The Rivers Between Commerce

The scrapyard beckons,
The dark art of light refraction,
Where we pile on our dissatisfactions
As if they own us,
As if their price will go up
This time, if only this one time
Then we're flush
As the skies that promise nothing,
Nothing to deny us.

We list between piles of bitter complaint
That the one we have left,
Our mythical selves,
Can't compete
With the sleaze and light victories
Pulled like gills to the gulls
From warm polluted holes,
White gulls with otherworldly eyes,
Yet they pluck the lotus for shit
As does Quan Yin herself as well,
Have the choice to see heaven or hell,
Or maybe the blue only knows its own kind,
Learns nothing from all of the lies.

I have poured out as diurnal ritual
The barrels of measurable shit and urine,
Made microadjustments to

The indefensible
Dysfunction
Hoping my time was enough
Of a sacrifice

For the pleasure of seeing
Everything break,
Everything die and get taken
Apart,
All rationales slide down an icy crevasse
Where the Self as we pictured it
Can't be said to exist anymore
And nothing of goodness escapes
To the light ...

That trickery flickery always throws relief
Onto the shade,
In patterns of steel 

Glittering blade
Like Venetian blinds ...
— Is it the light or the dark
That binds us?
Who knows?
The pipes always churn out
The waste with ease
After this many rained-out days. 

This Day in Buffalo Bills History

They were named for a vaudeville show 
Because the Buffalo Bisons were already spoken for,
But that hardly explains one Elbert D. "Golden Wheels" Dubenion 
From miniscule Bluffton College to be beckoned in black face
To the first playbill will call for a casting coach named Buster
With Carlton, Wray; Torczon, LaVerne; Fowler, Willmer; Yoho, Mack ...
Impossible names all, even for vaudeville 
When they shuffle off the mortal coil
Of Buffalo's defunct and defiant ghosts of football.

They never knew they were dead, you see,
Always thinking they were in it when they weren't.
It's not the same to beat the shit out of the other pigskin misfits
As ride the golden steeds of the football gods,
As merciless and clean as they were sexy, as this crew --
Archie and Butch and Booker and Stew --
The penitents of Lou -- most assuredly were not.

And then there was Cookie, washed out with the Argonauts
For his too-cool-for Canada's dry three goose wings down,
Proof you can liquefy a cookie, to minstrel show juice.
He came with Ernie Warlick - a name I didn't make up -
To try their luck down South in the impossible TV snow

That brought light to Niagara's honeymooner cabins

And the arc welding eyes of the Lackawanna Poles,

The factory negroes, the Erie Irish, the Alsatians

Who came in on the wind. They agreed on nothing 

But the Bills, how truly disappointing they were,

And how they still prefer Pepsi 2 to 1 to Coke and think

The Bavarian creme pies on the East Side are the best in the world.

The world. Yes they want a taste of the misery of glory but

No one had anything to give, only the glory of misery.
Still they took so tiny a slot in the prime time machine,
They only took, even from the mythical Buffalo, the urge to run.

That's where Cookie came in, never crumbling,
Even at contract time, when Buffalo wingback payback
Made it apparent at last just how far Buffalo's light had cast,
The first Tesla-electrified city so they say,
And he was cast to the woeful Bronco winds 
As was Daryl "the Mad Bomber" Lamonica
Presented for peanuts and a harmonica
To the Al Davis monkey vendor, as Jack the quarterback 
Became, because he could not be the hero of this play, 
A Republican intellectual who ran for President
On an "I'm a quarterback" plank, but no one by that time
Even remembered him.

                          What travelling show can't encompass such tragedy?
Their brothers in guerilla war rode the bouncing Super Bowl
To respectability and riches while they still
Stirred the cream of a post-Cookie apocalypse.
They changed their stadium from War to Rich
After the types of sweets at the sponsor's bakery.

And no one was ever sweeter than the man they called OJ,
The rich rookie who raced through the house that Cookie built
And whose father was the souest chef in Frisco Bay,
And if it wasn't for the love of his son, not able to be
White man cool like his heterosexual celebrity dad,
Carrying his pig-skinning chef knives to maul his great white stepmother,
We would be able to remember him,
The juice in the Electric Company, a light on TV,
The way he made us forget, for a moment,
That it mattered he was black.

Maundy Thursday at the Avenue A Swimming Pool in Saskatoon

Jones and Nyro approached lyrics from the standpoint

                         of the streets

As overheard by the ghost captain of riverboat sails,

                         which spooked him,

And the choir seemed somehow to offer food,

                         quite confusing

                                                   for a cool cat

This mission burning down thing, in the southern wing

                         of confederate rock history,

Wee hee hee hee sal on the other hand

                         of the white white boy's school

                                                   would be catnip

To go on a tightrope with impeccable poise

                                 like the ghost in our catnap.

She bailed at Monterey, thought herself too fat,

       didn't perform again until 1971, but she did,

Holy shit, Poverty Train, to half of America's high schoolers

      in their CIA-sponsored communal acid bath.

Clearly the hippies were not ready 

                          for a blue ray starseed

Who needed, at 19 years old, a 7th dimension to cover her songs! 

Who could twirl every carnival wheel within wheel til it popped,

      like a Russian savant reassembles a clock,

               refusing to settle for the real to feel

                          or any better place than dismal bliss,

                                        refusing to accept any fear in fact

      at the Stoney End of all sin-based redemptions

               that prophecy a different morning,

Who admitted to every conceivable sin in her songs

               yet each one was a mystical prayer

                         in the shadow that all light reaches for,

                                         the lunar nigro,

                         for art is in those shadows,

The eclipse observed thus pulled into creation.

                         The Spanish call it duende.

                                         We call it the blues.

There's that point where time and space are violated

                                         and cease to be.

Time stops and space dissolves to one point

                                         of eternal consciousness

                                                        mind goes on

       in Bach's Heisenberg uncertainty variations

                                          in the eternity ward

                          until a question comes again

To ground me into time and space, from an eagle,

      who says it is the only one:

                          are you free or enslaved?

Poison, it appears, is not written in the stars,

                          Blue Orpheus was ...

The choice is always ours

       to attach or not,

                        as a regular ritual

                                         like [fill in the blank].

The Creature No One Saw

Something is rotten in Ferry Bar Park.

Is it the mothman? Does he play this?

Or was it just a hologram like the moon,

Impossible to live with or miss?

Now the chromium flows, the crabs have come home to roost

At Sparrows Point, that sings its no-more secrets

Of Bethlehem Steel, on the day that Judas

Took down the Roman pig iron figurine.

Even the wedding dress and roses on the cake were blue 

And the ring bearers dressed as men in black

On the bridge where it happened in 1966,

Reports the Berkshire Eagle, on highway 36,

The same number of people who died on the Silver Bridge

Before they changed it to 37 on Wikipedia ...

And then there's Bonnybridge, "Scotland's Roswell",

In the Falkirk Triangle

And the Bridgeville UFO Festival, Bridgefest, you guessed it,

On a bridge. And there's that well-documented UFO boat

Floating by the now-singing ("wind retrofit") and Keyless

Golden Gate Bridge.

Brawny can't clean up this spill, the decades as they've festered,

Its non-union concrete crew the only supposed casualties.

Why they weren't warned like the lunar eclipse cars

Is just the most unasked of many mysteries

But I am much more interested in the "dolphins"

Placed specifically to protect said bridge from exactly this,

As pointed out by the incredulous structural engineer

Who poured the slab in 1974,

50 years ago, like clockwork tinker toy war spoils,

The third largest continuous truss bridge on the globe

Felled by a three-year old's tantrum ...

But there's so much not to make sense of:

Why in the 2012 movie Battleship did the aliens take bridges,

What no one on Reddit can figure out.

Or what really happened in High Bridge, New Jersey,

The site of irrefutable, unburiable fact,

As when in full view of Manhattan on the Brooklyn Bridge

People were pulled up one day into the sky,

Aligning such undefined choiring strings

As no allowable theory can contend.

Why, I ask, did the light beam blue avian blue,

And why was London Bridge sung to fall down

And is now on Lake Havasu?

What symbols can we use?

The Mayday Bridge like its namesake's namesake F. Scott's most

Famous story? Google won't tell you, its AI

Makes me admire how tight the Federation of Light has to be

To keep the veil as black as we need it to be.

The one incontrovertible fact in that whole Mothman business

Was that a bunch of real West Virginians saw him in 1966,

Although his eyes were like chrome reflectors not red,

And no one ever called him the Mothman, 

That's just what some AP copy editor said, 

And it wasn't even the figure but the fact

It was foisted on the consciousness 

Of Pleasant Park's unwittingly empathetic

Through some advanced blue light technology 

Presided over by actual men in black

Driving Cadillacs over the bridge

That undeniably went down,

And undeniably

Emil Roedel, Nazi Germany's most famous spy,

Was there, in West Virginia, before the bridge toppled,

As was Indrid Cold, an impossible name 

With a hard-to-conceive-of tale, like Indra the Hindu

God of fire, cold fusioned into dragon

Who appears as a vampire, or as spangle of stars

On any given red, white and blue bridge to nowhere.

It was an attack, a personal pearl harbor I suppose,

On what I was, on Grizzly and the miniature

Row homes of Curtis Bay, and the aforementioned

Ferry Bar Park, where, indeed, Homey Didn't Play That.

And the name of the cargo barge, with its captain called in

Like Jim Morrison's admiral dad for all the headline

Bridge apocalypse operations, was that book

That both of us magically have

On the surrealist Dali, from Dahlia as in the Blue,

Who drew a broken bridge he called it

To dream, but it was fully constructed

To the point it had to cross something, anything, to connect.

The locals never knew the bridge was at stake

When they saw that full-of-holes moth, 

Their accounts never quite connected,

As anonymously famous as they became.

The whole eastern seaboard is now unexpectedly 

Unhinged, as Apple buys up nuclear power plants.

But it is only the land that does not connect,

Everything else in the great mind flows

Like the Patapsco River now flooding its banks

To a dragon balance, and we see 

In the blue beam clear to Northumbria

Without even having to talk.

If You Don't Ask, the Answer is Yes

There's a consequence for everything you ask 

Though the odds of one and one dictate

You may carefully be given what you say,

Another chance to decide, if feeling lucky

Means another has to give you a prize

That turns, it always does, into resentment,

For you carry the weight of the thing

That assumes for a time 

The proportions of the world

What you innocently wanted

Vs. what you innocently thought

You could have.

It's not like it's a compromise, a negotiation 

On which your savvy is judged. You are the only God,

The one who decides what your sun shines on.

No Rolling Stones Gather in Jerry Moss Plaza

The spring confetti swirls in Fibonacci spirals 

Over the hard concrete

As I disappear between worlds

At the end of the day.

I am for others and others are for me

But we have nothing in common otherwise,

Just the situation, where agreements were made,

Our names are our own, signed, but, really

We have no inkling of why we are here

Or who needs to use us to speak.

So the crack seems almost natural,

The place for all the cool people to go

To not be seen. The world outside our senses

Turns to gold decorative foil, hard to peel away

But once the edge is found

There's no limit to how much can be removed.

Gaza with a Z

Mayor Mensch declared all Civil Disobedience

Safe and even sacred, even in Sacramento 

Before a city council hung like a rooster weathervane

Out to dry, in the balance.

"We will wait all night to hear everyone speak,"

He declared, sad he could not do more 

For the olive trees and branches and cocktails

But the audience of one, the photojo in the free speech zone 

Had left when pandemonium and arrests arrived

To such a carefully contrived chaos.

What is it but love everyone sought?

Fish-eyed, she had gazed for hours into Gaza,

Eyeless, thanked for bearing witness 

To someone else's land and crime and truth

In the militarized zone of zealots

She once had been the queen of, telling the truth

To allow the seeing. Righteous of the word

She went beyond the pink sea's endless partings

In her rebellion of peace, the church key lady

Who lit a candle in the dark, for those who risk their lives

So she didn't have to, a fellow traveler 

Photojo who had worn the fur.

But this resistance is all suffering

And darkness is the holding space.

Light is what she uses to speak

Thus walking in hell is walking in sunshine.

The banks close in on the border river, both are judgements

But the river is not, it is only the flow  of light

Zero giving of fucks. To avoid too much photojo with the salt

She had to leave her ego at the checkpoint Charlie door.

Everyone has love as a weapon,

Everyone sees only light

Yet look how much seems aligned against it

To sell the illusion that it has no power.

The photojo looks for the clarity just out of range,

The detail that reveals it as a prop 

On a manufactured stage on which

Our very real yearnings burn.

In the dream of a third opinion they give her 

A wide berth, to be invisible enough to see, 

But she renders no voice not her own, 

That's the thing about the voiceless 

She takes on, to fling upon the primal scream,

They make no sound.

She dreams of Lady Nada, how she sparkles in the pink spring

Like the light means something.

Signs of G_d 3.14

The twin tarot towers fall into their footprint 2 to 1
Like eternal clocks unwinding to perfection
And wound again so we may accomplish
What is already there
And perhaps understand the limitlessness of love,
For that, after all, is its only limit.

I'm aware of you, vescica blue,
And thus conscious of eternity,
Your pi hole in the middle of the rings of Guinevere
The sacred door, the portal,
The sweet g-spot of creation,
God, geometry, the Great arf-arf Seal,
The elusive guess and guest,
Grand Architect, a kind way of saying it:
Gimel Gamma Gamal,
Gematria's perfect triad
Taught by Gamaliel on down
As the harmony when opposites manifest in trine,
As kindness allows in from the choice to give or take
In free will, such generosity twins the contraries,
Merging soul and mind, earth and spirit, into heart,
The G force of G source,
The zero point of everything where nothing creates something,
The key of gratitude that unlocks the gooey, living void

And we all sincerely call for the truth of love
But it's the blue mirror that makes a geometry real
As a spinning funhouse, like the one where the Germans
Lost the War but are still in control ...
Germania, an ancient place of unknown origin
Named by the fiesty Celts for the Romans
To trine the Goths and Gaul as neighbors
For germination and germ warfare
Like 33.3 Gs in the glove of St. Germaine.
The Romans liked to erase things
Like the Druids and the (wait for it) Gnostics.

Exit Ramp on the Van Allen Beltway

The problem with seeing people 

        Is sometimes you see them.

Every eye is a mirror

        And mirrors aren't real

Just a glint of nothingness 

        Retracing the retraction

Back to the eternal subject

        That has no shape or name

In the blind light

                               Where the school of heart knocks

         Tricks you away from dancing free

With a kicked on the way out door

         That can be opened more or less,

Each swing of transactional authenticity

         To learn how you resist one thing 

And the world coils ready to spring

         So say the walking fortune cookies

Who would have you hack the matrix by focusing ...

          How the looking glass magnifies

Before it turns the thing that's seen 

          To dust

Without a stop for popcorn

          Or the nit gnats of judgment

All mystics and Indians know

          Is a crutch.

Death Doula Villanelle

He coughs up blood like Kerouac.

She won't phone up her vegan Republican quack.

The caul is over us now.

Appetite has slowed to a bite

Though whisky still flows, potatoes kept from the light.

The caul will fall too soon.

Photos are gathered for post-it note chats

On the dog's sleeping lie once avoided like gnats.

The caul will fall too soon.

The Swede's scrapbook hung like a sail.

The Mick's napkin sketch what it's like beyond the veil.

The caul is over us now.

Charon's great ship with its white foam prow!

The caul has come over us now,

In the last sick light of the moon.

The caul always falls much too soon.

Checking in on Cleo and Briscone

Baggage gone missing at the new moon

          On the spirals of progression carousel

That spin as one would peel back the toroid

          Of an onion

Off-balanced like a top our merkabah

          Tilted to the zero point

Where you would straddle the pole to recharge it

           Not at true horse North but blue.

I am in the center of you, unable to move

           Except closer

To the spiral of your chapter pages turned,

           Your ever-unpeeled onion leaves 

That leave me to cry for morsels,

            For the morsel horses, 

For the breadcrumbs to the morsel code,

             Point Zero Morsel.

But the world gets a little less straightened and chaste

             A little wiser as we

Become a little more free don't it Zephyrillis

             Or is it Etherea? 

We know each other 

             By so many names

We have become as fluid as Flood,

              For shape is optional, 

An excuse to lose myself, forget you,

              Always fun, seldom necessary, 

As memories of you crystalize my DNA,

             Conforming to me like memory foam

Squeezable as an inflamed sponge,

             A lemon ponied up

Off-world and off-the-hook at the Nature Lounge

             Naked Spirits bar.

Timelines tremble,

             Thoughts interstell.

The nothingness of pure light

             Manifests all things 

For the sake of illumination

              Nothing more.

But then we went quantum

              And truly lost time.

The Oldest Chinese Restaurant in California

The rain drips in my bed.

The long-suffering house is finally crying.
It can no longer dance.
The main vein has been unreined
To memories fallen like mirrors.
The pillaging pillow bends like a willow
As the crisper fills with remedial rain.
 
The pea flower blue forbidden rice frog
Has many paddies to cross.
The lilies are the only things blooming
In the pea soup, blue velvet fog
That refuses to smoke out in a blaze of entitlement
Like flair-haired Jimmy the red-headed step head,
Roller of doobs for pubes 
But to evolve with each resolve,
To see the master's hand as my own
Pulling the black and blue down into the sky.

The only consistent thing in my life,

The panhandler at the cross-walk

Hits me up with an especially robust "spare today, spare today"

As he holds a few coins in his fingers.

Bus 69

My forlorn lonesome burn
For what's locked away in Folsom,
Your fulsome bosom blues
and their foregone conclusions.

Yet they somehow found their way
To the Ukrainian pray for rain party
At Open Heaven that went on all night
Keeping vigil like a light house,
A sigil for the ages where the buzzers and alarms
Go off instead of on
And Caspar the Jumping Ghost is on the struggle bus
But thankfully not thrown under
Like at the Mesmer school of Mnemesyne
When the Chicago School of lab rats and coats took over
And asked, famous artists style, "can you draw this blank?"

Oh my wing woman
For the sweet adelines
Swedes on treble cliffs
Wailing love language for dummies
From open source on the light web
Open all night
Wherever love is forbidden
Which interplanetary love always is
Everywhere but heaven
Open all night
Like the pickup truck that rides the LA River
Blaring Staying Alive with no way to disco duck it.

The doctors just say fuck it, face the hypnotist and dance.

Whisperings of the Way

The whole is the only individual.

The blue glass where we live our sunlit part

Asks only we stay quiet, for the murmur

Of what has transcended us, in common share,

The common's tragic end in keen elite listening,

To the white noise there, all the secrets

Burrowed in like grain for ancient rats.

It is so clean, the air, so crisp in execution

And weejun wax. We leave no trace,

For we touch no hands, at our best,

Let all success turn to failure

And failure our greatest success.

The clock that we keep measures the mind

Of the one, the living corporation

We incompletely fill.

                                      We are unreal

For most of the day, as the sunlight tracks

The Hollywood sign, descends into flame

Above Wilshire every single night...

The weather's unpredictable 

In Southern California, 

The micro-climates,

The infinite flow.

The Space it Takes to Be Nothing

Somewhere in this garage is my new life.

Is it the green iguana heat lamp, for future movies

   as a figure of shadow and screen renown perhaps?

Or the toilet seat riser that no one will want, will it

           cling to me like the memory of an elephant?

The felt casters of a thousand broken chairs

                     and paint enough for a mausoleum,

The gardener will be gone, the mauve gloves will have 

                                                             slipped on,

There are never enough Goodwill runs to take

                      the finish off the hands

Of the disposable experience, that rests now next

    to the trash receptacles, in Zen balance.

The dragon sees the sky red

             and all of the leaves are crying.

Make of me what you wish, kind spirit, as you spin

          the fated fool's wheel like a Colt revolver

And the bated breath blows out to soil and solitude,

   small house with dog on the outskirts of Yuma,

And another family filed as a chapter in my saga,

           my postcards from another world

I pin to my heart of cork like a flag that is only the past

    and, therefore, proven wrong

But still stirring its lies in the pale light of fear

                                where absence once swam

And it's waiting again, the Swan,

             ever black as the night is long.

The Fear Leaves

Silence is blue sky.

The words curl below.

They wait to exist as the wind deems it so.

But be always blows into do.

The others are filled with meaning

Then exhaled in a plume

To travel like birds

Over hills, without weight,

Shape or place to go.

The thousand years of rain

Can only be recalled

In the longing to be absorbed.

The Kings of Hollywood

Tornados in San Diego 

But the clouds all laugh at that.

They throw their weight around 

As if they owned these hills,

As if they're merely vapor

Not the massive moving anchor

That mottles the valley 

To robes of black and white

As lords of shadow

Under judicial blue review.

Sunrise Train after Rain

The windows are blue. The steam is like clouds.

Mountains rise white in Buena Park.

The snow came in from the Pleiades 

To say how far away the white is

Of our spirit.

                         The streets of Cascade Circle

Are encased in mirror.

                                         The grass

By Commerce Casino, enflamed by new sun,

Befriends the names left behind: Blaze, Shred, Spar

-- At large and now in charge on Isra Mi'raj --

The pebbles sun themselves 

Beside the Blisterpak storm drains

Where the world shines back 

As if it was all nothing,

The thing that plagued the sleep of orphaned children.

Light will make a mockery

Of the cold blue moneyed spires

-- Even the ties by Mission Tower glisten from home--

And will inhabit hobo chairs

Wet like redwood beside

The shiny tracks,

To view the passing

In a different white.

The river pours like a concrete truck,

Flowing wings, as birds arise

Unearthly bright.

Fire Horse

What can be done with the fire horse?

It can't exist 

Yet it does.

It won't burn

But there's flame

As far as the eye can withstand.

And the dirt and horizon

Have become

The same red,

The burning of blood

As a ritual act

In someone else's show.

Ox and Goat in Rabbit Time

I.

Like clockwork we agree, to our broken clock

Twice a day -- the rest is a hiss

Of enmity and longing, pleadings for what can

Never be. Bliss, the critics say,

The horse on course will miss its whip and jockey.

A spirit must be broken like a spine

In the book of grievance, encased in ice

To encapsulate the noise. The silence,

Though occasional, is the gift for the soul,

A fair exchange on the planet of war.

In some schools I'm the hero for getting through

But tell that to the moon, whose narcotic milk

Won't feed the mouth deprived of bristols

To call one's own. We boys we do such sullen things

At the persistence of tyrants, the knife we draw

A pain we can call pleasure.

II.

I did agree to love. I did agree to fear.

I did agree to veil myself behind the silver mirror.

There are some things that I have learned in time

Of who I am and how I came to be,

And every single one of them's a lie,

The bite of that bitter apple the not me.

It is always someone else who does this,

The murders in my name. And, always, just by seeing,

I take all the blame. As victory,

For even that can hurt me, transcendent

As I am, a galaxy.

                                 It's how I'm known,

The rumor turned 3D, the murmur that becomes

A raging stream, and feeds so many capillaries

The trees start to believe that they are green.

III.

Where we have been is a mystery,

The future history.

The thing now's to take it all in

And turn it back like the cousin at the door

Sent packing.

                        Who are we, when the real don't talk

And the mauvaise-froid share the same heart?

The dancers stand with weapons drawn

As the back-beat shifts from the 2-step.

I take my ten-gallon of the possible off

From what she wanted, the impossible to fulfill.

Thus the shadow of the cattle hat fell across

The floor, like that holographic horse just appeared

Ununseeable, from that snow-blind winter scene. 

1940

It's come to this, the zero degree

Where all urge of surrender has ceased,

The frozen moment, where leopards

Merely stare. There is a war somewhere.

You can hear it on the military bands.

But the war in here, does not give in

Its thaw. One waits coldly for a word

That is law.

                    Ah, but it was only story time

On that crackling pipe, all the ships to sea

A pale moonlit reflection of the words

I bore each day, of traumatizing fathers,

Zealot moms, cigarettes packed too tight

And an acid point of view on negroes, jews, jews.

Everyone could see it, no one did a thing,

At the Ashkenazi warlords command,

     Per the sane one knowing bravery

And the power of the radio

To garble.

                                  There's gold in Nome

And radar towers.

       And men who go on ships to quiet die

                      Smoking Santa Claus cigars

And bearing Jimmy Cagney to the skies,

Where they fly, regardless

Of life and death,

                                Mere adjustments in the dial,

The game of chess whose master

In Antarctica always wins.

The ice is too thick for human hearts

That burn for any shore.

                       Even the sane one fell victim.

Condemned as insane he went within, silent

As a radio at the thought he only took a hill

In his heart, where all that matters flows.

Signal after the Storm

The terror has poppycocked.

The peaks betray but few

Stray smoke pocks

On blue.

Irreducible the layers peeled

As far as feeling allowed.

The art of doing nothing

First must bear the fear

Of clouds.

Song of the Wheelchair

Even the crows talk of someone else,

Someone who matters

So I can release my great brace,

Smell the exhaust of squealing freedom

Squirrelled out one nut crack at a time,

The inordinate candor

To a squalor of truth

That still floats inside the blues 

Chased like bitters away,

To draw close to.

Incident in Norwalk

The lost angels have gone off the rails, Off tumbleweed reservations, one tweaker Kept 7 trains, 1000s of people, stranded For hours, all up the line to Bakersfield And everyone watches the system collapse, The inexplicable malfunctions In the way people love and understand As we watch our beliefs on the board go down. I’m a lucky one. I escaped the good fortune Of commuter rail suicides on either side of the drive And the bridge dive suicides. The 10 freeway Has fallen through! The hills are angry with smoke As we wait expectant but senseless, accepting But numb, the stoic SoCal cool where there would be Homicides in Gotham, third rail replies To the no explanations, not even, really, lies. It’s a party, in fact, a copa cabana in the club car, A conga line where everyone can sing Of their endless love and get hitched in, Laughing like the moon at jackals. The anonymous station we were deposited With only hope left in our pockets was once The scene of a town’s, any American town’s, joy As the freight rumbled through with a shudder. And when we finally move, it feels somehow historic, This epic fail, to withstand all the traps of time Placed in our way for us, and still be standing, as, At the end of the endless, you’re still there, intact.

Mother For The Sky

The clouds are browned this morning

In a lightly hoovered stream 

That warps in woven frays

Refracting reds and purple 

On beds of wool minds laying

Contemplative as they conjure.

They coat the void as they float.

She was harder than that

Though she floated just as still

And promised hues of softness

No cloudwool can distill.

There was always something for herself

Not spread like rainbow ice among the crystal,

The only note that she could play

In such cold blue.

The air was much too thin,

The company too bleak ...

What happens to the best of us

As we spread too thin our fleece

Across the cling-charged flock

Too nebulous for love enough 

To uncurl ever their locks.

They will move much further on,

Acquire a bruised patina

As the offering of their play

That never ceases its spin

Away.

del vino e delle rose

non è lungo, 

l'eternità 

i panorami che si aprono 

non sono mai la fine,

più paradiso, 

come se fosse tutto ciò 

che è mai 

esistito.

[it is not long, 

eternity

the vistas that open 

are never the end,

more heaven, 

as if it was all 

that ever 

was.]

Ode to Skip's Garage

A man needs a shed by the edge of the sea,

A shit ton of poly, jig band table saw three

To plane, sand and join like his home-building clan

And squirrel as many dowels as one man can

In library drawers stuffed of clamps to spools

As his voice still resounds "Who stole all my tools?"

For he needed each nail for the love he built in

To the furniture, the frames, the Skip-shaped kitchen.

A man built his house at the edge of the sea

For a loving wife and children three

Who dusty cup lift of old Andre's still stashed

To his dreams each fulfilled, lived largely.

Moon

Captain Kirk
Has already shown us
The black broken hulk
Of a once-proud starship
Decimated by war
And put in orbit
To save a planet
That looks on it fondly,
Its sick light
Projected like a movie,
As source of all mystery,
All feminine lunacy,
As it makes birth regular
Instead of free,
The Van Allen tidal trance
Demagnetizes women,
Keeps them from control
Of the earth, her body,
Source of everything.

The Zucchini Unraveling

The roots are deep,

       leaves wide,

              flowers

                    edible,

You just want to bring them

       to your mouth

               and taste

Whatever bitterness

       has been distilled

               from feverish sun,

The one we circumscribe

      pulls free 

               from the fungus 

                          bed

Where death is daily turning,

      the crypt like a compost

               cylinder hard to spin

That burns out shoulders

       rocking endless 

                cradles.

There is no hope

      only consequence,

               all actions glide to

                            resistance,

The conflicted pair

      all knotted up

               and intertwined

With all one's nothingness,

      the play of the mind

               on what will happens

As the worms turn 

      the dirt

               and the sun massages

                             strawberries,

Who will one day too

      fall to seed,

               that thing

That our life seems 

      to wait for, rely on,

               the seed.

Catullus 16

From the Latin

I will prick you, Aurelius,
Tongue and throat your noble boy toy Furius,
Until you say what you think of my poetry,
A little soft, a little sheathed?
For a pious poet ought to be clean, 

There is no need, in fact, for verses
When there's fleur de sel and rabbits on the grass;
Let the lines purr gentle and a little chaste
And if the hairs stiffen for an itch
It's for those whose loins are never moved. 
You, who cover all the bases,
Did you read me wrong?
Do you think I am a male? 
I will prick you, Aurelius.

Retro

Lavender farm to the sea
      in Hawaii,
The first one proposed, as the place
      to end all place 
And a few more were offered
      to the agil-e divinities:
      

Queen Charlotte Island accessible
       only by boat,
The Pismo barefoot lifestyle,
       the sofa 
Where the children were read to ...

Until the last one saw her home,
       Walpole, abode
Of the prison, the orangeade farm,
        the one road to the den

Of the lawless champion
        pitching razor blades.

Afternoon TV

The common caw
Of get involved with me
Rubs the entanglement ropes
The wrong way
And the puppet strings break
To free-fall flying through
What used to not be illusions
But palpable beads
Of crystal, the world 

Bounced up and down 
With somnolent echo
To efface the frack congress 
Of slack lackey flacks
On your behalf,
The ludicrous madhouse
Of plaints real
And remembered
In your vast entitlement writ
Of complaint
To steal everything outside
Into the hole you had to climb
Into, unrecognizable
To yourself
Just in time for a fade
Into a sunset no one sees
Or doesn't want to,
Your suffering neglected
Because it is taken on
For the collective, so they can
Look away
Or look so closely
They can't see what you 
Don't want them to see,
What you can't,
Librarian caught
In a classification scheme
Fit for priests 
Where emotion was spared,
Now needed 
A river of tears
As the sea recedes 

Carmel Mission

I break the silence
With these words of love
As I broke the bread
Of silence
So long ago
In these echoing halls

When we were one heart
In all but name,
Touch, kiss,
The sacred word
Flowed between us
Beyond words, beyond God,
The place we knew
But could never land

So we landed here
Our pure white wings
In service to suds
And feathers and lace
And each other,
The look of learning
In each eye,
A key to who we were
And will always be.

Books of symbols compromised
By the lack of proximity
To us,
Lace all that is left
Of our hands
That should have touched,
Our silence that was wasted
On no kiss.

But that is the way
Of the pilgrim,
To find in absence
What would be too much ...
What you are right now
A hundred miles away
In my very core.

So we continue
Where we broke off,
Waves that never stop
Reaching the shore.

Another Carmel Apartment

There's a rainbow on the sea
Where our Penelope
Awaits her invisible,

Her pinned shot fading

In his cell

For posterity,

Still glistening

His might-have-beens

Of dream,

The descriptions of home,

Bedsheets flying

Due to clothespins,

Car returning in grey

To an empty garage

In glory every day.

Does he stand on the gangplank longing?
Or does he know all this
Will end
Only when the knot is tied
To dock
And not a moment before,
No matter how tremulous the waves
Or uncanny the shore.

There are houses, now,
Encased in mist,
Lost in their views
From the hill,
The love inside
Too vulnerable
To be spied even with
The drapes flung wide,
Would-be widows at windows
With eyes that only mirror
What they see,
Eternal grey
To pierce again from sky
Another rainbow.

It only appears
When you least expect it,
Like the ghost horizon ship
That stays away from port
Dredging and dumping
In menial breath
Some black stuff that holds
All its value
In arm hurl and sinew
Tightening
To serve it
At a reach

From where hearts are open
To receive,
By hearths that make quick work
Of it
In the name of things to burn
And share
And never run out
Of the need to share
It all.

The person there
Becomes whole

In the fire

Of give and take, 

Of nothing really,

Just a wish

That they would know,

In this case, the sea,

The impossible road

That lends itself

To nursery rhymes

Where serpents rescue nymphs

But goes silent

At the truth,

That no one rides
Its scales,
The heart is always
Somewhere else,
Frozen like an ice chunk
Under glass
Waiting for its maiden
Who will claim it
When the tide returns
What treasures the sea
Disgorges:
Some rope, some kelp,
A handful of shell,
The things that stay
In sitting rooms
Forever,
Memories of loss
And distance.

Trine

Western Union announces the birth of our daughter

29 years too late

But we're ecstatic anyway

Having finally left the sea

For desert shores

Where sun reports the afterbirth

To infinity,

Our carcass heaps

Happy as a dream

And still in a way that can only be

If each lives inside the other

Completely.

It has been a long day

Of striped harlequin watching

And compliment fishing

With the denizens of Purple Town

Who huddle now like we once did at bonfires

And make babies like balloons

To scream into indifferent skies

The glee of their disquiet ...

But that was many years ago.

Our cold hands never really touched,

Our eyes never locked despite

How much our fingers shook

And pushed whatever bilge came up

Back down. 

The sun just glazed the rinse repeating days

With radiance for tears

That never seemed to end 

And never really appeared.

What is left of what never happened 

Is in what did:

A father's love, earth placed here

To contain it,

So he can be the one who climbs the cross

Like crows the sunrise for love.

Grief Trading Eights

How can the separation bring you closer?

The pain of love

Makes you see love

Is not pain

But a feeling 

That flows beyond all walls,

The very feeling

I came here for

And now I know what it means

To love what you don't get,

What you had.

Unbearable grief is the only way

Sometimes

To feel

The love

We are.

The Jazz Baby

From Dirt for Sale, written August, 1991

Too many troubadours and no legitimate leader,

But the jazz baby can almost fly on his blue wing.

Every dream is owned by some unholy conglomerate,

But the jazz baby skreeks like the birds.

Rotted tyrants hold the Earth and its entire people hostage,

But the jazz baby will grab at anything he can reach.

The jazz baby hears in church bells things we'll never comprehend.

Every day more furniture is put out on the street,

But the jazz baby has a taste for everything left behind.

Discarded masterpieces float in the sewers,

But the jazz baby looks toward the blue in the skies.

When he looks at you, he smiles right through. 

Elegy for Jesse

What many would consider to be the greatest tragedy, to lose a son, is equally the greatest treasure, to know in my life the true meaning of his life.

The streets are too soft.

Forgiveness comes too easily.

The people of the sun are unredeemed in this world.

We cannot hear their screaming,

As they move past us like shadows,

Who think their pain isn't real.

That's where Jesse chose to be,

Enjoying his stay

In the trestles and the drains, in plain sight

Hiding places, the overpasses,

Squat homes owned by kudzu, 

Alleys colder than the truth 

Spanging coin from the wits of his guitar

And spent his spare, never-wasted time in 

Loaded club rooms where his monk-robed friends 

Gathered as men to watch football and other slow suicides, 

Or in his well-tuned blue Suzuki with his beloved country bride

And adopted feline Weenie of the streets.

He was living his dream

Of complete self-sufficiency,

People were too easy to hurt otherwise

If reliant on their kindness in any way.

He made heroin cool again in Lynn,

Slept on its beach in fisherman's ice,

Carved up his arms for the unbelievable kick of it,

The kick of jumping off the roof

Got him locked inside a fine rubber room and orangeade

Institution of Higher Crazy, where he shared

His joy at Pops the Sailor

And the usual cast of characters he spent his time

Befriending, learning from, but mostly being amused,

Like a moth to the light, forever flying,

Forever learning how to find love, or, rather, apply it

To the unbelievable darkness at hand, inevitably a broken soul,

Someone lonely.

With, just as inevitably, a guitar, 

As in Witch City Salem, where he made his living 

From humility. Or in the City of the Queen, 

In whose service he always wound up, 

Fighting a well-intentioned army 

For the right to be free, to make his living from the street, 

The closest thing to natural we can find. 

And in many rooms he was alone, actually scared,

Tho' you'd never see that behind his Negro-level cool

That always relayed everything was 'ight

No matter how much you'd fret, he made it feel better,

Laughed at it before anyone else got a chance,

Jesse, old goat, wise philosopher,

Master of the bad-ass Geronimo Effect,

Who would rather share himself

Than win another war, the old general who 

Saw, finally saw, the most hardened of souls

And made them all better, for being true,

His impossible glee 

In bleakness unimaginable

For weeks, months, years on end.

He'd shrug and laugh, and, to comfort, say

"Anything is better than that damn shelter, son 

Almost as bad as the Gideons. They're the worst."

He was born high, in fact, at some faster vibration,

Some immediate knowledge of what God wants

His Children to do, full of cartoons, complete designs,

More life than a roomful of people, a Saturn of aliens

With lives like our own, in ice cream frequency detail,

Everything, in fact, included, all plastic toys were filled

With stories and tunes and sound effects, a soundtrack 

Constant as bird song.

And Jesse was a bird, just a little higher from us, 

Looking downward in love and wonder

With his ever-present cry: "Light!"

Which was joy,

Which was life

Well-lived.

He would only consent to work for the birds.

As a boy, with a vision of his dream home

In McAlpine Creek Park, an old tree house 

In the woods, he saw as his key to freedom,

To grow green beans and peas

You can eat off the vines, to turn wood

Left for dead into doghouses for the poor,

And in time he became a scrap metal entrepreneur 

Who took only what was thrown away

In subdivision dumpsters 

And made it his own,

With the freedom from 

That he insisted upon,

To be an orderly with the blessed elderly, EMT, team leader

In the free people's union, and then be mechanic,

Roof mover, tattoo surgeon, 

Flying to and fro so effortlessly, as his heart not the man said

And you know who the man is,

The same one you once were and will be again

But this time, thanks to Jesse,

You will know how it feels 

To give love 

Without condition to his friends,

Everyone. 

He rose to his station to wash the dustiest feet,

Menial to the mendicants as always,

Shaman of the streets, who did not believe

He was any less than anyone, or more ...

                               But his sunny orange turned blue

When he discovered he felt much more than the others,

Expected them to act more like the Children of God, 

Disappointed at himself to be disappointed by them, by us, 

For the humanity he chose

To experience, in the guise of a bird, a spirit of rising

From the mud where he played long after others had found

A warm bed and clean sheets to live their lives asleep.

And as the world prepared their Sunday night faces

For another round of dreams

He went out to demonstrate his love.

As if he knew when he was gone, we'd finally feel it.

His Passion was on Brookshire, a Roman chariot

For a distinctly non-Roman messiah

With a Jesus guitar for a cross

On a roadside Golgotha 

In a chord of God

Our song, not even knowing. 

He insists we must be joyous

At this time, even inside this ribcage prison, 

With a love only violence can show,

Where all I didn't know

Or couldn't understand

Came radiating through 

The angels and their wings

On the darkest of nights,

Like so many he remembers,

So pitch black he could see the birth of light. 

The Only Tears Allowed are Tears of Joy

Jesse McCulloch Sigler, 8/23/91 - 11/27/22

The death of someone close 

Is not always a bed of roses,

Sometimes it's a highway crucifixion

On a Jesus guitar

At a roadside Golgotha 

Whose chord of God

We sound with our song

Not even knowing,

Merely joyous inside the prison,

As he insists, with the love

Only violence can show,

Where all I didn't know

Or couldn't understand,

The love at the center of the gift,

Black chariot and doomed messiah,

Winds back to teach me

What love feels like

As time solidifies.

And a most decidedly non-Roman Christ

Holds me strictly to happiness

In all that is left,

A few scraps of Metallica

From a happy metal scrapper 

Who would only consent

To work for the birds,

Whose dream home was a tree house in the woods ...

Ah but it veers into tears now

For the people he touched

And left no choice

But to accept him as he was

Walking round in circles

Over the mistakes you've made --

That toughest of pills to take

Has been waiting in my cabinet

For a long, long time,

Why he chose to set his joy

In the places people weep of

Trying to forgive, trying to understand

How bleakness unimaginable

Could spring such hope each day,

How those the most heroic

Had the fewest laurels of all...

I rested in his cool,

Though twists and turns unfathomable

Amid his constant laughter

Of compassion there to share

For we always knew, no matter how

Far apart, our hearts

Were one frequency of love

That came from that familiar place

That gets included here now too somehow

However thrown out with old sketches

To the lowest toy chest 

In the earliest room.

And as I understand him less and less

I feel released, to get it at last,

What he did for those he loved,

Which was everyone

Without condition,

His unblinking smile

Into a gaping hole,

A darkness so perpetual

One could witness the birth of light.

Contrast of Light and Boysenberry Vine

To be a poet

With no time fr'it

In obligation's constant pull,

Something I agreed to

So unable to

Settle

Except for the bend of

Tendons

Angering my way

Through

Morning chores

As bells,

Evening chores

As prayers

And the numb

Unending plea

From every building

Burning

While songs await

Patiently

To share the sentience 

Of birds

Who seemingly belong now

To another world

As I look through glass

With occupied eyes,

Rag in hand,

Daring to clean.

Variations at Sunset

The imagined sun is no less real

Than the one we worship

But the hawk that comes close

Is more familiar.

~~

We who make the least etheric goods

Can afford to think our thoughts are less,

A quotient of air, a gradient of nothingness,

For what imprisons us we're proud to possess.

~~

A father dominates his daughter at hoops

But one would never know,

Nor the meaning feet deal to a soccer ball --

How heavy in the material must holiness go.

~~

We savor and wait for the pink

As ideal at the end of the day.

Is it real, we ask, knowing it's physical,

Colors still stable to unbelieving eyes.

~~

How dimly the world of thought

We come from filters in

To the neighborhood of hard-edged forms

And children spiraling with glee.

~~

The blue light dog, with a tennis ball 

In its snout, can only smile

At how we've made things simple,

Impossible to transcend.

Gift of the Balsamic Moon

We are limits, not bodies,

Punctured by edits ...

That's the way it has to be;

The thing's not real

Unless seen

In all its glory

By those eyes on every side

Worrying death to infinity.

What we call the real

Mere movie

To a ghost projector 

Who slips the loops

Through dust-mote light.

The proprietor hums

As the audience turns

Stone and blind.

I have always known this,

But now ... now

Its sound is a purr

That soothes the background clouds

To sleep.

The birds wake up,

Try to sound like it,

That is, like me.

Old Playbills and User Manuals

Consciousness starts the machine.

Is that really so strange, so new an idea

As we'd dreamed?

When we sleep, the world ceases,

As even the golden books

Of lies attest.

As we rise the next act lifts

Exactly as the program indicates.

We install instantly,

Can look but better not attach

To the backdrop that we're not.

Everything is for our benefit.

How, then, could word not reach 

That we are God?

Pages I look through in vain.

Chill After the Show

The night has cat eyes,

Thousands pounce the windshield 

As the cars move through space

Under the whole's baton 

That swings in my mind like a lantern,

As if to music already there

And the cars would appear

Without my eye.

The mad clavinet that plays in my head

Overtakes their sound

For the feeling of gold

Beyond the Norm's sign. 

It must be open all night

As they claim,

How else could each booth tell its secret

From a room I have never seen?

Confessions of a Short Attention Span

I'm a shapeshifter 

Of 

The frequencies ...

Now I wear 

A mustard 70's 

Velour

And am observed 

By those I've noticed,

Looked at by eyes

I can't see through,

Unlike the moment 

Before ...

But a moment further

I have Billie 

Holiday from the Black Trumpet PA

And I have her 

3 AM voice,

Always someone else ...

And now the Hell's Angels 

Have taken over 

The pool ...

And Aung San 

Has gone

To jail!

Each thought is a leaf 

I pick and exist

Inside of

If I have 

A place

At all -- 

The all must always 

Be nothing, 

Must even close its apertures

To send tiny packets 

Of universe

Kaleidoscopic with light,

A light that imprints its thoughts 

On the sky 

As time lapses,

The shutter closes,

And the bulb of lived experience

Flashes in a wink

That captures

The afterburn 

Of what is natural:

Everything indistinguishable,

Compressed into some middle

Of a love sangwee,

Not the blessed separation,

That thing we asked for,

Freedom.

Balance Exercise

When I'm in the other room 

I am not real to her.

I don't live in her attention

So from her field have been removed

Only to return

With an offer of coffee

Fully materialized, 

While the real I 

Pauses briefly from chasing clouds 

In a balloon

 

To ponder on whether she'd need

Some love. 

So I sense in this way who I am,

In absentia.

Alienations of the Free

The art of the adept 

Is the skill with which the truth

Mixes with the lie

For the truth needs companions

— It's lonely in the cold

Without gods, words, tastes shared

And the dual always waits 

With a loaded pistol aimed 

At whatever heart aches

To get through the smoke

Of a morning where nothing

Is left to chance,

Everything's explained, or

Everyone thinks it is at least,

The bare table that's been left for us:

The coffee is bitter,

Berries sour,

Tastes that can be shared ...

How can you survive

When it's sweeter for you

Than for others?

Senator Fetterman*

Senator Fetterman

     doesn't exist.

We created him,

            you and I,

Out of wholecloth

                wishes.

Their latest model

      imposition 

Coincidentally 

             the same

As what we wish

      to experience:

The joy, the anger,

              the pain

And thus remembrance 

      of who we are

And can now peel away

      for a newer one,

A different ring

      of the true tree

Forever growing

      without a single

Idea of separation

      succeeding

To change the future

                  trajectory.

Those limits

     bounding ideas;

From beyond they

    scarcely exist,

Like 

    Senator

            Fetterman,

Who they talk 

            up

Today

    as President

When everybody knows

                there is no

President,

                   for I am

In charge here,

    of everything.

* Refers to John Fetterman, an android replicant of the type immortalized in the "Minions" cartoon series, who cannot form coherent thoughts yet is claimed by mainstream narratives to be Pennsylvania's newest US Senator, having beaten a beloved celebrity heart surgeon in the 2022 midterm elections. 

The Taste of Sour Grapes

The black ocean

I never knew I desired 

Comes cajoled from a cloud

Of my thoughts in another room

Forever plotting out

What I will do,

How the needle will move,

Always touching true.

Dinner on the Princess

Was a freak cold in Laredo 

With the ladies in their serapes 

And that beautiful Mexican boy

Who begged to go back with us

But the best we could do 

Was an Encinitas orphanage

Run by our friend Stan Stout

Remember him?

City of Children

I think it was called.

They let us walk right in,

There was a great big bathroom 

And tiny little toilets all lined up.

In those days we went diving

All the time,

Lobster every night

And we found one

On that pink fluffy rug,

The same one where I found

That missing snake,

And no, possums aren't dangerous

But raccoons are. We had a family 

In our yard

Of different colors

But nobody does negatives

Any more, the colors 

Aren't right, I took some old Kodaks 

To a specialist

And they couldn't get it back.

But all the heads turned

For the coyote coat

We bought at auction

At the Bear Valley Country Club.

I remember

Hilda asked Johanna

What are you doing,

And she said she was looking for Lars

Somewhere in the crowd

Isn't that sad?

Poor woman.

Not like MiMa 

Churning up the gravel 

In front of the cabin

After Pookie married a black man.

Now all those rednecks

Became BLM

That crazy summer

And gave out our number

"We're gonna kill your kids"

They said, little did they know

We had a pickaninny too.