Couldn't Call It Unexpected #6

The biggest decisions are the easiest ones
Feel love in the middle stages of sleep
Shun sleep in the later stages of grief
Would I run
Far from the crowds of kids and their painted-on eyelids?
Sure I would run, who wouldn't? Who couldn't
Believe in something bigger than the tiny steps taken?

In the aisles of the big rooms on Bellflower Boulevard
He checked the texts from the sexy something sweet
He turned the corners carefully
Shunning the endcaps like cadavers
Don't want to deal with the badgers
No need for injuries with so little time to wait

In the spring of nineteen-ninety-zero
A tap on the shoulder leads to a loaded question
She keeps him guessing
For the rest of the semester
And Orange County skies look like blue-black bibles of bled-dry thought bubbles

The man in glasses - the little brother - wrote a history
With place names and fake names
Choruses and crushed corduroy
Faded labels in the neon commercial light
She might not have been part of this particular story
But her man without glasses read all these books
He liked the lines with lots of punctuation
Semi-colons unexpectedly launching exclamations
Now he's ready for his next big move
His last big move though there may be little ones left

He wishes he could have gone into her bedroom
The one in the old house but he made sure she made it in okay
While she made sure he had the right directions to the freeway
Still, he went the wrong way
Then they talked about the birthday

It's nice nice
The look in her living eyes
He was so tired that first night
But he got through it by narrating
The best tales, the ones he wrote himself
As he wrote himself into corners of laboratories
And she smiled like electricity itself

The easiest decisions are the biggest ones
Like yes he'll go to his third favorite city
With you you you

It was the summer she came back and he knew it
It was the summer she put the pieces together
It was the summer he discovered gummy bears
Softer than the hard soft rock swimming in his earbuds
But not as soft as Sunday night kisses on a subdivision street

August 22, 2009

Almost Summer

Almost summer in the almost city and the air is almost still
The green-eyed red-socked black-penned genius is thinking about the kill
His hair is cropped and brutal
His skin is soft and cold
He misses what he misses
He's in on the joke, out with the old

By the time I get to June
And its spare parts and spent hearts
I hope to be rid of
The broken pearls, the spy glass
I hope to be free of
The all-night curses, the never nurses
And their almighty grins
As I cleanse away their sins
And give mine another shine
For the first time

Now my task is
To clean my head, put on my tie
To learn if my fate is a good one
Or neutral, in need of a dislodging
Almost summer in the almost city and the air is almost still
There's a moment before that moment when he free-kills his free will

May 4, 2009

Unincorporated East Los Angeles #2

In each of the heart shaped boxes

Lives a night and a week and a month

They turned into each other, no sister no brother

It comes out in corners, under doors, through mid-air

A life for the dying, a death and then there's a struggle

He turns away or he doesn't

She gives her hand and he takes it or he doesn't

He's sleepy but soon he will wake

He's taken all he can take

He starts giving back, paying back

Tomorrow and love is the figment

Of imaginations crushed and coiled

Her hand is offered to a man in the misty south of her city

It's a pity he's nowhere around

It's tragic he's got nothing but his hand and his laptop and his bag

He stands up to leave but she's coming back

Again, he's not going anywhere

In love they have nothing but the loss of love

It hurts but he's here for the sweet duration

Which is likely 10 hours and maybe 2 more

And a month after that and a couple of weeks

Then his car, held together with black duct tape

Will make its way midwest

And he'll curse the summer he saw the sun rise through an uncovered crack of a papered-up window

written August 9, 2009

Unincorporated East Los Angeles #1

It's where they put all the cemeteries
At the turn of the 20th century
But they didn't wait long enough
For the rush of dead bodies
At the turn of the 21st
Not because of any war
Just critical mass and a city in flames
Every 24 years or so

Atlantic winds its way around the 710
And you have no idea why
They named the street after the ocean
On the other side of the country
Not the one you could almost see from there
If the buildings were a bit higher
And the skies a lot clearer

There are stairs and old rooms, never to be entered
There are plates and plastic spoons, for all the convenience
There is time and she nods her head at the sun coming up
The radio station pours in from the west side
Music defies the sun
Just as it defers the dark
To another sphere of up and down
To the border at the very next town
All six of them, wherever you happen to be

She called it the informal economy
But it looks like every other place
A few more 99 cent stores, a few more 98 cent stores
One more 97 cent store. not a single Starbucks or Trader Joe's
But there's a grid
There are gas stations with clean islands
There's a smog check guy
And just like the one in Santa Monica, he's not above being bribed
(A twenty plus the forty is all it takes)

He died in that one old room
She almost joined him until she shut it down
She moved across the hall
Except there is no hall, just stairs
And she needs to pin it all down some day
The reason she throws nothing away
She needs to pin it all down some day
The day they give her the back yard
She won't mess that one up, she tells me

Each day I drive away
Toward the freeway up there or the one to the right
I think not another day, never another night
I'm not going back, there's safety in not coming back
But it's not up to me, is it?
I hear the dead silence
As I inch my way onto the 710 south
There are corpses and gravestones beyond that wall
They're not coming back
And it looks like I'm clear to Long Beach once again

August 4, 2009