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Catch the Cat

Here's what happened

In the front of the market

Saturday suburban sprawl

Setting up bowling pins

For kids to knock down

But we've been around

Since the day before yesterday

And the night before that

The girl in the cowboy hat can't sing

But she brings in the bucks and her cat is named Catch

All holy modes await

For the starlet and her fate

She daydreams

She's coming down a maritime aisle in a white long dress

But it's not her wedding day

The guy she loves is far away

Up and at the peak of a sham mountain

While his girl and Catch the cat sleep peacefully

On a bed made of tooth and nail

As the harbor ships set sail for pirate ports

That's what happened in the peace of the evening

Another Saturday, another 'I know you know I know"

That's all good and just

But the guy regards the rust

As time slip slip slipping

Into the future, far from the flaws and pinned-down hair

The fractures and the beauty stare

As Catch the cat says "he'll be back"

Or, more accurately, purrs and falls asleep

In the clutch crossed heart of a sweet sweat dream

February 4, 2009

Signal Hill Sunday Morning

I haven't been here before
Haven't found a reason to come all this way
This far south and west of Cherry

This far east and north of 7th
Not until this morning
I felt like maybe
I was in a hurry
Had to find the nearest location
Not necessarily the best one
Just the one that I could get to as soon as possible
So I could stroll the aisles for 100 minutes
Pretending to be in a hurry
No need to worry
The effects will wear off
Around the time I need to unwind
Alone in the dark morning cloud of my second and so far best of my Long Beach apartments

I start in present tense
I move to past or more like present looking back
Then the past tense looking forward to a present that's now past
As I write this
Goddamn poem
To justify the picture you see
It was a Sunday morning, the last day of the first month
Of the second decade of the 21st century
There's a Target on E. 33rd, Signal Hill
They're remodeling
There's an oil well just down the street and around the corner
Meaning there's a derrick just down the street and around the corner
Meaning there's a pumpjack.... a nodding donkey... a thirsty bird
Just down the street and around the corner

Slow fade:
I kept the receipt
Actually there were two 'cause I bought electronics too
I kept the receipts
Spent $188 and now I think I spend way too much
I'm returning the gizmo and the high-end toothbrush
I'm keeping the toothpaste and high fiber bars
I never did get the green Brita pitcher
And that's what I went there for
In the first place

Fast fade:
I kept the receipt
Two, not one
I kept the receipts  

2.2.10

My PJ Harvey Problem

I’m trying to explain

my begrudging hatred

of PJ Harvey

I’m investigating deeply

whether my trouble with her

has something to do

with gender, with youth

and what if it does?

how do I work through that?

after all, I know some brilliant people

who find her to be a genius

what am I missing?

what do I lack?

but maybe rather then it being my fault

perhaps Polly Jean is to blame

perhaps her songs are lacking

some semblance of listenability

because her sensibilities

are built upon

the ravenous curtailing of certain emotions, followed by

the ravenous dispensing of selected other emotions

i.e., her songs (except C’mon Billy) suck

whatever the reason, consider the investigation

incomplete

November 20, 1997


(note: Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea made this "problem" disappear) 

Devil Got My Woman #2*

Among the dropped papers
In the long night of demons
In the short drive from moment to next
A girl, with her hand, in the salad bowl
Recalls the name of the man
In the vision she had
Before she stopped having visions
She shudders because
It’s clear to her now
That the man’s name
Is on both sides of one page in the pile
No picture
No mention of no children
Just his name twice, once in bold 

She keeps her hair pins
And her earrings
And her feathers
And her beads
In the bowl
She doesn’t use it for salad 

The named man was famous in his small city
For a song about kissing cousins
A charmed man and a charmless woman
Their doomed love, their devout air
Rumors tossed to sea overboard
Grown children skipping through forests
Where snow falls instead of leaves
The charmed man forgot their kisses
Deflected her love like a moonbeam off a Toyota
But the charmless woman never forgot anything
Except forgetting
So she jumped off the bridge
Near where the poet jumped and died
24 years earlier, a year before she was born
The charmed man, her third cousin
Read at her funeral
Like he was the smartest kid at a small town poetry reading
Rhyming “stop the bleeding”
With “5 a.m. feeding”
Then he turned her life into a song
About the deadly perils of doing wrong
It had a melody like a flock of geese  

The woman with the salad bowl
Finds the page and files it away
She walks outside for air
And for the opposite of air
She presses shuffle
That song, like a beast of a love gone north for the spring
Plays first
She practically skips down Wilshire Boulevard as she hears:  

“This river’s not like
That river, I like
Both rivers until
One takes my true love away” 

She slows to a walk
Because practically skipping makes no sense
For a song like that
Notwithstanding facts like

“I like his voice”
“She had a choice”

In glorious noise there’s often the absence of nowhere
The opposite of light deflected
Off the dirtiest greenest dirt-green
Lake of the Isles gosling 

Spring, 2006

*title courtesy of bluesman Skip James, as cited in Ghost World

M * D = Y

It's one of those days
Where if you multiply the month by the day
You get the year
1.10.10

Just like 9.10.90
My great lost birthday
The one I can't remember
It came around and then left town
I was a hotel guest in my own hometown
I had an eight-month stint and they let me down
Sent me back to California with my eyes averted
Way past closing time in the 909, sweet friend of mine
Where'd you find the time?

Just like 1.9.09
It didn't seem like a harbinger
I didn't look like a dead ringer
For the tall blank scepter in the church hall hell-light
Good thing I'm not
Good thing I'm special and a doctor
Good thing I'm good
Good thing I'm stylish and a doctor
Yeah, 1.9.09
She told me I could come back
With or without the laptop
She told me I was funny
I was funny because of the laptop

But that anniversary has past
Just like 8.12.96
I boarded the plane at LAX
Leaving town forever
Said I was never coming back
Said I was never even thinking about coming back
I soared all the way to Boston
Rented a car with two cats in it
Hated my new home inside of a minute
Hey Amherst - it's not your fault
I had unfinished business in two other time zones
I've since learned... that unfinished business can be left alone
There's always a new land ahead around every corner
With faucets and fixtures and squirrels and sweethearts
There's no need to write the story myself
Just let it be


I'll stay silent on the math 
Just arbitrary numbers
Means nothing now, meant nothing then
Might mean nothing on the 5th of February
2.5.10
Then comes 5.2.10 and 10.1.10 and two more times next year

1.10.10

Unincorporated East Los Angeles #5

The 6th day of the second decade of the 21st century

Feels like 1972 to me

Just pick a house - any house - at random

Like the one where...

Sly Stone says to the encyclopedia salesman at the door

"Only need K through O. Got everything else.

Ain't buying the rest of the alphabet

Nothing's changed since '68 anyway"

The salesman can smell the royalty checks and stands down

But Sly knows the music's not infinite

Which means the money's not infinite

Besides

He doesn't live here

He's just visiting

Staying with some lady

She's missing K-L

She's missing M

She's missing N-O

Sly's new girl is picking up her only son, her only child

From the new elementary school up by ELAC

He's in 1st grade

Doesn't know Sly Stone from Sky Saxon

And believes what his dad says about his mom

More than he believes his mom

"The guy your mother's dating ain't no rock star

He just looks like one

He's got that crazy hippie vibe

His name's Victor

Just got done with doing time

Sits around all day

Writes manifestos

Hides them in the middle pages of mid-alphabet encyclopedias

His name's not Sylvester or Sly or Sky or Sy or Spy vs. Spy

It's Victor"

Mom takes the kid up north

Car breaks down halfway up

She sells some gold for a Gremlin

Sly - not Victor - gets tired of waiting

In a neighborhood that isn't his

He packed up his three suitcases

Takes a cab to a train to another train to Oakland

Forgets his medication

Forgets to re-tape the pages he tore out about Papua New Guinea

When he finally gives up on finding her, that runaway, that run-fast-and-far-away mother

It had been seven days

Six mail days and the letter came

In penmanship that never needs lined paper

She wrote:

"Thank you for

Giving me a moment to think

Letting me be a threat

To no one but

Myself

I belong to no one

Again"

Sly wondered how she knew to send it to his house
He looks at the postmark
San Luis Obispo
So she sent it on her way back down
So she took he coastal route
What she said on her way back down
She belongs to no one
She belongs to her only son

At the Grammys, in the dead spot between

Best New and Best Old

The session musicians sneak out back and the subject

Always come back to Sly and if he's okay or if he's Sly, high and goodbye

Between bourbon coughs, the bassist from the Valley shakes his head slightly

And the drummer from Covina says "maybe it's time to intervene"

The mom and her son heard he'd be here but he's home

300+ miles away, but they stay for the end of it anyway

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face wins it all

Back home she picked up that half-piece of paper where Sly wrote the note

She wondered why he couldn't use a full sheet and what he meant when he wrote
"Come into my kitchen, there's fire and water in here"

1.6.10

Unincorporated East Los Angeles #4

We waited until the lamp fell

Before we thought to change the bulb

We listened to three collisions that night

From the freeway down the little hill down the frontage road

If these are the details that make you listen

And yours are the decals that stick

To the wall behind the outdated stereo

And the dead turntable dust cover

Then baby you're a fighter AND a lover

We weren't really made for each other

But this land was made for being you

1.5.10

Robert Cray's Wednesday

Robert Cray asked the lady

at the bus stop where she got her hair done
she said "I don't know but if you ask the lord, he'll tell you"
Robert put the words to paper and asked the lady her name
she said "is that my bus?, my name is God, and yes that is my bus"

Bobby didn't know what to do with this

He walked with his guitar down Main Street

To the place where it ended, the runway of cars

Made of steel, made of tin, made of flames

He found his El Camino

The car he named Victoria

He revved her up, put her in gear and rolled out of town

He made it home to the suburbs, to his blue and white house

With its niches and its copper antiquities

He said to his wife "I'm a bluesman, dear. I'm a bluesman for life"

His wife cried in her honey jasmine tea

She'd been to the bank that day

And the library. And the dry cleaners. And the butcher on Main Street

"I saw you talking to God" she said

"I didn't know she was a woman

And that she rides the bus

The uptown bus

The one called number 6"

Bobby said

"Yes, but I didn't know at the time

She was God, I just had to know

Where she got her hair done and if she carried a heavy load"

He continued

"Anyway. She just said she was God

She may have been lying, like your mother did to us

When she said we'd get the Forerunner

We never got the Forerunner"

But Robert Cray's wife

Had left the house by now

Slamming the door, in unison with Robert's next to last syllable

She ran down the cul de sac, screaming these words

"Bluesman, fuck yourself!"

Written in an office in Encino, 2003

Before the Parade

There won’t be a rustling of leaves
Or a pulled string of pained expressions
Or light bulbs left on inside the monument
But there may be dusk
Followed by a night
When weepy people find a way
To mark time with indecision
To make fine art with pencils
To make all the little sorrows
Big
Whole
Brooding


There won’t be a decade left for dead
Or an energetic healing of the lifeless
Or an antsy angel fidgeting away
But there may be a pageant
Followed by a slight
In which absolution of morality
Is a game to play with knives
Is a carol sung by owls
Is the big whole sorrows turned to
Brood
Melt
Flicker


There will be a moment
Before we leave the room
When the hint of recognition
That we will leave the room
That there will be a moment
Makes us stay


(written some time between 2002 and 2004)

Never Been to Hammond

Never been to Hammond

Never been to Jackson

Never been to the changing table

Never been to the sevens and eights

And yeah I've been to Scranton (4)

And yeah I've been to Tustin (2)

And yeah I've been to a cave for kids (3)

And yeah I've been to cemetery gates (1)

It was in 1999

Her friend died

Leaving behind

A husband and a cold charmed city

It was in 1988

My love left

She said she had

A moment of regret

It was in the seventies

Man-made, not nature-made

Later, I left them all

Kids in a sewer in September

It was in 1981

I went to a bookstore

Then went to an another

Came home clutching comic books

It was in 2029

It was in the infernal pines

It was in 2029

I was in fear of the signs

I saw them everywhere

I traded four for two and two to make eight

I saw them walk away

It was not in 1998

Years roll and years split

Spineless, timeless, why not?

Never been to a believer's church

Never laid in a burial plot

Never been to Oxnard

Oh yeah I've been to Oxnard

Never been to Downey

Oh yeah I've been to Downey

But we are we are we are

Sleepy and bleeding

Breeding and weepy

Yes we are we are we are

Never been to Paterson

Except for passing through in '96

Never been to Albany

Except for holding court in '88

She couldn't wait for me

I couldn't spin the world

I couldn't pretend time zones were irrelevent

She wouldn't cater to me

So when my sister got married

And my cousin got matriculated

I stood by, sleepy-eyed, world-weary

And my cousin just extrapolated

He turned to Paris and Chicago

My other cousin found Manhattan to his liking

My sister found the lowest mansion on the hill

My absence was notable if not striking

Never been to Glasgow (true, true)

Never been to Dublin (except the one in Pennsylvania)

Never been to south of North America

Never been to north of my birthplace, not once

I want to double the final verse

I want to counter the family curse

I want to be better than prescribed

I want to unexpected and unretired

I want to relive the years I died and stayed dead

I want to forgive the tears I cried as I never said

Love is futile if it's only a name

Never been in love, baby baby still the same

December 17 and December 21, 2009

(1987 - 1997)

I love
Then I don't love

Then I walk slow
Down the still road

Stunt men
Women
Dogs and barking bounders


I love
Then I don't love
Then I run home
Stopping for a picnic
In the stunted, runty soil
Of the parkland
Where the girl named
What her name was
Told me not to

December 20, 2009

The Second Lace

When I tie the second lace

And turn to face the door

And walk until I reach the knob

And turn it 'til it lets me out

And walk to where the beach lies low

And march to where my car sits still

In silver remnants of a good run

In black and almost blue

I feel good

Yeah when that all happens I feel fresh

I feel compelled to tell the world

I'm happy and it shows

Might not last and it shows

August 28, 2009

No Refrain

I've run out of reasons
To come to Pasadena in daytime
To ladder up the L.A. River
From my temporary home
Long Beach with its fractured numbered streets
And its cleaved community centers
Gardens of hope and damp flowers
Ferns, fraud fauna, the sweep of history

So I rolled out of that parking lot
Turned right on Colorado and proceeded west
Past Allen and Hill, stopped in the street space
Between the record store and the racist restaurant
I realized that once that decision was made
To go with leather over microfiber
I had no need to come to Pasadena
Before sundown again
That's when the poker games and the arthouse films begin to bloom
No I'll stay down by the water
Writing operas and editing bibles
Counting cargo and capturing malice
Before it spills out the bottle

I've run out of reasons
I've spent too many seasons
Waiting
I feel the end will come
On different roads I'll run
Sad ballads will end with no refrain
And we'll dance into our own hall of fame

December 9, 2009

Tenleytown

I have not been
Sleeping so well
I would prefer not to be
Persecuted for my nightmares
It's not like I selected them
Carried and corrected them
Rather, I gather and cultivate
The robotic and the reprobate

I replace pinwheeled decorations, numerically descriptive
With inappropriate behavior
Colored by lonely penny-ante poems
I used to ask her to read them aloud
I'd sit there pensive, nervous, but proud
And if she'd get the accents and inflections wrong
I'd remember it's the singer not the song

Sad refrain:
Except when it's the song
Except when it's the song
It's always the song
Always the sad sweet severance song
You got it wrong baby, always perfect and wrong

I have not been

Accepting of fate

Throat-clearing as I spit

An "it's not too late" at the audience

If you don't see them there

They're a ghost of a guy with a gun and a girl

And another girl with glittery eyes

And their cats and their kids and mittens and hats

They applaud as the reading comes to a close

They applaud as the moment sweeps to an end

They applaud as the loved one sneaks away softly

As the one who loves him looks down

And the one who doesn't nods and says to his face

You have not been accepting of fate

Because you and I agree on this

Fate is just future; future is just dots on a grid

Together they crooned and capped on the clever kids

Of which they were two

But they is I and he is she

The one who does is the one who doesn't
A is B and C is D

Everyone is one and the same

I should be as lucky

To be as joyful

As the two kids in the D.C. subway

Coming back from a Joe Cocker concert

In 2003, didn't they know Joe was old enough to be their dad?

As they first-kissed their first-date into the deep dark tunnel

They disembarked at Tenleytown

November 27 and November 30, 2009

Bags

We all have a tote bag phase
We all have a duffel bag stage
We all have a "throw your hands up / don't have the right bag" year of our lives
As we long for the totes
As we yearn for the duffels
And sin plenty for the range of our years
But you know, now ain't the time for our tears

November 19, 2009

Stereolab 5

I've listened to Stereolab in a dark car on a dark street
In a basement of a college I belonged to at the time
In an attic of a full house in a long street of a half-town
In my office at home, when I had an office at home
In my office at work. I have an office at work
These are the times
I've listened to Stereolab
Five times, the other times I wasn't really listening

November 12, 2009

29 Homes in 21 Cities (revised)

See the blog for an illumination


We worked it out
I come from Eskilstuna where the kiosks come up
I come from Alexandria where the asphalt was invented
I come from Teaneck with its sharks in quicksand
I come from Feasterville so you have no upper upper hand

We called it out
I come from Bergenfield where the floods did come
I come from New Milford where no children smile
I come from River Vale with its bushes of baseball bats
I come from Doylestown so you best not relax

We tore it up
I come from Eden Prairie where the warmth is palatable
I come from Eden Prairie again where the earth is flat
I come from Brea with its music 'til four in the morning
I come from Minneapolis where swift lifts make for soft pulls

We made it shiny
I come from Pomona so all your threats are empty, empty
I come from Pasadena where the ping-pong is dusty
I come from Monrovia where hearts are down and dusky
I come from Newbury Park with its two exits

We pulled it back
I come from North Hollywood so I know about coming from
I come from North Hollywood again and its ski lodge aspirations
I come from Ventura where the U-Hauls skulk
I come from Amherst where on the twelfth day we rise

We cleaned clocks
I come from Eden Prairie again so you best believe I linger
I come from Eden Prairie again with its misreading of the future
I come from Minneapolis again with its disappeared
I come from Minneapolis again with its so you never stood a chance

We pushed it out
I come from Minneapolis again with its owned not rented
I come from Santa Monica where nothing bad ever happens
I come from Santa Monica again where the rain is unending
I come from Hollywood where the helicopters haunt me

We rattle easily, no
I come from Long Beach so you know why we do what we do when we do what we do

We broke it down
We made a run
We wait it out
We have it all
I...

Written October 5 and October 27, 2009

Devil's Treason

I'm nothing if not timely
With my timeless salutations
That get you right there
And split your brain halves, like yolk from white
Uneven, odd colors, and is that a fable book?
That you hold in your hand like a cannibal's meal hand?
Unknown resister to reason
Guess what, that's the devil's very treason

October 27, 2009

Unincorporated East Lost Angeles #3

She talks about that one dead end
As if it's hallowed ground and not the edge of town
Where the city stops so the pavement stops
She thinks there's buried bones there
She may be right but no one's digging any time soon

The stories she tells
As the excitement swells and sweats
They're as true as a shy man's wedding vows
All bent toward great heights
Invented at the moment
Aroused and uninvited
She calls cameras
She stalls camera crews
The regional news
Gives her a segment

I think of that parking lot
As hope unearthed
Dashed and cursed
Speed bumps 'til the fence and forest
So dense. So warm. So porous
I wish we had more space and time
Fewer power cords, fewer shoes
Cotten swabs and rotten jobs
A trade off, one and not the other
Blood angel, two mothers
No fathers, a galaxy of pixelations
October 23, 2009