We Came Into Town Under Cover of Night

#1

The drives home were sluggish
Perfect for a heavy heart
To step inside was to catch the eyes
Of cats and mirrored lasting impressions
And heroes, what were they anyway?
Or villains, face first in the snow?
No, no, I don’t know
And I’m almost there
Almost to the edge of falling back into
What happened first, way back then
When the shadow light was just physics
And my favorite songs had choruses

I could romanticize that spring
And call Caroline my savior
With her little hair and little head
And little hands and big words
I gave her a book and a stack of papers
She read them all, I believe it
But she’s in Columbus and I’m still here
And in Columbus, as Mark says, there’s no spotlight
To dazzle and that’s alright because dazzle hurts the eyes

I listened to Tallahassee almost every night
As I drove the two big boulevards home
It made me feel better about my own circumstance
But it still brought out the hurt
That I wore in my eyes, wear in my eyes
As I pictured peacocks
And Cuban planes and empty roads in college towns
And you


#2

Hey you, “No”
Where did your little hair go?
To other towns with colleges
Big ones and little ones
Santa Cruz, Columbus
And hey you, “No”

I never went anywhere with you really
I only went outside and back in
I only went to Pico and that other street
And in the cruelest of ironies
I was in the goddamn Gap dressing room when you cancelled
Our second date and we still haven’t rescheduled

This is my own sweet time
I can say what I want, want what I feel
There’s a hundred years to live
And a thousand years to heal

The secret is, no one knows
Hey you, you never said ‘yes”
And I imagine you leaving Los Angeles
And then that other town and that other town
In the bright white dazzling morning light


#3

I slept on that floor for months
I slept on that floor for 9 long months
I slept on three blankets, sometimes two
And a soft thick rug on the hardwood floor

(The rug is gone now, sold or under the bed)
(Two of the blankets are still here but I only use one)
(And the hardwood floor’s still hard, with little short nails and splinters)

I think I’m going soon, I’ve got a feeling
Maybe down to Long Beach or up to where I’m from
And anyway this isn’t the town we came into under cover of night
That was 2002, that was some other place
Two cars and one truck and a posse of friends
All spread out, Midwestern now, like brown sugar on waffle plates

Santa Monica was misty that night
Santa Monica was misty every night
The mist cut into me, messed with my sinus and the bed wood
But whatever I loved and missed that air
So it was with heavy heart that I left
In the Caroline, No and Peacocks spring of ‘06
I don’t remember what the sky looked like that day
I remember it was Saturday
It was morning
It was heavy
And then I’m gone again
Some day


#4

So March and April I listened to Tallahassee almost every night
And April and May I dated a girl from Tallahassee once a week
I didn’t treat her as well as I could have
But we learn from mistakes and we shake up the breaks
And May and June I found a Milwaukee swoon
And June and July I was back in the heat and yeah
It was the hottest endless summer of my life
I can still feel it
(should move closer to the water)

But what about that girl from Tallahassee?
Where is she now?
She’s in Burbank
I’ve never seen her place
But I hear it’s nice
No air conditioning
Must have been hot that summer


#5

Sail on sailor, come sail with me
Sail away with me
Between the moon and Kansas City

Fly with me on paper planes
Feel the freedom in the middle states
Interstate, in the dark, in the light

They make the trucks yellow and orange
So no one misses the fact
You’re moving away and you can fit it all
In one vehicle

(I’d rather drive a UPS truck)

“There’s danger of me losing all my happiness”
Then she lost it
I can’t see it anymore
I can hear her voice
I hear the call
I hear it all
And if the words were 50 years old
The happiness was only 20
And still not hitting 21

There’s morning
And afternoon
And evening
And sleep
Floor, bed, side of the road
And you

December 7, 2008

I Don't Think Of You That Often

I have empathy
unlike you
this is why
I'm better than you

hot cocoa and s'mores
for all the poet's whores
is an appropriate reward
for years and years
of praising perfect verse

your best friend told me
you worked as a sailor
for months at a time
in the seventies
the implications of this
are too numerous to mention
until more data is ready
data that demystifies
the certain blurring
that such an endeavor implies

there's an intimate moment
at the end of our movie
that defines us as people
you know the moment
it's after the guns come out
and after the tension breaks

I love the way your green shirt
brings out the green
from your green green eyes
now here come the anesthetic
feel the pain, common worker

there's a part of me sleeping
a part of me you don't know
because you have no empathy
there's a part of me sleeping
out in the desert
next to the windmills
in the heart of the beast

I'm better than most
but not better than others
this sums me up
in the eyes of the caged one
and in the eyes of me
this tells you that
I'm coming home, but I'm coming home alone
that's the way it must have been meant to be

so where's your pride?
your pride's on the radio
I've heard the only song
you ever knew how to play
I've heard it sung badly
I've heard it sung falsely
you were the only one to do it right

October 26, 1995

Allies

the sugary one is stirring up trouble
making threats and speaking loudly
of canyons and the yodels therein
I haven’t seen you smiling lately, why?

packing your things
you think of going
but really you’re staying
because tomorrow
you’ll be back
so you may as well
leave it all be
climb up a tree
and make your own threats

the trouble, once stirred, is absent now
the sun is falling from its sleeves
the gauges we have are unreliable
and I think that’s the sound of trouble again
it couldn’t last, it wouldn’t
but that doesn’t mean
my eyes aren’t green
my skin isn’t soft
my lips aren’t dry
but that doesn’t mean
my angles are worn and rounded slightly
because, brother, sister, other, they’re not

June 6, 2000

Sightings

I'm looking at the fog, can't see the hills
I'm thinking about a revolution
I'm thinking I should announce my retirement
I'm sitting on my couch, can't feel my feet
I'm remembering the drives along the west side of Bush Lake
And then it spits you out
By the highway, near the glassy buildings
People I didn't know worked in
People I didn't know slept in

I'm waiting for an answer
I'm confiding in you, can you feel it?
I miss the mollusk, I miss the ocean
I miss the lake, I miss the muddy feet
But I can't just do what they say
I can't just covet the end of the day

She saw me on 3rd Street
I saw her on Chapman
She saw me on Pico
I saw her on Colorado
She saw me on Larchmont
I saw her right back
She looked away on Normandale
I looked right through her on Burnt House Hill
She saw me on 3rd Street
I punched the little spaces on my iPhone
And considered a move, eastward in the dark
I waved
She drove ahead
And in the fog I will know you by the trail of what I've never said

December 2, 2008

They're Calling Me

They're calling me to come to
To wake myself, to wake the earth
To rouse the bursting fields
The harvest that I built
But I'm sleeping in this morning
I'm dreaming of a wake
A man with knives is pointing
The path to a dead girl
The coffin lies half-empty
The child too small and low
She's pushed herself to one edge
With gravity, grief, or both
I nod my first and last respects
I never knew the girl
I often dream of strangers
With half a sparrow's curl

They're calling me to come home
To trumpet my return
To sing of highways drawn in
To exhale, exhaust, and cough
But I'm careful not to tip my hand
No commitment, no regret
Songs are for romantics
With fists for wings and feet for feet
I never knew the girl
Though I recognize her hands
Pale and soft and empty
Holding out for holding back
Her years were warm and heavy
With snow on each her birthdays
But her name is a mystery
I never dream of names

They're calling me to slip through
The gateway to the next day
The keeper sleeps his day by
Like I wished I'd sleep my own
They've called enough to wake me
I'm shaking off my dusty sleeves
I'm breaking up my shaky schemes
My charts and graphs and sketches
Of running in inertia
As far as eyes can see
But eyes are built for sleeping
In dreams the fever cures the well
I recognize her hands
They're open to the extra space
She hopes the lid stays open
Oh God, I recognize her face

They're calling me to speak up
My voice is soft but pure
No threat I make is veiled
No promise too impossible
I switch back to the road to town
I'm coming back to kiss the ground
To bless it and get out
I get tired but then I don't
Her face was all I couldn't see
When a word called for a cure
Medicine too slow to do the trick
To thick to save the world
Don't close the top, she loves the sun
Not ceilings of spiders and pine
Love requires nothing but love
Nothing but love never hurts

They're calling me to come to
I'm sleeping again, it's late
I'm driving asleep, it's dusty
The air is ugly but ugly's alright
The day I sprained my ankle
I fell to the blacktop just like that
I asked for a nap before the hospital
I asked for my book and my cat
She loves the dirt under the sun
The sun as it looks from the moon
The moon as it looks from the sea
The sky as it splits from the earth
She kisses the dirt under the sun
The ground I walked yesterday
I woke when they carried her out
When she shouted “It's okay”

-2002

The House

There’s a danger in there. We shouldn’t go in there. They have secrets made of small leaves and strange histories. If we go in we will find nothing.

It’s an old house, next to the new ones, in the old town we have grown up in, as philistines with baseball bats and short-sleeved shirts. It’s an old house with a creaky door with a cobwebbed knob. No one has lived there for years. It is unsafe. A crowd is forming behind us.

We must go in. But we shouldn’t go in. There’s a danger in there and I can almost taste it.

Still we enter. Still we walk slowly, in awe, with no flash cameras, with eager souls. The others are following us, tugging at our clothes because of the dark.

There is a story to be told for every room. There is a history but I only know some of it. Knowing too much could be dangerous. Knowing too little could be deadly. We could make it up. Or we could get out of here. I don’t like being haunted. We shouldn’t like being haunted. The crowd is abuzz.

One of the crowd – the youngest – is almost giggly with anticipation. She has heard more stories than we have but we are the oldest so we have to lead. Sometimes having the most responsibility is dangerous.

The youngest one tells us that she once heard the house was to be demolished, that a prospective buyer wanted to sell the land to our fathers. But then there was a lull. Months passed and the buyer backed out at the last minute. He backed out quietly, with only a note on out-of-state letterhead to show for it. He hasn’t been back to town since. And this story we believe because the youngest one, a child, wouldn’t voluntarily speak of buyers and letterhead.

I am afraid for myself. The silence is relentless. There are ten of us in here and none of us can hear a thing, none of us can make a sound. It is dark and old and dusty and dead in here and we aren’t adding a single audible breath to the room’s sound. We have been turned into nothing, ten of us, and we are helpless to do a thing. The youngest one speaks first but most of us don’t hear her. We are in another room now. There is tugging at our clothes, a train of children and teenagers both frightened and overjoyed and the youngest one is at the end of the line and we can’t hear her.

Perhaps she has said something important. I can hear breaths of concern, that the youngest one is missing. I hear the front door slam, perhaps she ran outside. I want to ask the one who was supposed to be in front of her if anyone is tugging at his clothes, if anyone was tugging at his clothes, but I can’t say a thing.

Often we are brainwashed to believe exactly what we want to believe.

We find a spiral staircase and one by one the nine of us now walk upstairs to where the real secrets are answered and the deadest ghosts recline. I try count the footsteps. I can tell there are more than five of us but probably less than ten. I am hoping we have only lost one. I am scared. There is danger upstairs.

I make it to the top first. There are two directions to walk, straight ahead or to the left. I walk straight ahead with my forearm leading the way. I touch what feels like a slightly ajar door and I push it forward only to realize I should have pulled it toward me. I change course and pull and feel for the opening and I walk through. I don’t say a word because I want everyone to follow me. I want everyone to feel the same fear I am feeling as I enter the first upstairs bedroom, where the deadest ghosts are said to recline.

I stop and I wait until I no longer hear footsteps. I count the steps I do hear. By my estimation seven of us are in the room. I know the youngest one never made it to the stairs. The next two youngest may have stayed downstairs or gone to rescue their frightened child friend. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are eight of us. Or nine or five or one, me, making echoes that sound like others. Maybe the person tugging at my un-tucked shirt is a ghost, no longer dead and reclining but lithe and spry and here.

Next I try to find the first upstairs bedroom closet. The closet, according to local legend, is where it all happens. This is where the victims, sanguine and oblivious, spent their final restful night, before they woke in the morning to the terror in the closet that doesn’t have a name, the dread that so surely occurred and just as certainly cannot be defined. It smells like a thousand years in here I say to myself and though there were no houses in the town a thousand years ago, though this house is no more than a hundred years old, my sense is shared by the others in the room, I think, I hope, I fear.

In the daytime, before we entered the house, I said to the group, we need to do this while we are still young so we have stories to tell our children, so they navigate the world with an endless curiosity. I know now that I tell a good story. I know now that I didn’t mean any of it.

Though it is unnamed we know that in the closet lived something, a person, a spirit, an animal, a ghost, something that had a motive to kill and make bodies disappear. Though it is unnamed it is understood this way, in these terms: something, kill, disappear.

As my arm reaches out for a closet I sense that I am stepping on what feels like dry leaves. The oldest one before me, the boy who did not come along today, the boy who gave us every detail he could name about the house, told me that early each spring, with the house’s surrounding oak trees plied with fragments of leaves, a harsh wind would touch down in the valley and the swinging shuttered windows would open wide, thirsty for the tree’s new life. The tree would shed its first set of small spring leaves, not yet full, hardly green and the wind would carry them into the upstairs bedrooms, this one and the next. The wind would dissipate and the windows would shut and the trees would be still, waiting to be replenished with the next rains which would always come the next morning by dawn, always the morning after the wind.

I didn’t doubt what the older one said to me. I believed it then and I believe it now as I step on the small dry leaves and I listen for the crackled footsteps of others.

The history of the leaves was not the most important thing the older boy told us. He also implored us not to speak, not to scream, just to breathe. If we spoke, if we screamed, we would perish in a blaze of light invisible to the living but unmistakable to the dead. Perhaps this is where the youngest girl went.

This is why when I hear a whispered voice in the bedroom I cringe. I am now more alone than before. This is why when I hear a scream following the whispered voice, a scream surely emanating from the child whose clothes were no longer being tugged, I cringe again, one less friend, one less confirmation of our journey into the soul of death.

If there were no more than seven at the top of the stairs, there can be no more than five now. I still feel the tug on my clothes, so we’re somewhere between two and five.

The terror I felt before entering seemed justified at the time. Now, though, the terror has been replaced by a sense of pride at being one of the few still left standing. I’m in the top half, perhaps in the top two, and this is a story I could tell to my children with pride. My friends may be dead but I didn’t love them as much as I love myself and the history I spawn.

I find a doorknob and know that I should pull, as is the case with all closets. Except this one. This one isn’t moving as I pull so I push. I hear a creaking door move forward. I disappear into the darkest place I have ever conceived of and I feel the second oldest one follow me, squeezing my shirt so tightly that it hurts both of us. I don’t know if anyone is behind us and I have to stop to think to count the footsteps and when I am primed to count I have to stop again to feel the airspace in front of me and when I feel nothing but air and I remember to count again I no longer feel anyone touching my clothes. I chase my short term memory. Did I hear whispers? Did I hear screams? Did someone say something, anything? And I swear I hear nothing. But perhaps I was too busy feeling and counting to hear. Perhaps I am alone. This makes me happy. I am the last one standing. They are all dead and I am still here and I am in the closet that houses the spirit that killed the people who now recline in the rooms of the house as the deadest ghosts of all. I am the bravest and I am the oldest and when I descend the staircase in a downward amoebic coil and I retrace my steps to the front door and I stay silent as death and I open the door into the safe night beyond this house I will be alone to answer for the ten of us. I will be questioned and I will be studied. Many will wonder what it is I carry that others do not possess. Some will say it is age. Some will say it is that I am a natural leader. Others will say I failed to lead but I will blame the higher powers, the house and its century of neglect and torpor. Some will suspect me of the darkest crimes but I will walk away from them. Now, the closet is defined for me, as I touch all three of its walls in succession, as I hear thunder crack and winds howl outside, as I remember that it is spring and this is the first storm, as I hear the shuttered windows bang open in a defiant thrust, as I feel the first of the oak leaves slap my smooth, un-goose-bumped skin. I hear myself breathe in, breathe out. I feel myself fighting against words. I feel a scream flailing its way up my throat. I twist my tongue to keep it inside, I clench my teeth to keep silent, but the thunder smacks and the winds grow stronger and the leaves won’t stop. I am too weak to stop this next scream. I can feel it punch my abdomen, squirrel up my windpipe, and shove itself into my mouth and because I die the moment I scream I hear nothing but I know it happened.

I Will Lay Me Down Like A Bridge

1.

These are massive buildings, built with friction and dusted-off bad ideas. The buildings capture the city and the city raises its hands and stretches its arms and all that comes of any of it is a new experimental age of commerce and technology.

In one of those buildings there is a risen corpse with his arms around a small boy. The corpse is telling the child that he has come back for him, that the two of them will be together for a long time and no need to bring your winter coat, it’s warm there. The boy resists the invitation and screams, scaring the risen corpse out of his borrowed clothes and the corpse plummets, naked, like a show horse.

There are other buildings; let’s go to one now. In this one there is a writer’s block-addled songwriter in a bad mood, smacking at her piano with a pencil and saying “Why me? Why today? Why not yesterday? I didn’t need you yesterday?”

She is older now. Older than when she broke into the business, into the mainstream, in the early nineties. She is older with better, smaller hair but writer’s block just the same. She is trying to break through a blank wall and her fingers have dulled and her pencil is old and her piano is just an instrument, an entitlement.

When she was young, things would happen to her – bad things – and the songs would write themselves. These would be painful songs however. She would have to summon up nerve from her youthful reservoir when it came time to perform the songs live, but that was easier than this, than having nothing. And now that she is without hope, seemingly, without a way through this brutal wall, she thinks... I wish I was young and troubled. But the thought vanishes and she starts imagining her neighbor’s lives and what they may have gone through just this morning to make it to the afternoon and this seems strained, so she walks.

She sees the corpse as soon as she opens the front door of her apartment building. They were once friends. They were once lovers. He had killed himself because of her, mostly, according to his note. But if you pin him down these days, he’s tell you it was all him.

She runs fast from the corpse because it’s a normal first reaction. Her gait is more relentless than troubled and she goes far – miles down this one street, before tiring and looking up to the clouds for forgiveness. Which, if she pinned him down now, she would not need. Not at all, in fact she’ll get an apology from him. An apology as sincere as he could make it, being a corpse newly risen from the dead below us and is that a hat he’s wearing? She never knew him in a hat.

He is gone. She has escaped. She feels it’s safe now to walk, not run, home. This is something she can write about. She’s already thought of the first lines: “Why the hat? What’s with the hat? Take off the hat.”

It’s snowing when she gets back to her building which is unusual if not impossible for late March in New York City. She isn’t dressed for snow, just for rain, so she’s shivering when she gets inside. Manhattan glistens in new snow and she wants to go inside and get a warmer coat so she can go back outside and bask in the white magnificence. But today she has a song to write. And today she saw her second lover’s risen corpse naked save for a hat. So today she must stay inside and write. For the good of the band.

2.

The night before he killed himself he called his friend, the one he had traveled around Europe with the summer between high school and college. It was a glorious trip but it was marked by several events that nearly destroyed his friend and will destroy him. Tomorrow. He told his friend of his plans, that what had been foreseen will happen tomorrow, that there will be a note, that he is not at home and he cannot be found. That he will call the woman who scorned him, the songwriter, after he swallows the pills and before they take effect. That even if she figures out where he is, if she has caller ID, she will not get there fast enough, help will not arrive soon enough. There is nothing anyone can do. He is going.

His friend has heard this all before and though he suspects that this may be the time that it will really come down, he does not want to buy into the scenario and heighten the sense of drama. The friend is a playwright and knows all about moments of pause, about abating the swell. So when he says goodnight and good luck, he does it without judgment and does not allow a sense of finality to permeate his voice. Even though he feels it. Even though he knows this is the time. If it happens, it will happen no matter how he says goodbye.

The playwright does not know the songwriter’s phone number. She is famous now so her number is not listed. The friend does not think of calling the police. He knows that if he calls the police, it will happen anyway, maybe a day later, but it will happen and he will not get a goodbye phone call this time. He wants to find the songwriter so it’s less of a surprise. He imagines her receiving the phone call from her suicidal ex-lover. He imagines her wishing she had more time, so he’ll give it to her. Even if he’s certain now that more time won’t change a thing.

The playwright has heard enough of the songwriter’s songs to know that the suicide of his friend and her ex-lover will not destroy her. She will turn it into music, beautiful music, and she has the right, not to mention the obligation to do so. He knows this. He and she are artists. She has turned pain to melody before and will do it again. It is what she is best at.

So he calls people, people who might know her or where she lives, people who might know people who know and he comes up empty. He calls her record company and they are closed and have no provisions for such an emergency. He calls a friend at the local weekly newspaper who then leaves a voice mail message with the paper’s music critic who knows people in the business, but the music critic doesn’t return the message and midnight is approaching. The playwright knows only that the planned suicide of his friend is tomorrow. It could be in the morning. It could be late at night. It could be one minute past midnight, but that’s too literal. His friend isn’t that literal.

Though it makes no sense to not try to stop it, he knows he can’t stop it. He just wants to warn her. The warning, although it will make her subsequent songs less urgent perhaps, will be a good deed and he has goodness in his heart.

3.

He is threatened more by his sense of malaise than by his imminent death. He breathes like a mannequin would. He breathes like it’s breakfast. He shakes for the fountain of rain that’s spanking his window now. He’s loved. He’s lost. He’s done.

Haphazard thoughts spark through his mind, just staying long enough on the lily pads between his synapses to grant him moments of recognition but nothing more. When the colors on the walls around him become one, it will be almost time, not quite yet. Almost time.

He thinks of London with Eric. He thinks of not knowing the neighborhoods, not bringing his travel books – we were all cocky then – and not knowing where to find new ones. He thinks of weak shoes and scandalous nights. He remembers coming home, to Los Angeles. He had not gone to New York yet to follow her. That would come later. He remembers the flight home, after London and Amsterdam and Rotterdam and (West) Berlin and Barcelona and the smaller cities, and he remembers the realization that yes he will make it back to his city’s airport. But he had no home. On the plane, he decided he would live in motels by the airport, cheap ones. He had no car and no friends, now that Eric was in the hospital in Paris, cursing the wallpaper in English and the medicine in French. So, motels by the airport, that was as good a place as any.

On the side streets near LAX, in the shadows of the Sheratons and the Hiltons and the Holiday Inns, there exists a small village of lesser motor hotels, two or three stories high, exterior hallways, will take cash if need be. He found a good one at the best price. He thought then that he would be there a few weeks at most. And then something would have to give.

He remembers interrupting his concern over not having a permanent home to realize that he had been in most of the world’s great cities (at least as he saw them) in a span of a few weeks, especially if you count the layover in New York on the way there, the glorious inbound day, full of glitter and promise and nothing abject yet. He had been in the world’s great cities, was now in another one, his home, but all he owned was in a suitcase and all he had in front of him was nothing.

But then he got lucky and found a bartending job on a lark. Then he got luckier and met her and fell in love. Then came New York and then a phone call from Eric’s sister – things are cool now, he’s home, he’s quiet, he’s definitely a changed man. He wants to talk to you.

He replays these scenes in his twelve-by-twelve grid of a mind and he looks at the pills and he thinks of who to call and who not to call and of the mistakes of New York, of which there were many. He replays these scenes and builds new ones out of their slow fades and he can’t help but imagine himself in her arms again, that first spring in the city, in the dark apartment with the wood shutters, such a Lower East Side anomaly that place was. He is falling hard. This will take him down as far as he’s got room to fall, thinking of the spring when the fruit was sweeter and the moon was clearer and her eyes hadn’t seen through his own just yet.

He is in the middle of his life's country now. He has left his two corkscrewed lives right where they left him. He is hiding and he is falling and no one can see his sleeved arms over his head and his legs shaking as they rise to meet his arms, two pairs of limbs winging him from head to torso and he’s the only one who can see this. The pills are still in the bottle. But the cap is coming off. The pills are going down. He drinks the bottled water. He swallows its velocity. He can almost hear the pills breaking apart and each little piece is destroying its own little city block of tall shadowy apartment buildings and gilded vague dollhouses. It’s over.

4.

He remembers the exact moment he slipped. When the pills were done manipulating his system and simply shut the system down. And then he slipped. He remembers it as his corpse walks along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, heading west but not quite certain how far west. He remembers the way the noise, almost unbearable, certainly tragic, suddenly ceased and the colors abruptly stopped swirling, becoming one certain color: a sunny pink – the last color anyone would ever expect of death.

He wanted a better color at first, as he floated toward wherever it was he would float toward. He wanted a dark blue or a forest green or a sturdy deep purple or, if it had to be the red family, a historic battlefield crimson. But eventually the sunny pink was like a pillow of cotton and fluff that comforted him on his long, circular float through the highest clouds. He was ecstatic with the thing with the clouds: this was better than permanent residence in heaven or an eternity in fiery hell – floating, just floating. Silent, yes. Lonely, for certain. But these were clouds and it was warm, oddly warm he always thought. The pink eventually became his favorite color and the only one he was capable of imagining. That is, until yesterday, when he came back: to New York, where she lived now. Yesterday, all the colors became available to him and he embraced them. He missed the clouds but he knew that couldn’t last forever, what with the unfinished business.

He mapped it all out from the clouds – the fastest way west, away from his Manhattan visitation. He chose the interstate highway system for the company mainly. The walk would be a long one. Though he was incapable now of tiring, boredom was still a likely possibility. And he wanted faces, even if they had to be seen through the well-plied glass of passing cars and trucks – he knew he wouldn’t be alone. Some of them, they could even see him, even if they couldn’t touch him.

When they first met, it was quiet. They spent a lot of their clandestine dates – she was dating a prominent musician then – staring into each other’s eyes, waiting for someone to break and say something. He relished this silence. Even more, he relished his control over not breaking down and blinking (talking) first. He was very tired during this time – mentally stuck somewhere far away and uncertain and just looking at her thin and pretty eyes was enough for him then.

Eventually, they started speaking to each other – it had to happen. They were sweet and doting and curious, like all lovers at the beginning. Like all young lovers. She told him about her childhood, her father, the stories behind the songs he was familiar with and the new ones she was still working on. Most of the stories were well-documented in the music press, and he read about her frequently, both before and after their meeting in the bar. But he liked hearing them in her words. He liked gauging her pain or joy directly from her eyes and limb movements and stuttered breaths. And he told her things too. A little bit about Europe and Eric. A little bit about living in the airport hotels, how the smell of jet fuel was eucalyptus and the sounds of takeoffs and landings were his bird songs. She considered his living situation romantic and literary. Just like he did.

What would she think of this? Him, walking the length of the United States, a country he wasn’t even born in, in a state he had never been in before. Walking, to a place he couldn’t name, away from and to people he couldn’t reconcile, in a form he couldn’t quite explain to anybody, much less those who could see him but couldn’t touch him.

Like the boy yesterday. He didn’t know the boy. The boy wasn’t hers. She didn’t know the boy. He didn’t know anyone who knew the boy. The boy was simply there, near her, near where she was supposed to be living. So he tested himself on the boy. He wasn’t sure if anyone could see him or hear him or touch him, much less believe him. He thought he would try himself on an innocent. He figured the boy would just chalk it up to a bad dream. The boy couldn’t have been more than six, though his scream seemed like it could belong to a ten-year old. Either way, he was sure that the boy wouldn’t be believed by adults, much less by himself. He tried his hardest not to scare the boy. He tried to be gentle, maybe even comical with his word and his actions. He reasoned that a child’s imagination is creepier than anything he himself could place in the boy’s reality.

So, now that his material had been tested on a very surprised audience, he set out to see her, to find her building, to give it his best shot. And really what did he expect? Of course, she would run. Maybe she wouldn’t scream but she would have to run.

5.

(Eric)

There are no more things that I have to say to you. There is only this sky-blue day and the scattered plums it permits to clog the gutters above its streets, the red-blue rain that I can only love as much as I used to love...

Then what? Then I remember (for the most part) the odd remnant of a columnar building, the one with the lone fire escape in town. For it is a modern town. For is it an insular, private town.

Europe. Walking like crabs, me in morning, you in the light of your own masked memory. Then when the covers come off and the rain resists the temptation to fall, all of us are left without a longing and the skin of your hands is peeling off. You forgot to wear gloves as you held on, held on, held on. And it’s a random act that got you help and an awful slur that got you home and back in trouble. There was the time when... no, you know, you know how it felt, you made it happen and that’s all I can like about you.

Rooftops were the magical world. But that was before I was allowed inside. Now I prefer to remain inside or on the street level outside. I cannot for the life of me admit to missing it, the exalted state that left my poetry stranded in the mind. But not on the skin. But that’s 1997 for you. That’s the panorama that got the words out. Still, I couldn’t sleep without a little help. Still, I couldn’t breathe without the window open and my ears burned from your words, the three of them, the words. I am no longer still. I am all the way home. I am all they way back. I am struggling to stay alive. But it feels so good. I am loping. I am pulling. I am magnetic. I am aromatic. I am Elliot Smith when he feels like a second draft is necessary. Which is never. Maybe he should, maybe he will, maybe he should.

And though there are days when I feel less run down than others, I still make drama out of nothing but an incident. And it’s not so bad, never so bad, for a playwright. Let me list the things, there’s this first, there’s the way I’ve given up completely on doing what I never should have considered in the first place. I’m not an educator. I look like one, I walk like one, I seem like one. But I’m not. There are others. Let them do it. They will be the giants in the field. Then, next, second, there’s the fact that I’m thinking of starting to do the legwork that it takes to become an auteur. Though I’m tired, I’m not impossible. There, that’s not so bad. That’s kind of sexy. How was New York? Does it get cold in the elevator rooms? In January? When there’s no one to go out with and nothing to do on the inside? Does it get cold and dark?

My predilections for questions give you pause? Is that a long black hair in your hand, something to remind you of the old day, the harvest months, the long drives down Laurel Canyon with the wind all unruly and the music unforgettable? Not to mention cool and melodic. There are moments and then there are months. Tell the difference and you will go places, far away from any here that I can build for you.

It was one night, one 4:00am in particular, when I got the phone call, that the situation was indeed, finally, changed. I received the phone call and was told to drive south, over the canyon and into the city. And when the lights of Hollywood washed over my own well-accorded personal vista I felt a twinge of something graceful. And a lot of something scary. I was just a voice and she was just a remnant, a well-accented actor, breathless in her way with old words we don’t use much anymore. And then, after we went inside, as the table seemed to shake and the restaurant started to empty, the sun peeked through the window and I realized it was indeed a new day. That could be why I stopped paying attention to her movements and only noticed her rare words. That could be why it led nowhere, nothing to hold on to, no one to grab and unwrap.

She could be anywhere now, but I assume she is right where she’s expected to be, living in the same apartment, regaling other strangers with stories of Van Nuys High in her campy British accent. She could be telling lies about medical school and granting wishes to friends and suitors and others. But not to everyone, there are always those that have to be, need to be disappointed. And the only reason I know this is that there are only so many siren sounds in the city firmament.

So you’re the latest incarnation of the impetuous observer, with a notebook or a laptop or both on Saturdays. You’re the blue-haired roustabout skewering our notions of fair play and slandering literature. I give you credit for this. I will be sure to honor you in many more ways, not just this, here today, not that this is not enough. This is barely audible. This scream is fading fast. This light is dark and darkness has no place. Not today, in the sun, with my skin like this.

I ought to stop spilling it all. I ought to remember that a day without sun is still a day in many parts of the world, maybe even Los Angeles, maybe even (if it mattered) New York, maybe even Ohio or wherever you have gotten to by now. It’s a long road between where you found her and where you must be going to truly save yourself, to truly get your life back. You have eyes for so much more than what she is expected to have. There are a lot of smaller words and littler sentences that could describe her, or describe you and her, but I choose not to write those words. I am unlimited now. You are not here to strike anything down. You are dead. To chop any little sense of meaning off the edges. You are not here, so I do not have to answer to you. Though I am speaking to you. Only to you. It’s complicated and I can’t get out of it without just shutting up, so I will.

3 Beach Poems

I write these four poems in Santa Monica on 8/14/08. The first two were written on a boardwalk bench looking out onto the ocean. The last one was written on a hotel couch.

I was there for a retreat. I was really tired.

1. Evening in the Rain Light

Sirens meant for singing
Poets primed for distance
Evening in the rain light
Listening to the music
It sounds like broken peace
It sounds like slipped up sleep
It creeps like coward kids
Crawling from the busted sphere
A hundred miles away from here
Sirens stuck in mid-song
Intended for the avalanche
Evening in the rain light
Listening to the wisdom
Of a hellish holy man
Shaggy and redemptive
Needing quiet, breathing loud
Creeping up the mountainside
Pretending that he never died


2. The Light Will Always Come

I tremble in fever
I'm not a believer
In fire and brimstone
In bodies of the holy
I stand for the universe
No blessing, no evil curse
I walk for the living
I walk for the dead
I'm the one with the finger
Pressed up at my head
Pushing the pain
Through the right temple
Back into my brain
There, it stays cushioned
And I can't see the spark for the trees
And I can't feel a thing in my legs
And I don't want to beg baby, I'm too proud
I don't want to hurt you or scream too loud
I know that the light will always come
I know that the light will always come


3. Jigsaw Puzzle

The next voice you hear
The next voice you hear
Will not be a familiar one
Will not be your sister
Will not be a garden gnome
But it might seem like
The high hat is twilight
I try to explain it
Its' easier not to bother
I couldn't contain it
Even if I tried, I usually don't
Let it go, let it come
Words - on trains, in cars, on foot
Words - in streets, on boardwalks, at home
Words busted and beautiful
I've got the fever dream today
Like that afternoon in '99
When the streets of Minneapolis
Were like old black cars and eiderdown
Today, here in Santa Monica
The sky is gray and broken
By a bright bright shiny light
By a flash soon gone, then back
Wait three hours and it will go black

The first voice I ever heard
The first voice I ever heard
Was of a man I'd never met before
And would never see again
I don't recall the context
I only know this:
Two words, two syllables each
"Jigsaw
Puzzle"
Breaking pictures only to struggle
To put them back together again
Like the bowling alley arms and shovel
Ten pinks back up again
Truth is your only friend

August 14, 2008

The Beautiful Dirt of Possible Lies: Six Poems From the 4th and 5th of July

1. For Too Long, I'd Wake Up Every Morning...

This one goes out to Annie
Who held her heart out
For all to see and take
Pieces of, see the drops
Of rain or blood on pages
Too sleepy to read now
So
Just lay inside the heartbreak
Fly above the helicopter elevation
See the starry spiked portraits
Bringing you down, singing you down
What else could she say that day?
So again, so
There was the Saturday
(I remember days of the week)
We converged on the campus
Annie, the anchor, and I
Three students on an off-day
Hands in pockets, pockets full
(Different Annie, different anchor, same story)
And we slapped around the Minnesota sun
Paced around like gophers with no holes
Only flat hard dirt and picked-apart shrubs
No love, just mutual respect
And time, time, time

Now, today, here
It's just a made-up memory
Details - Saturday, the toothpaste, the names
All true and covered with
The beautiful dirt of possible lies
Chris the anchor, he moved to Hollywood
I followed him 20 years later
Almost to the day, now he's in Atlanta
I'm still here, a mile from Orange Drive
Ten more to Overland and Venice
Where once they said the secrets were kept
Bastards - old kids, stuck
Damn - I'm sleepy now
New times, old kids, stuck
New false universe
Turn slowly when you hit the corner
Speed over speed bumps
You're not going anywhere, not falling down
The whirling story
Comes to a crawl
A stop


2. Four Mistakes

They came at me from both sides
They filled up my voice mail, my insides
They crushed the cardboard boxes
They replaced the gophers with sly slow foxes
They don't exist, I do

I've made four mistakes in my life
Which isn't so bad for such a long time
It's just that
I made one mistake 600 times
And another 245
But that's cool, no crimes, no wasted holidays
No corners turned blindly, eyes open
Narrow and tired
But still open and green

They came from both sides
Doesn't matter if you get it
Only matters if it hits you
Hard enough


3. Superhero

She's a slipped-up superhero
With a longing for a longing
A galley with empty walls
And a filled-up floor
Littered with love and rugs and last year
Or the one before - '06 - which dropped hard
Hit hard and blatantly
Into a wall of deflecting fists
And risks well enumerated
Described like flesh and stone
Neither one breakable
Despite what you think

She's a stuck watch superhero
Flailing for the light to disappear
Big songs are better because
They never leave you for a moment
Unlike, well unlike a lot of things
Which just don't stick
There's no one, there's only
Dust and black and air and dust
And the dust is invisible anyway
Brick and wood and dirt and brick
And the brick and wood and dirt
Don't mean a damn thing
When the hunger is holding you close
Like a field full of babies
Or a house full of DVDs

There's a color carrying you
A shape holding you
Losing, running my mind
Running, losing my time
Large, the world gets
Big, the song stays
I'm shaking from the beauty
Of all graceful things
Of each healed broken wing
Of all never healed
Of the bursting baby field
Or the sunrise facing west
Or the damn elephant hovering over us
It's inflatable from a curse
We do not want it to burst
We only want the love
You take that's equal to
The most brilliant mistake


4. Days of the Week

I fell in love for the first time on a Thursday
In November and yes I remember the year

I was thrown to the ground in Westwood
On a Wednesday and I don't know the month
Or day but I think it was 1996

I rode up the elevator on a Tuesday
It let me out in the student union
Of my third and fifth college
The woman asked me my name, I had an answer

Nothing ever happened on a Monday
Except for the day my marriage ended
MLK Day and the sun was brighter than
The opposite of death

Sundays are easy - when my friend and I
Walked the free meter streets of downtown Minneapolis
To pick one of a thousand beautiful 12-inch singles

Saturday is tomorrow and six days ago
When I tore through the desert
In a sadcore haze, avenging the gods
And enjoying the last days of holding
The phone to my ear in a California car

Friday. 1996. August
I was back home and I didn't know why
Didn't seem real, the Twins on the radio
My shit in the U-Haul my cats in an Edina hotel room
I found a place to live by that Sunday
But fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck?
Where did the days go?
Where will they take me tomorrow?
And the next day and then Monday


5. They Were the Music Lovers

Eleven years ago I boasted
Of moving three friends to London
To bask in the foglight
To sleep in the stuck rooms
But they got me back
One went to Waikiki
Another to Brooklyn
The last one just down the street
From the prettiest of the five Minneapolis lakes
And I'm holding my hand to my head
To cover the sun and protect the dead
Half of me, the identical twin
Who never committed a crime
Who never crossed a blurry line

My new friend, she's considering
A move too, I wish I knew
If I want her to go or stay
If I want to go too or play
The same mix CDs over and over again
Because it's not easy to be my friend


6. Crow

My eyes moved in too many directions
The mixtape mystery girl, she cradled
Her home phone like it was a bible
I committed myself to 14 words
To the girl with 8 names, only two of which
Mattered

She moved south
Near the Iowa border, surprised
That I called her to say goodbye
I stayed in town, in school
Never saw her again

It's a stain on my record
The lost cause years - '92, '93
The false start years - '92, '93
But I have to blame
Myself for decisions made
In '92, '93, and of course '85
I lived through it
Don't need to hear the songs again
My eyes, under water and closed
To the surface
When it all comes clean

Slower Than I Was

I might have exactly
What I'm looking for
Within reach of upturned palms
Tall people and short people
The sound of the uphill cars
The purr of the buzzkill bars
I think I've got it / Now do I want it?

I shadow the slow walkers
I lie because it's easy
It's simple and pure
I'm slower than I was
Last fall, last time
I coveted and lost
It's an eternal internal cost

The girl with the red hair smirks
The one with the brown hair cries in a coma
The one with the black hair works
The other two with red?
One saves the dead
The other lives in Chicago

May 19, 2008

Veronica In Winter

We're in long pursuit
Of an impossible goal
To fill up the hole in the earth
To cradle the action
To covet the fraction
Of good into bad
Or false into all that is true

I don't name those numbers
Some numbers are proxies for names
I don't give out my real past
Some facts are unnecessary
I hold implications in my left hand
I hold cash and coins in my right
My notebook's a big one
My pens are blue and black
My family's dead, they're not coming back

It's a longing, she's got
A second child ahead of her
I'm confident she's got it down
As she rides into the new town
Her husband her soldier
Her first son her partner
Her cooler in the back
Iced out, blessed out

It was 1995
It all went dead or stayed alive
Revolving doors
Led me to bleak rooms
Forced me to speak doom
And on that June day
We wasted Wilshire Boulevard
We traded it in for a dirty 405
My cat was sleeping on the edge
Of the bed, like he will tonight
He's older but he's alright
I'm older and what I write
Trading gypsies for punks
Trading Jersey for Silver Lake
Trading legends for cold stark truth
Like Veronica in winter
Archie-less and effortlessly cool

May 19, 2008

She's Got Her Seatbelt On

It's come to this
Waited two years for this
Golden opportunities
One, red-tinged and north of the river
The other, bleak and blue, by the mission
I'll take one
I prefer two
None would be a disappointment

Take the body with you (sing the sequel)
Take the body with you (lotus position)
Take the body with you (it's an abstract world)
Take the body with you (portals, icicles)

The force of wonder made me blink
The eyes intolerant of passersby
Golden opportunities, gold sounds, gold lion
Red-headed stranger on the brink

It's strange, the darkness leads you through
The light, the black, the orange, the same songs
You heard in a Tears for Fears blur
Or a Blur flash in your lying eyes
She told me the end was never coming
That the city on a Saturday was a blessing
That if I stayed and watched the crowds form, I'd be good
Today I sleep, in cul de sac Hollywood
What goes on

April 17, 2008

Some catching up to do: 4 from 2000

Mimi’s Cafe

anchored down in Yorba Linda
sedentary and blue at times
I came to on that Sunday
I wrote my finest rhymes

the Highway was Imperial
the light was wearing thin
the grass was brown but beautiful
dinner took me in

it was almost half the family
a crowded room, a cult
the menu was irrepressible
none of it my fault

time to go, the night was young
I said goodbye, I shrugged
I thought of running far away
I said goodbye, I shrugged

and dawn would come, it would
I held out all my hope
and dawn came and nothing moved
I fingered up the rope

and dawn had bad ideas, dawn did
I couldn’t hold it in
and dawn gave birth to Monday
the rain would then begin

January 14, 2000

Hassling

feel like you’re hassling me
from the front, with a spell on me
from the back, with a curse for the progeny
you could see them coming down
from the last good part of town
before the mayor set about reforming things
and now he’s dying of the little things
he couldn’t touch to change to kill

feel like you’re hassling me
so what I’ll do is this
I’ll come for you in pieces
black cows five and easy
the first one will taste like morning
the second one dessert
the third one will seem like acid rain
the fourth one just acid, the fourth one just....
and number five
good to be alive
sometimes it’s just good
to be alive

May 1, 2000

The Doppelganger

the doppelganger fell on the sidewalk
he blamed the city

doppelganger fell on the sidewalk
he blamed himself

that’s what you get
when you first forget
that a doppelganger, fallen, is a fool
go back to school

July 31, 2000

Crazy Talk

you could end up wringing necks for sins like this
but what would that do? who would that help?
where would the wildest flowers take you?
you could end up wringing necks for sins like this
but who do you love? who do you think?
where would the wisest writings lead you?
do you have peace?
do you have flesh?
did you trade pantomime for art?
do you have feet?
do you walk fast?
did you have hardly any heart?
you threw her out the door, out of your life
one minute before she admitted to you
she knew that you knew, the footsteps were hers
but what about all your handsome hairs
piling up, all over the world, all over the world, all over the world

November 11, 2000