Dawn Outside the Street Door

Eleanor, the Villain

2010-08-28T11:25:00.000-07:00

You were a small mouse,

and a good mouse.

Though we never got to know each other,

you probably lived around my house.

Newark Poem Erat

2010-08-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

We were champions,

naked and sweating after the beach,

in love with brick that cost too much.

What about that old and gone friend,

on the rooftop?

The spring (years later)

too quiet across the river,

calling it off,

finding books and selling music,

going-going-gone.

A heart beats stronger

in regular sunlight,

an overhead announcement,

a card game,

a box fan,

a reunion in California.

But there you are

you old concrete jerk,

my good for a weekend Bette.

Linger on,

your pale blue skies.

The decade,

you gorgeous wonders,

you angels,

my Northeast train tracks.

I'm always coming home when the streetlight turns on.

October, no sign of winter.

2009-10-30T10:50:00.000-07:00

We kiss over the e-brake
on the corner of Echo Park
and Sunset
in a parking lot parade.

April, and the Jackaranda JIg

2009-04-30T10:19:00.000-07:00

A clean, empty hole for the lepers to jump in--
even The Basin can get behind that.
Matches and newspapers,
and revisions to the plan,
the lepers' turn in the hole; no top,
just moonlight.

The blossoms sing soda shop on the tree limbs
while our coyote makes a nest of trash.
By dawn the young are born.
Something gives.

I'm a-goin'-ta move the ocean right up next to the fence,
and drop my line
into the Leper Sea.
A joke is only so-so in the heat,
but the marine layer is soft and funny.

A New York Story.

2009-03-16T15:33:00.000-07:00

Hustle hustle hustle,

STOP!

Florida.

In and Out the Change Machine.

2009-03-04T16:12:00.000-08:00

If the road gets flat and there's me and you on it, one of us will take the hard line--and the other will act like he never saw a thing.

Winter Gloves.

2008-12-26T09:09:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow's Broadcast

2008-11-25T14:11:00.000-08:00

(Program recorded at an earlier date): This syndication is all we have left to describe brave journies alone through minor amounts of time. With close attention you will hear a faint tapping. There it is! A hard, corked heal of a polished shoe on tile, wouldn't you say? The General dying in the courthouse. He lost the war. His tongue was dried and his windpipe dislocated. He was buried in sand. The ecstatic oligarch of a lost civilization's media: music, violence, growth, prostrations, revisions, wet shoulders, fronts, mumbles, exhultations, doilies, monuments, hate, nostalgia, denial, puppet fucking, dust, acquittals, stolid beyond and within, redemptions, witches, technocrats, shocking facts, treasons upon high seas, daytime television, misleading information, reported gang affiliations, employee misconduct, hay fever, free speech, cotton dresses, islands, women whose hips swung like hoses, brick facades, tinkering, rail spikes, cryptozoological inertia, scientific gridlock, lemonade, moon-tide menstruation, hymnals for sale, snowstorms in the East, legacies, owlish professors, parking lots, and bank accounts. The General's foot has stopped tapping. You'll notice the silence. This frequency was long ago abandoned. What we wish to recover will diminish if we shade this oribital joy from others in the world. We plunge our being into the future in laying down our pasts. We don't see either clearly. Volume and tone are hints on our radar. But somewhere beyond our vision, out of sight, is static. By it we abide, we tune in, and will to the end. Ours is a civilization of sound filtration. We live, no matter, together within a broadcast. At one frequency there is an audience, a plausible reason to believe in our utility and unity, our mutual desolation more like it, and to explore the possibility of nudges and vaults, of still more roads not taken, of encouragement, prolonged joy, and a new way of letting it all go to the birds.

Hand Grenade.

2008-10-23T14:23:00.000-07:00

I'm where war flowers bloom.

There are weaving eccentrics in the air,

vents of hated smoke,

persimmons hard,

rolling down the empty corridors of hours.

You bareknuckle son-of-a-bitch,

you've won my heart.

Remittance.

2008-10-11T12:12:00.000-07:00

Passenger Mockingbird,

A suitcase and good posture will save you, friend. Sweet peace, to go where the rails end.

Regards,

Sycamore

The Blossomghost Tree

2008-08-22T16:47:00.000-07:00

2008-08-22T15:26:00.000-07:00

Oh, but they tortured him! Dressed him as a woman, howling for love in rags. He was pathetic. He was a prince. He was dying in a thousand colors. They put a crown on his pocked head and declared him ruler of the stranded, of the lame, of the antagonistically poor, degenerate souls of the alleyways and chronicles, of the proof that sadness denounces the petty.

It...is...true. And the forgiven scoundrels of testified pity will hang in their shackles on brick walls. Their posture will straighten as they stare at escape and realize its sucking, soothing, wet improbability. A wrist in a chain, shriveling to the bone, and freedom there in the rotting, love in the mouths of ghosts, tears on the cheeks of martyrs long since hollowed out.

Film on a Tenement Wall.

2008-08-07T21:40:00.000-07:00

A pinwheel stuck out in the lawn. The building made of bricks. The hotel and a thousand doors. Obscure behind the most rotund dreams. Stuffing sheet music papers away in otherwise empty sock drawers. Struck wire and white keys hidden from snooping maids. One door mistakenly ajar, whispered with heart, "Adagietto! The fool!" The beginning of an explanation. But we're all so bored, and we won't share. A pinwheel stuck out in the lawn. The wind making it move.

He Kissed the Rebel.

2008-07-22T17:22:00.001-07:00

When Plato said,
"You think the end of the world will come at nighttime, Jim?"
and Jim said,
"No. At dawn."