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

The Thumbprint

The thumbprint stays behind
Wrapped in crinkly paper
Four fingers beside it
Filing cabinet cold, the thumbprint's gold
If you know the story
Black if it's all a myth

The thumbprint's in your mind
Cold in the corner, cringing
Cement underfoot
They hooked the boy to sensors, damn torpedoes
Flying in the sun
Soaring from the magic hills

I wrote a riddle
I read someone else's
The rough knight cradled
His dancing girl
Her hair on fire
Gelatin and cellular
Scarred and cultured
She claimed the hills as hers

Demolition, marriage ended
Streets on fire, merry widow waltz
A parade of little cars
Down the hill, to the canyon
He grips the wheel
She's got a feather touch

And in the plastic pitch of all that's lost
He screamed the names of silent underdogs
Who won the waltz but lost the dancing queen
His fingers touch the gypsy skin of a raging libertine

Her arms with tracing tracks of old regrets
Her balance off, her hair an impish mess
She shakes her hips and hangs her head
Down so we see the back of her white neck

In the little village beneath her hair line
Is a circle, all traversed, a dropping hint
He put it there one night, wearing shoes without laces
His final remnant, his random right thumbprint

December 18, 2007

Middle L.A.

It's as if the weight
Isn't heavy enough to feel
But massive enough to see
Clearly, on a cloudy day
Like today, in Middle L.A.

The kids with cameras
Follow the kids with skateboards
The dogs on leashes
Obey the cats on cell phones
The rain looks as if it's coming
But it won't
The sun will win out
The sky will break out

But weather is weather
And irrelevant
So let's go
To a path of razor blades
To a field of gopher holes
To a river running through
The cities east of here
The continents west of here
The earth is shaky
My eyes are open wide
Let's go on another ride
Demolition derby
County fair and crushy stares
From girls with funnel cakes
But now's not the time for regrets

It's as if the weight
Has bounds and limits
Maps with insets
Here on a Saturday
At ease and play, in middle L.A.

The soundtrack has been silent
Since the broken down version
Of the laminated streets
Put their hex on us
But it's cool
Fires have burned out
Albums have come out
Sequels have panned out
Little lost kids
Have turned their tears to food
For a minor revolution
Marching on City Hall
Misbehaving on the bus
Losing their siblings' trust
Reading books and seizing lands
Writing treaties, breaking treaties
It's a trajectory

It IS a better day
Than the blue black yesterdays
Or the tow trucks in the haze
There are no alleys on these streets
Just the blind and blank at play
In easy breezy middle L.A.

Everything makes more sense
And holds less truth
In the plural

October 27, 2007

Devil Got My Woman Part 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