean and there's certain feelings triggered by those qualities ,say, palsy or thrifty-ness or exactitude or patriotism if you live in Colorado Springs...But this tropical light, when it's framed by paranormal Zen Americana hip west coast, it's the light of the melancholy of Coleridge, the grip of Bird's habit,--"Peckinpah’s Light"—

And it's in this terrarium that Sharpe and I set out, removed from the family quaintness and security into a world willed by our base senses…two men showered and ready, seeking poison to earmark the possibility of history in make--we were calculating, cunning, & so on--and so we left...Dean had me on back of another motorized terror vehicle, designed to tear up and go over whatever was in the way…sure I myself used to tear up hills and dales in my youth but here we were reaching for 35 and these Sharpes had all the toys America deemed necessary for the male...and along with sports, this made up the 88% brain matter usage...

-Michael Price

Late Afternoon Song Early in the Morning

The way one might
downshift passing a whale skeleton on a day when the
decidedly distracted sunlight
wobbles like a sumo wrestler on stilts

when knock-kneed bamboo windchimes
along with a badly tuned mandolin
conspire to hijack my otherwise delicate sensibilities

a bucket of rain, green mist, multiple hinges, seaweed, gravel

The Complete Poems of the Pacific Coast Highway

a systematic disinclination of the senses
with diminishing returns

Stone Canyons Beneath the Sea

velvet blades slice the ocean haze
              seashells skimming descent
                                                where you & I knock down the
                              auguries of innocence in rusty tidepool
              sessions

              trembling Spanish interiors

                                                & a kind of rumbling indifference
                              you could build a religion out of

Goodbye, Dirty Machine (part 62)

And we had made contact, the twosome versus the twosome.   And we had made eyes—Candy and I—and they were not mad eyes, but eyes of primrose, and I was all for openings in this new second home...As usual Dean only had a small amount of time because he was required to report back to the compound for work, but we had made some plans for later that night with the dames and they seemed pleased...

All my life I had wanted Cunt, loads and loads of Cunt…It seems I was terrified of being nothing—were taught to yearn to be something and like my father always said in moments of heightened revelry “let’s get drunk and be somebody!"…but to be nothing is the freedom divine…

So Dean and I speeding homeward to the compound to see his folks and get the lay of their land…I see this giant tasty house with great open windows and local wood cut deep brown and stuccoed...fans and screens and great wooden doors, giant deck with observation tower towards the north and behind that the wind propeller all white and black for the winds of leisure to shape it...and once inside the furniture mimed the way you see it in Casablanca movie memories with great openness and a flavor you can breathe in all the way to a hungry stomach...Breath is the junior credential after all while death the senior...like I say when I sit "Holy breath or death" and here it feels alive and physical tho’ I know underneath lurks sam and sara the great suffering world of us...so this is the place where the rumors were built, and though the Sharpes were far short of "owning their own island" as I had heard, they had it pretty good...and do you know that the old man had about twenty Belizians out on that pier working to bring it back to life after is was sunk by the hurricaine, and he himself was out back building a giant wine cellar and greenhouse with a blue backhoe brought from the states…

Meanwhile the Mrs. kept busy with needlepoint and magazines and the occasional mixture of cock and tail...man it was all bent up in some plutonian fashion seeing these Boulder youth-town people in such contrast and it was sweet too, like cribbage and the Donner party, and I felt right at home…I was singing, singing with a wide brick smile on my face...I loved it here, and I was going to stay as long as my American lungs would have it...

-Michael Price

Gunmetal Iguana Pipes

What is propped up with
aftermarket sun-
light lingers behind eyes
a long way back as I would
tell myself again
how see-saw battles have
spun-out in drunk-colored neon spray
just as I could say our numbers are
tapped like keystrokes in re-mix samples
of accent & rime
but ethereal enough
to keep your sunglasses on all night
not that I’d lift the tell tale
signage
nor drag the sectioned break that tacks
your ankles to a cross of sand
but hazard to recite litanies resigned
to nickle & dime aloha bells
& count the steps below

An homage

Out in the street


Out in the middle of the motherfucking street