Brushes With The Dark Law

 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.