Sometimes, I look into the night skies and it’s the insides
of the eyes of a friend I know is not going to make it,
the bright, startling moments and ideas that blow out
of the falling away, the going, the loss studded by stars,
of someone under so much suspicion for being more
than a witness in this world. And the river in me
has always been the search for that key to insert
into us for peace, as if it was the right five words
that you had to snatch out of this language in precise
order—grabbing honey bees out of a passing swarm.
Until then, drive your new product straight to the garbage heap.
I have left the old world.
Call me if you want in.
But first, point to your chest
and say, "Drought starts here."
Be warned: the world we seek
comes with a senseless new language.
Ongongaroo!
Decorations
my wife stood over this mess
of 200 feet of christmas lights
imagined the tangles and knots
complained of the effort required
to sort everything all out
until I took the tail of one end
and my wife took the other
in a mad act of small faith
and we stepped back
until we could see a line
stretched absolutely straight
then we both illuminated
of 200 feet of christmas lights
imagined the tangles and knots
complained of the effort required
to sort everything all out
until I took the tail of one end
and my wife took the other
in a mad act of small faith
and we stepped back
until we could see a line
stretched absolutely straight
then we both illuminated
Keep It To Myself
What if God gave me the sky
and let me write upon it
in letters two clouds high
so a line of poetry stretched
halfway across the state?
Yes, that’s when I’d learn
I’ve nothing much to say.
But, wait! What about the engine room?
That growth! That door somewhere in my skin
to the steaming, grimy, ta-pocketa space
that grew to power my place in this world,
unnerved bosses and made contractors do
exactly what I said and for how much,
made women take inventory for the man
they’d someday hope to get, kept
mechanics and car dealers fairly honest,
fixed broken things in single Saturdays,
paid all the bills even in the broke years,
so a wife and kids could believe me
when I said, “It’s going to be alright.”
I’m going to waste the sky for that?
Let's save the sky for all
its hellos and goodbyes.
and let me write upon it
in letters two clouds high
so a line of poetry stretched
halfway across the state?
Yes, that’s when I’d learn
I’ve nothing much to say.
But, wait! What about the engine room?
That growth! That door somewhere in my skin
to the steaming, grimy, ta-pocketa space
that grew to power my place in this world,
unnerved bosses and made contractors do
exactly what I said and for how much,
made women take inventory for the man
they’d someday hope to get, kept
mechanics and car dealers fairly honest,
fixed broken things in single Saturdays,
paid all the bills even in the broke years,
so a wife and kids could believe me
when I said, “It’s going to be alright.”
I’m going to waste the sky for that?
Let's save the sky for all
its hellos and goodbyes.
Pond
Meteor snaps to flame. A bird
turns its head unaware—sense
of dread as true as hunger.
Its bones then ride the wrong side
of a shooting star straight
into the long target of our ground.
No escape from the errant velocity
of everything, the way Sherman
drank all that hero juice and drove
his Dad's Camaro straight to redline.
The crash took forever. Street lights folded
into old and droopy orchids (all color gone),
the crumpling metal sounded planned,
with the station wagon big as a drive-in screen
for his last movie. Another doomed mother
shouts her kids' names so they’d hear
how sorry we can suddenly be.
A grandson announces all he's going to do,
and Grandpa says, “All there is for any man
is to accept himself before he’s gone for good.”
Members of the day’s Kiwadi Wash patrol
whisper code into headsets to take their positions
while the mujahedin gesture to each other silently
for everyone to find the best rock they could,
and the firing started, with America’s best
M4 Carbine Assault Rifles, designed by Colt,
5.6 millimeter caliber bullets, gas-operated,
firing off 700 to 850 rounds per minute,
while 7,000 miles to Washington D.C.
a technician on satelite duty jokes,
“Man, that’s miles and miles of nothing.”
Back in L.A., Officer Hickman worries
about his Hazmat suit, and the holes
it’s getting from all the use, budget cutbacks
in the way of safety, while the highways amaze
with the volume of better and better poison
getting trucked to U.S. farms and factories.
Florida panther wears the night
like Dracula's finest emperor cloak.
Mojave rattlesnake glories on a pocket mouse
and the feeling he won't have to eat for a week.
California condor plummets in ragged shadows
after drinking from a puddle of anti-freeze
left over from a radiator flush outside Fillmore.
Johnny Bongos comes in from a cigarette,
announces if the jungle wrote a book,
most people’d be dead before they finished it.
And as much as Rita loves the little drunk,
her debt to trouble's long paid off, and
in world not built for saving poets,
what’s a dreamy sales admin to do,
with Johnny seeking the same destruction
killed his father, as if knighthood waited.
A crane follows the interiors of its DNA south
over New Mexico, but that old pond is gone,
wings turn to solid wood, then air fails.
turns its head unaware—sense
of dread as true as hunger.
Its bones then ride the wrong side
of a shooting star straight
into the long target of our ground.
No escape from the errant velocity
of everything, the way Sherman
drank all that hero juice and drove
his Dad's Camaro straight to redline.
The crash took forever. Street lights folded
into old and droopy orchids (all color gone),
the crumpling metal sounded planned,
with the station wagon big as a drive-in screen
for his last movie. Another doomed mother
shouts her kids' names so they’d hear
how sorry we can suddenly be.
A grandson announces all he's going to do,
and Grandpa says, “All there is for any man
is to accept himself before he’s gone for good.”
Members of the day’s Kiwadi Wash patrol
whisper code into headsets to take their positions
while the mujahedin gesture to each other silently
for everyone to find the best rock they could,
and the firing started, with America’s best
M4 Carbine Assault Rifles, designed by Colt,
5.6 millimeter caliber bullets, gas-operated,
firing off 700 to 850 rounds per minute,
while 7,000 miles to Washington D.C.
a technician on satelite duty jokes,
“Man, that’s miles and miles of nothing.”
Back in L.A., Officer Hickman worries
about his Hazmat suit, and the holes
it’s getting from all the use, budget cutbacks
in the way of safety, while the highways amaze
with the volume of better and better poison
getting trucked to U.S. farms and factories.
Florida panther wears the night
like Dracula's finest emperor cloak.
Mojave rattlesnake glories on a pocket mouse
and the feeling he won't have to eat for a week.
California condor plummets in ragged shadows
after drinking from a puddle of anti-freeze
left over from a radiator flush outside Fillmore.
Johnny Bongos comes in from a cigarette,
announces if the jungle wrote a book,
most people’d be dead before they finished it.
And as much as Rita loves the little drunk,
her debt to trouble's long paid off, and
in world not built for saving poets,
what’s a dreamy sales admin to do,
with Johnny seeking the same destruction
killed his father, as if knighthood waited.
A crane follows the interiors of its DNA south
over New Mexico, but that old pond is gone,
wings turn to solid wood, then air fails.
French Candy & Cigarettes
“Yes, I have lived far too long
on French candy and cigarettes.”
She talked the next step in evolution,
and I had to understand her beast
to entirely new species, the one
breeding all the best advantages
any animal’s ever had.
“Sense is a bad neighborhood.
We only know as savages.”
And my arms drooped down, longer,
wrists thicker, brow more pronounced
as some sort of eroded rock outcrop,
hair sprouting like it sought sunlight.
When she checked her phone,
I pictured the king of her tribe,
and how he glowed, and told her all
the secret meeting places, and promised
her the favored princess treatment.
You guys go on and never die,
I thought, hoping it’s more than talk,
and the borders and boundaries I felt
were real, and breakable. Just disappear
into your new dimension, stepping
inside that room of light that lands for you,
the ones who engineered foreverness.
But, if you want to fuck,
no joke here, I can handle that.
Get you back to the swamp mud,
and the moonlight that takes a swing
and knocks you out, until your skin
is calling out to all your friends
about the earthquake it enfolds,
and how they all have to try this!
My worry is you’d never leave
the manpack again, choose instead
to live and die too young, too rough,
with the prehistoric rest of us.
on French candy and cigarettes.”
She talked the next step in evolution,
and I had to understand her beast
to entirely new species, the one
breeding all the best advantages
any animal’s ever had.
“Sense is a bad neighborhood.
We only know as savages.”
And my arms drooped down, longer,
wrists thicker, brow more pronounced
as some sort of eroded rock outcrop,
hair sprouting like it sought sunlight.
When she checked her phone,
I pictured the king of her tribe,
and how he glowed, and told her all
the secret meeting places, and promised
her the favored princess treatment.
You guys go on and never die,
I thought, hoping it’s more than talk,
and the borders and boundaries I felt
were real, and breakable. Just disappear
into your new dimension, stepping
inside that room of light that lands for you,
the ones who engineered foreverness.
But, if you want to fuck,
no joke here, I can handle that.
Get you back to the swamp mud,
and the moonlight that takes a swing
and knocks you out, until your skin
is calling out to all your friends
about the earthquake it enfolds,
and how they all have to try this!
My worry is you’d never leave
the manpack again, choose instead
to live and die too young, too rough,
with the prehistoric rest of us.
Quarry
Carolina could squish her face into the start
of a public works project—train tunnel
being dynamited into a cliff wall,
the look of a quarry yet to come,
then I’d know I could leave the Chili Pepper
easily as a desert island. She whirled out
in a hornblow wind of scarves and parakeet wings
to smoke a cigarette and get over the brain freeze,
outside, from two quick margaritas. Posts the claim,
“That’s why there’s tears!” for everyone to see.
Alone and sweet, without too much wine,
she could pull you by the hand out of the river
onto the bank, in the sun, with flowers
just being flowers as if that’s the way
it always was, but you forgot because
you distrust all the things of spring.
“What I need is somone to change the past,”
she whispered once, shrieked twice.
Little chili pepper lights were spread across
the booth seat she had emptied back to pine.
A good friend of back doors, one appears.
I wait again for hurt people to heal,
as if there were resurrection seasons
for us, too, and not just plants.
It’s not proof that Carolina wants,
it’s more proof. I pay the bill. Find her.
And it’s like I arrive right on time
for the city’s newest, saddest face,
and tell her that, yes, it’s all true.
In Carolina’s name, I’ll still attempt
the trick of changing what’s been done,
thinking maybe somehow I did it, and
yesterday, everything was different.
The blue bank building is now black,
there's just one sun today,
and Carolina completed a To Do list,
the demolition crew gone from her gaze.
of a public works project—train tunnel
being dynamited into a cliff wall,
the look of a quarry yet to come,
then I’d know I could leave the Chili Pepper
easily as a desert island. She whirled out
in a hornblow wind of scarves and parakeet wings
to smoke a cigarette and get over the brain freeze,
outside, from two quick margaritas. Posts the claim,
“That’s why there’s tears!” for everyone to see.
Alone and sweet, without too much wine,
she could pull you by the hand out of the river
onto the bank, in the sun, with flowers
just being flowers as if that’s the way
it always was, but you forgot because
you distrust all the things of spring.
“What I need is somone to change the past,”
she whispered once, shrieked twice.
Little chili pepper lights were spread across
the booth seat she had emptied back to pine.
A good friend of back doors, one appears.
I wait again for hurt people to heal,
as if there were resurrection seasons
for us, too, and not just plants.
It’s not proof that Carolina wants,
it’s more proof. I pay the bill. Find her.
And it’s like I arrive right on time
for the city’s newest, saddest face,
and tell her that, yes, it’s all true.
In Carolina’s name, I’ll still attempt
the trick of changing what’s been done,
thinking maybe somehow I did it, and
yesterday, everything was different.
The blue bank building is now black,
there's just one sun today,
and Carolina completed a To Do list,
the demolition crew gone from her gaze.
Stater Bros.
Stater Bros. gurpled busy as a chemical plant,
as she dragged along her cloud of perfume,
another outbreak amidst the bags and boxes
of factory food, seal of doom, unhappiness.
Mrs. Clarendon read the fat levels of chips
boiled in a new African oil, and wondered
briefly if she could eat her way to 19 again.
Eleanor paid no mind, pretending not to see
her neighbor because, well, talking is useless
as good advice, best intentions, vitamins.
The news of life removes the scent of fruit
right from the air—one might as well breathe
fractions—or deletes the steps from stairs
we climb climb climb unto the click of void.
She feared the lawlessness of produce,
the faint jungle greens and odder colors
that begged us back to graze. Cows!
No! Only packages talked of wealth
and our greatest schemes and cities
cinematic enough to make us dream
we, too, could be worshipped somehow
for our DNA, if we just met one person
who knew the person who ran things.
as she dragged along her cloud of perfume,
another outbreak amidst the bags and boxes
of factory food, seal of doom, unhappiness.
Mrs. Clarendon read the fat levels of chips
boiled in a new African oil, and wondered
briefly if she could eat her way to 19 again.
Eleanor paid no mind, pretending not to see
her neighbor because, well, talking is useless
as good advice, best intentions, vitamins.
The news of life removes the scent of fruit
right from the air—one might as well breathe
fractions—or deletes the steps from stairs
we climb climb climb unto the click of void.
She feared the lawlessness of produce,
the faint jungle greens and odder colors
that begged us back to graze. Cows!
No! Only packages talked of wealth
and our greatest schemes and cities
cinematic enough to make us dream
we, too, could be worshipped somehow
for our DNA, if we just met one person
who knew the person who ran things.
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