For Andrew

Let me turn this bedroom into an ancient temple

where I will peel back the callouses

of your cynicism, pain, and insecurity

and let the god within you burst forth

like the unfolding of a lotus–

the birth of a galaxy

in which every star is a moment

that you smiled

and my heart stopped.

What if you believed in divinity?

That it is inside you

and in me.

Maybe then when we are lying on this bed

your lips pressed against mine

we would melt

like wax–

one into the other

unable to discern whether it is your eyes

or mine

that this world looks so rosy through.

– Or whether we were ever truly separate beings.

I want your eyes to flash like solar flares

every time I walk into the room

rather than being turned around in a circle

by your hands

that plastic ballerina in the music-box

pirouetting before your half-lidded, unchanging eyes.

I want to be something that you must achieve

through years of pious contemplation

like nirvana–

a blissful union of Shiva and Shakti

constantly seeking to become one

and desperate to forget they were ever torn asunder.

I want to hold the most fragile piece of your heart.

The one that you keep locked up in a glass box

on that shelf that I

just

can't

reach.

Because it is too dangerous to expose

and too delicate to play with.

I will pluck it down– like the apple of knowledge–

wear it around my neck

like a locket.

Wait until everyone has left the ballroom

the lamps are fading down

there is only you and I in this circle of light

And open it.

2/18/12

Thoughts after reading Robert Frank’s The Americans

Jack Kerouak wrote of an America already dead

He resuscitated her, that waxen banshee
And she had strength to snort out
A final abyss

Those deathly moments somewhere
Between down and delight
Were her very best

America walked out of a political cartoon
Her voice crooked from waking
Face ferocious in daylight

America now
Shivers into morning after a sixth drunken tussle
She discovers with indifference that she is still alive

In a way
America is the thinnest, Saddest of bar creeps
On the stool farthest from the jukebox

He stammers to his feet
Massaging his torn cardigan
And whispers to the wall
That he was no longer perfect

That’s why I wrote poetry oh!
Because these versions of myself never would have found manifest
Half of life happens everyday
The other half never leaves fantasy

The guy, seen in his attic window
Burning to find voice for his pale pen imitations

Imitations of chaff burner on tiger glow

Of myself in the place where she loves me best

Cloaked in Cyprus branches, lost in the fog that we grow here
Hide and go seek with gravestones
And the darkness of life

Or lost in enumklaw and Olympia

I remember myself best
Through the spyglasses of a dozen claimed females

The watchers were many veiled
Always invisible to you, though seen through you
A dozen, but only one
Like the lone black feather on back of a peacock

Do you remember the godlike trees?
Wispy surrounds the bar
We tote glasses and stand up
All red with webs of smoke

Do you remember? That shake!
Resents being relegated to the drums
Excuse the expression, Bali Hoo!

And the insects lining the walls
Sucking down cocktails of Lilly water
And cow blood
Resent the herd of us together

Dagger Eyes

Today I clambered to the top of the city
You’re what I like best in San Francis-
Co Dagger Eyes.

The Best of our two worlds
Collide and my mask is only worn to
Suppress your enduring pained expression
Only my pimpled, pearly, blues
Peruse back and forth and
Cloak rhapsodies within
The parodies without

No…

Wonder I awoke on this day
In a good mood…
Westerly edge is pretty alone
The whiskered mother wind awoke
Early to sweep the streets
Dry and hide the crying loon
Joker Hide! Find Disaster!

We all arrived here if by chance
A Chinamen’s romance…
When you get to the western edge
And stare over the bend
But me an mine have arrived
By the wrong side and
Have no where else to turn
But sake straw bale tavern flats
And mystic mood driven rats!

By the same token this
Is impolite cliché’ romantic and immature.

I can almost make out
The bad 70’s bonanza
Projected via heli-
Copter hanging camera
On the city’s easterly edge.

All bleached and naked and used
There’s no way for the smog to decay
Bottlenecked beaten east bay
Or the Hokusai etched mountain Marin
Assaulted sieged then colonized
By winos in the latter stages of uselessness.

I grazed your ear Belvedere
And Tiburon you turn me on
The citation got from Antioch
From the Berkeley Hills I’m swooning still.

But to lose the smog
Is to lose the fog
And hence all I love
From this shaded cove
Where all forces collide
Capsize my…
squinting
dagger
eyes

One Hundred Twenty Miles

One hundred twenty miles–
one hundred twenty miles is a mighty long way
to stretch a lonesome heart.
Yes, mighty long
and weary,
and all that lies between you and I
the poised rise of the Mountain,
the silent span of lakes spreading us apart
have grown barren.

I have awoken on a sliver of wide bed.
I have seen the perfect circle of your iris
pulling thread through buttons.
I have turned your name around in my distracted brain.
I have wished that every word of love
would reach you, honey–
Over bridge and bank and burrow;
all the way back to your vacant hands

One hundred twenty miles.

10-12-10

august 4, 2010

i am free

free if only

for today

awake in the morning

white laden mountains

Schubert and Parra

lifting weight

from the shoulders

of my soul

voices connecting me

to the ancient

caminos trodden

by calloused feet

heights of father sun

whose son am i?

mother earth will embrace me

with with her dusty arms

and release me

from the prison

of this corpse

yet today i am

free

free to live

laugh

love

and linger

in each moment

as if it were my last

to savor the tastes

which drip like honey

upon my tongue

the crisp air

filling my lungs

with sacred songs

sung

by the spirits

searching an audience

amidst the polluted

existence of modernity

echoing from the cavernous steeps

into the overpopulated

valley below

that today

we are free

Laurel Canyon

Smile tapping out rhythms on his typewriter guitar
Through blues laden curtains and gazing very far
The raven winks away upon the shoulder of a dream
And cooks up cardboard puzzles of salamander cream

A well constructed parody
Is ugly at its base
Like scores of swimming atoms
In the construction of a face

I’m deep inside my study
I’m deep inside my heart
Hundreds stand at attention
What stems from the flowering dark

I’m lost inside the mansion
I’m lost inside my part
Of the kumbays rodeo
And a fragment of the art

Atlas walks from solitude
Into the ghastly parade
And a thousand burning horses
Resting in the shade

Mount Shasta wears a mask
Of silver button snow
And a pool of screaming wildcats
Has nowhere else to go

In conclusion I saw writers
I saw victims I saw cheats
I saw spider footed wanderers
Spiraling headlong to the deep

All I could truly contemplate
And hear at the end of days
Is I’m better of enraptured
Because at least I have something to say

Walk on the Shore

Yesterday
you and I skated barefoot
through the sand.
A strip of shoreline lay
traced
with our lazy steps
dipping into new ocean
without hesitation
or fear.
Today
I went down to the water
with a stone in my chest
and a long shadow
stretched out before me.
My shoes were on.

4-20-10