Published in Pinky Theater Press, No. 6, Summer 2022
Breakfast in Lotusland
You ought to look
up more often. (The sun’s advice to Frank O’Hara)
Another
west coast night conjures its end and puts the sun back in place.
In faint first light I dust myself
off again. I’m tired. I pluck
lint off leather and
notes out of air.
A harpist’s finger flicks
off the specks of bad luck, and checks the lists of chance and fanfare.
Fingers made of bird bones, blisters and ash.
Fingers snapping on the offbeat. Blood numbed will still boil.
On the terrace, outside the back casement windows, dead bamboo and empty Bud bottles,
not mine.
I specialize. And no true account will ever be told.
A
breakfast of searchlights, by the dawn’s early light. A ragged
grand opening, the diurnal premiere
of crime scenes of hubris and shaking hunger.
Klieg eyes scan and scour the sky
as these famous jugglers’ hands drop things
off the patient’s table. The sound of things dropping
is music like Newman, Hermann, Rózsa… the melodic delight
before the apophatic flatline of the brave heart stopping.
I
made it home one more time. This bildungsroman of cinder block flats
overdramatizes for art’s sake. It did before I moved in.
A lineage of fibs fill this garden apartment at the foot
of the Hollywood Hills
where lucent roots need makeshift water
in tiny boxes of dry fables.
My mid-century cargo;
A cocktail cart stocked with beatnik artifice. Ice. Lenny Bruce.
Next door Judy Sills shot up and died after Thanksgiving, 1979,
and Anna Kashfi bedded both Brando and Peepers in one blessing
in the bedroom then shellacked with a nation’s dreams and rent control.
As a legion of lodgers like me creep in at dawn. The past
merely covers our tracks.
Fortune’s
a stand up comic. Its wry good humor bends the morning.
into hunger performed for temporary words.
Like, “I’ll rent sleep later.” Or, “Don’t be so rude,
you’re the last one who gets this warning.”
And I
read
about Frank O'Hara
mangled by a jeep
on his way home after dark too.
And
how he foretold the end. Another
lie. Poetry is prophecy
but a poet’s no prophet.
Each poet just wants to leave a record of this, not that. Now, not then.
Any
dead end is a road into accidental song.
I take these truths
to be unexpected. As last night took the fullness of everywhere
and left it in the ashtray.
The odds, the changing odds of survival itself
make the game interesting. The high isn’t even the point.
The random skin in the game gets old, and never stays.
Hypervigilance will always disguise witness, if you aren’t careful
the details themselves
obscure both beauty and truth.
What’s
the damn point? I’ll tell you
all you need to know. It’s a dream etched
on a burial urn of mornings and happy endings.
Survival cascades, windmills, and lands
in a revenge edged with citrus and honeysuckle.
The point is that no point is possible.
And the magnificent numbness will outlast you.
I couldn’t last night, the next
morning or now,
match DeLonpre’s glorious seedy facts.
My acts of love hollow out this story.
The safe return whimpers
in the blood’s drumming, in the faux
Polynesian detritus from the boozy decades
before I was born. Last night was not my life.
This morning I know last night is all I have.
The romance was to dance with
death.
Herr Gott, Herr Bank Account, Herr expiration dates.
I am three quarter time, but the finish line is all about
syncopation.
All
this is what I tell the sun, or whisper. The neighbors upstairs
are up. I smell their coffee brew: “I fancied I knew too much
about this end deal. No sleight of hand could juggle air.”
Catching a cup of darkness, I make an argument for staying put.
Making the case for another shot at day. Critical thinking indeed.
In
the late stages of the
annihilating obsessions,
the details (tools, chemicals, Kama Sutra allegiances,
commerce on the mean street, fancy denials,
pretending that time will never stop, gunpoint, and stepped-on bunk)
matter not at all.
Just the mornings remembered
when the sun said, “want another chance, punk?”
And
talking to the sun happens in poems
when
the heart hushes enough and the juggler’s hands come to rest.
Marcella
came back before nightfall
and I woke a measure away from the dawn of last resorts.
The sun then slouched across the kitchen. I didn’t plan on lux perpetua.
The
checkerboard linoleum squares have blood drying on them.
I’m waiting for more than a soundtrack.
For
example, Coltrane is on as I write this
and was on then
and was the grace that Marcella pitched
effortlessly into my hands
and
it's perfect for the nightmusic’s residue
without a cause. Unmerited and accidental favor from a CD
forgotten in a player for days. Fortune pushes play.
Song
of any sort connects random dots
and plucks the sacred strings of original sun.
So I have another day to play who’s there? Who’s left?
How can a god do it? The juggler’s dilemma before he dies.
Drawing lines from paralysis to the samsara of broken bones and bottles
with the glory of true lies.
This
sun is a fallen orange tossed up to catch the wind.
What relief to be up there, or down here, and to stay
as the new day strings this out to last a chorus more.
Strung out for forgiveness. The laws lose power
with each daybreak.
A witness tunes up with what’s left. A gust
of fullness empties the event horizon and chucks
fortune into the bed I’ve made
up.
In faint first light I dust myself
off again. I’m tired. I pluck
lint off leather and
notes out of air.
A harpist’s finger flicks
off the specks of bad luck, and checks the lists of chance and fanfare.
Fingers made of bird bones, blisters and ash.
Fingers snapping on the offbeat. Blood numbed will still boil.
On the terrace, outside the back casement windows, dead bamboo and empty Bud bottles,
not mine.
I specialize. And no true account will ever be told.
grand opening, the diurnal premiere
of crime scenes of hubris and shaking hunger.
Klieg eyes scan and scour the sky
as these famous jugglers’ hands drop things
off the patient’s table. The sound of things dropping
is music like Newman, Hermann, Rózsa… the melodic delight
before the apophatic flatline of the brave heart stopping.
overdramatizes for art’s sake. It did before I moved in.
A lineage of fibs fill this garden apartment at the foot
of the Hollywood Hills
where lucent roots need makeshift water
in tiny boxes of dry fables.
My mid-century cargo;
A cocktail cart stocked with beatnik artifice. Ice. Lenny Bruce.
Next door Judy Sills shot up and died after Thanksgiving, 1979,
and Anna Kashfi bedded both Brando and Peepers in one blessing
in the bedroom then shellacked with a nation’s dreams and rent control.
As a legion of lodgers like me creep in at dawn. The past
merely covers our tracks.
into hunger performed for temporary words.
Like, “I’ll rent sleep later.” Or, “Don’t be so rude,
you’re the last one who gets this warning.”
about Frank O'Hara
mangled by a jeep
on his way home after dark too.
but a poet’s no prophet.
Each poet just wants to leave a record of this, not that. Now, not then.
to be unexpected. As last night took the fullness of everywhere
and left it in the ashtray.
The odds, the changing odds of survival itself
make the game interesting. The high isn’t even the point.
The random skin in the game gets old, and never stays.
Hypervigilance will always disguise witness, if you aren’t careful
the details themselves
obscure both beauty and truth.
all you need to know. It’s a dream etched
on a burial urn of mornings and happy endings.
Survival cascades, windmills, and lands
in a revenge edged with citrus and honeysuckle.
The point is that no point is possible.
And the magnificent numbness will outlast you.
match DeLonpre’s glorious seedy facts.
My acts of love hollow out this story.
The safe return whimpers
in the blood’s drumming, in the faux
Polynesian detritus from the boozy decades
before I was born. Last night was not my life.
This morning I know last night is all I have.
Herr Gott, Herr Bank Account, Herr expiration dates.
I am three quarter time, but the finish line is all about
syncopation.
are up. I smell their coffee brew: “I fancied I knew too much
about this end deal. No sleight of hand could juggle air.”
Catching a cup of darkness, I make an argument for staying put.
Making the case for another shot at day. Critical thinking indeed.
the details (tools, chemicals, Kama Sutra allegiances,
commerce on the mean street, fancy denials,
pretending that time will never stop, gunpoint, and stepped-on bunk)
matter not at all.
Just the mornings remembered
when the sun said, “want another chance, punk?”
and I woke a measure away from the dawn of last resorts.
The sun then slouched across the kitchen. I didn’t plan on lux perpetua.
I’m waiting for more than a soundtrack.
and was on then
and was the grace that Marcella pitched
effortlessly into my hands
without a cause. Unmerited and accidental favor from a CD
forgotten in a player for days. Fortune pushes play.
and plucks the sacred strings of original sun.
So I have another day to play who’s there? Who’s left?
How can a god do it? The juggler’s dilemma before he dies.
Drawing lines from paralysis to the samsara of broken bones and bottles
with the glory of true lies.
What relief to be up there, or down here, and to stay
as the new day strings this out to last a chorus more.
Strung out for forgiveness. The laws lose power
with each daybreak.
A witness tunes up with what’s left. A gust
of fullness empties the event horizon and chucks
fortune into the bed I’ve made
up.