ghosts of jazz notes float
slowly in the breeze tonight
Billie’s song haunts me
crimson streets howling with soul
brick by brick the voices grow
Poetry
Rexall
on the table is a word
followed by dozens of
other words lying next
to each other in lines of
instruction, warning and
grief
although the moon has
dropped her pretty face
i pick her up by her wise
chin and beg her to shine
again
the stars in my moon’s
hair dance like beams
in a driven stony river
where the bones of time
soak unto the soil of my
bloods
what a waste of the moon
what a waste of the moon.
she hangs there brightly,
excitedly laughing,
waiting for you and i to kiss.
i look at her with an apologetic smile looking nervously
at the door to open.
i don’t want to hurt her.
i really wish you could see the beam of love in her face.
what a waste of the fragile moon.
who like me hangs there in the empty stage of the night, broken.
wishing you would someday beam for me.
late at night
when the moths sleep
and the ants strategize
how to crumble a dead
water bug under the house
i wake up with fever.
the riveting white hot
hateful kind that doesn’t
let you sweat. my kidneys
brochette while my heart
slowly bakes and in a pang
of fear i think if i wait
will i live to the morning?
a war rages between heaven
and hell in a warning that
Einstein understood well
relativity unto death and life
the wormholes and quantum
so plainly in sight.
3:13 a.m.
so dimly you come. to
satiate my sole being with
liberty’s cry. but i wait
another season to trial
another pill in the angst
to chase life. a comfort
in theory, in practicum
a lie.
i hate coffee now
she came on the wave of
eggy breathes of revelers
choking on designer swine
I’d never seen a soul so simple
but in coffee intertwined she
talked of your affections
so disappointed that she wasn’t
taken to New York and how those
big blue ones scowled at her
but rest assured that my face
never betrayed the offers
made to me at our cafe
in a moment of nothing
when I thought I was something
in your words filled with emptiness
let down
i woke up early.
the scent of my soap
crept into my imagination
and dared me to dream.
i drew a map in my mind.
closed my eyes and squeezed
them shut hoping you would like
my soap too.
feeling the weight of your hands,
on my breasts and your lips on
my chest, my soul blushed.
just a little, though.
the little monk’s bell broke the
spell and i knew you weren’t coming.
urban pre-k
i think of air
the load on my mind
is old and un fascinating
Alvarado has lost its
gold and my memories with it
i miss the buildings and their soul
the potato pancakes and the ducks
breezes that used to smell like L.A. Times
have died away with Marilyn and the Waltz
the pain of polio boosters and empty hugs
rushes back as i walk from the past
on Sundays i had gampa and pistachios on the lawn
an incomprehensible accentuated teutonic love
but that too has flown away with the
sirens and on the wings of the med fly
Westlake
at 5:37 p.m. the smell of
bacon and fabric softener
covers the neighborhood
like 4 a.m. London fog
so many lies and angers
and injustices and tears
and hungers and losses
in one city block
but the smiles, oh
those immutable smiles
and the hope in the paper sacks
dog shit by the fichus trees
is the city’s way of welcome
but the carnival in the hearts
and the corn fed regimes in mind
cannot and will not tear
them down
angst, terror and hate
has become a child’s game
the roses are not free
but they are in juan v’s
can along the window
rotten with defeat
it is no longer enough
to wave the right flags
blood sacrifice one son
to the blue coats and one the
the Vat
no we have become
smarter than you
and we will not
lay down to the east
or to the west
but resign to be
free in the window
in the door
in our spirit
and in the mind
to be 74
although the scratches on the record
add to the appeal of midcentury Americana,
i don’t believe the boy at the counter
gave me correct change.
the fact that my perfume is from S.H.Kress
across the street, but the gangrene on my leg
cannot be hid by pheromones alone.
the stench is likened to war.
but that is not the fact.
the one good leg danced the Tennessee Waltz
when it was good, the bad leg was bad
from the beginning.
the root, the marrow, the veins,
the sinews all of it; rotten
all over. i wear pearls and smile
at the wrong time and in the wrongest of place.
Buddy Clark in my head,
i saw Treasure of Sierra Madre
merely to see Bogey again
on Los Angeles Street before
the nuclear heat pushes me down
the barker
scurry, flurry
and tread right up
to the strangest
show on earth
come one or all who
remain in this world
to see the corpse in
the archives of time
hanging for the wolves
beloved and slated in one breath
global victim of the letter
of the law
inoperable in the one pit of time
terror and broken bone
let the vultures
entertain your value
let the earth open up and
imbibe us whole
oh holy milky way
spit us back out
through caves
let the mud and the ashes
fill in the tooth
the trees are all broken
the soul’s in the zoo
waiting for a
piece of meat
words less spoken 