(Published in The Dewdrop , December 2022)

The Way of Mountains

I practice pockets
on these mountains too.
Like I tucked in
the embarrassing moments
winding down in the world. 
Moments coolly glazed
with habit; 
moments too cherished   
in kind.
 
Moments belonging
because I loved them.
Moments marked mine
by the steps
pressing up these switchbacks.
Dusty footing,
pine needles resinous
on loose gravel;
I am ready to slip.
 
Belonging or not,
the mountain pilgrim
moves west.
Toward or away: trust is trust.
Impartial steps are beautiful.
Rock and dust ready the end
of this and any day.
 
The sun holds its 
alpenglow;
goes and comes back.
I can’t forgive myself in valleys.
Clemency only rolls off the sawtooth ridge,
falling in a sky
lifted by
22,000 breaths.
 
Only the mountains
redeem the mysterious debt.
Only the mountains offer death
a button and thread,
and place to wait.

 (Published on the Humans of the World blog, winning first prize in its 2022 Summer Poetry Challenge.)

Cassandra Adjacent

It’s overtime. And we’ve replaced
presence with performance.
We captured an image
to withdraw intention. We rattle cagey syntax
to lose the clues and count cold likes.
The likes pile up and the subtle body relaxes.                       
 
I warn of these attacks with but a sleepy muse.
Late-stage capitalism limits limbs and sinews.
Bloodshot eyes choose the garden’s rot.
Three particles from stars already dead
convene the most marketable headshots.
It hurts to stand in the way.
 
I guess I am more a crack on the spectrum
than a Cassandra.        Look at where trees limn
the heavens.                For fuck sake,
look at how seed surrenders to the larger life.
For fuck sake,             allow me to remember how
the world was              before poison chilled
with the needle of numbers and accountable grace.
Before original blessings in the glass gardens
pulled the rhizome prank
to monetize the dark matters at the root. 
There, when the lucid apple broke rank to place
the infinite memory in finite space.
 
Let’s say it’s God, then, in your face.
(Free me from the algorithms’ virtual absolutes.)
This practice is to knock three times on the Tree of Life
to count on the anima of what’s left. 
Ah, the metrics of codes and clarion calls!
I yearn for you to hear all of me dispute
the standard model
as it invents the space and time it also denies.
(Thrice denied before the dawn of stones). 
A new Tree of Last Chances and ciphers and ones won’t grow
from this rare earth nested in metals’ secret.
The danger is more finite with every dawn,
it’s time to move on.
The word changes its holy profile to ghost you. 
You won’t recognize anyone.
Turn off. Turn off. Turn off oh bruised body.
Repeat this 20 minutes every day. You won’t be left out.

 (Published in the August, 2022 issue of Cathexis Northwest Press).

Mock Orange

We wait in the greenest bowers 

made from borrowed water with no need to return the favors

from a world where everything changes every hour. 

The world here where Santana winds 

make mud dust, and turn the day inside out. 

             We wait for nothing. 

             Nothing is in our blood. 

In a den of thieves and strangers with no strings, 

the cosmetic replaces the cosmic, with eternity 

             as Plan B. 

 Pick up the replacements fallen from the orange sky. 

Smoke too falls out of the blue on ragged ranges and shores 

and on the valley of placeholders; instead of rain 

blossoms drop the ball. A net appears when the game 

is done. The numbing vegetation of theme and variation 

is borrowed too. A culture of sly flourishing only hungers for more 

We were tired at birth, nothing but temples, tabernacles, 

tents and gymnasiums in the transplanted eucalyptus. 

Nothing but a sketch of progress, a hint of jasmine 

in wounded summers and rosemary in the perfect autumns 

of the land with no seasons. Tired in the middle 

of what was unplanned. The body exhausted 

the-days-the-Lord-hath-made, and ran up a bill. 

No debt was recorded. No root needed the doubt 

rejoicing for air at the surface, 

in beauty immune from scarcity, 

immune from drought, 

from sleeping on the beach and under the stars. 

Tired hands only, only from too much play, a mission 

to salute the reality of no history. 

             They brought the relief 

of no history, of bones stripped and ready for lies. 

The fabulous respite of no narrative but the waves 

crashing just the way they did for the Chumash 

and will, when, choked with plastic molecules 

they roll on the empty beach when our wait is done. 

Of bones dressed to kill. We came to be killed. 

We took the drugs to make the kill count. 

And now, waiting for the score, we breathe deeply 

as the scent of oranges spends itself on our skin. 

The night opens the flower to its borrowed conclusions. 

To the sweetest imitation of fruit and its ripening. 

 The line between paradise and rot was never clear. 

We took the drugs to hide our uncertainty 

and hoped the line crossed 

was because the path of least resistance 

took us home. 

            Where we would never tire of beauty again.

 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.

 Published in the May, 2022, Arlington Literary Journal, Issue #160

The Texts of Innocence and Experience

1

Go to settings
…and choose a one-scoop heart.
 
Measure what you want to know,
and ignore the answers. They
toy with your similarity.
 
Make a menu
of what you won’t need.
Choose not now.
Broaden what you see
so far.
 
2
 
It’s a sad little radar
that sounds out
the wide space
between you and me.
 
I check the
foreign screens. We all do
now.
 
You don’t know how
to live outside the inside rules.
 
3
 
My time is only
doors opening,
as doors will open.
 
My days
number single stars.
 
The moonlight’s utility
is how much it can hold.
 
4
 
A firmament softens
in the green still grown
from our loss
of control.  The machines
will turn off. The nodes melt down
in what remains
without measure or code.
(Insert
another sentence
here
of what you wanted
but could not have).
 
5
 
We are losing contact
with what knows us.
As we defer to the dazzling
images of infinite access,
we shorten, chop perspective
and seek portrayal. Every lie possible
waits. Ransomware writes
our tired stories.
In such cleverness we lose the point
and are punished by the bottom lines.
 
6
 
The screens and keys
and operating structures
contrived to place us on hold
and in artifacts
deftly clouding our unknowing.
 
Experience travels, then deceives.
We don’t remember that the will
is architect of the soul.
 
All is at hand.
And our hands are missing.

 Published in Flora Fiction Literary Magazine Volume 3, Issue I, Spring 2022

A New Year Flood

There is a hole in this wall of feldspar and quartz.
There is a hole in the rain.
 
Gopherwood hardly holds us all
in the dawn of this new era of sun-leaking days.
 
Yet like seeks like only on whims of last resort.
Order twists reason in the newly wild winds.
 
In the seed vault rain-green tendrils pledge to climb
a stem from the root of time.
 
In the library of catastrophic gaffs
hangs an icon of the image of melancholy, just for laughs.
 
After cubits of chaos comes a paltry branch
in an arc of light.  A promise of gravity to salvage time.
 
We, perhaps, did not destroy the plenty of our garden home.
Our birdbrain negligence is given another chance.
 
The myths of progress and the chronographic bones
are tossed into the air with simian glee and freedom chimes.
Clean and unclean eyes without beasts, our divining stones,
 
are throwbacks, vestigial purification, three knocks on a raintree.
Let’s, you and I, construct a celebration.  We’re free.
Let’s clear-cut some old-growth shame,
 
let’s dynamite through a received, impassable mountain
of cinematic range.  Let’s have forty days of not thinking about it.
It is time for my sons to see me drunk and naked.
 
For birds to return from the archipelago of scorched earth. 
It’s time at last for life without covenants or grievance.
Let’s recover from our addiction to grievance.
 

 Published in High Shelf issue XVIII, December, 2021

Archness as a Mode of Confession

scours the days, confusing ridicule for teasing
 
the sharpened tongue pries off the barnacles of the Received…
just as my purged personality inventories the past,
logs the time-stamps of pesky Canonical Hours,
molds Golden Calves ready for breaking,
delivers half- baked Culture, DNA and Biography
in the electrodes attached to my shame. 
the old eats the new. What was slaughter
is remembered as mere play,
and Loki plays hooky from Phenomenology
with the usual adult sleep.  Loki
waking up.  Anima
nudging Kundalini and both,
not exactly keeping Chaos at bay,
rather loving the rising Tide from today.
 
lifting nature’s pandemonium
up high enough to put up
sails
and sail away,
with the raging            wind of tricks,
no longer playing the game of looking for increments
in the colonized internal logics du temps perdu 
sealed from a jaunty world too large for jokes.
the past is stand-up comedy.  Today is a battery.
 
that old world of symbols, where tiresome repetition
is the signature symptom of the need to sing new songs.
a new world without symbols, where hunger just sings.
where wit no longer erodes with snappy comebacks
and venality drifts off into grey areas.
another night awake,
numbering my mistakes?
no style in forgiveness, n'est-ce pas? I almost waited too long.
 

 Published in The Angel Rust magazine, issue VII, January, 2022

Are the Rockies that Far Away?

When the call came to tell me mom died
my hand put the phone down and reached for the glass pipe.
I wanted the familiar fog that failed to numb,
but did hide the world.
 
I had seen her the night before, and carefully cleaned
the putrescence draining from her bedsores. I’d looked down to see her face
smashed into the chrome guardrails; she’d made no sound.
 
I rolled her on her burning back, sought her eyes,
“do you know your whole family loves you?”
She stared back from some mysterious space,
eyes once brown and powerful dried with gray pain now,
baffled that I’d said anything denying the mystery she saw.
Did I expect an answer?
 
Months before tumors the size of grapefruits
had cleaved her brain away and left her sputtering.
Then I, having read of the mindful role of loved ones
meeting at the edge, asked, so to give her permission to go,
“mom, do you want to die?”
She turned those knowing eyes to focus
on her youngest son,
“are you crazy?”, she asked.
She didn’t expect an answer.
 
A week later, a bright blue winter day,
I found her in her room slumped in a wheelchair,
the sun, through Venetian blinds, throwing horizontal bands
on her hands, pricked and swollen.
I rolled her out to the tarmac and the air outside where
the rocky San Gabriels were white with rare snow.
She looked up to those mountains and she, haphazardly
capable of any word at all with less than
half her brain left in her skull, sang out loud and strong
“When it’s Springtime in the Rockies…” 
We stopped rolling, I stopped pushing her, to focus
on this artifact of who she was. Or even more, a clue,
emerging now at the end, of someone she was
I didn’t know.  She looked back at me from the mountains, blasé
almost surprised herself at these parts of her still left,
and she sang a robust second verse
 
And though I long to be back in the Rockies
I'll wait until the springtime comes…
 
The Trickster, though terminal, still had a pretty voice.
 
Another day at the City of Hope,
before she came home to live with dad and die,
(she’d been housed in a bungalow
like a vintage SoCal hot springs spa -
starched white sheets, TB recovery, and healing mineral water - 
or a Raymond Chandler mystery’s illicit autocourt,
or the old rehab cottage at Los Robles hospital
where W.C. Fields died and where I’d spent time too)
I walked in and she was on her back, looking up at the ceiling,
 
her hands lightly poised in the air above her chest,
fingertips touching, left and right hands
lightly bouncing against each other,
the scholar’s gesture.
She was ruminating, considering,
pondering, not unpleasantly, some deeper meaning
only she knew.
She turned her head when she heard me.
She smiled softly, politely greeting a familiar face,
“here’s my little girl-boy,
I wish I knew your story.”
 
Then the shadow passed over her face,
with half a brain left, she still traced
a certain line that perhaps she’d crossed.
Although, too, maybe just a reflection from my unset face.
We both pulled back. Again. She, back in the body ending life.
Me, hiding from too much light.
 
“Mildred, I wish you knew my story.”
 
Are the mountains far away?
I don’t expect an answer right now.
Not yet.
 

 Published in the digital and print magazine, 34th PARAllel MAG issue 89, August, 2021

Body Paint, No Tattoos 

I listen to a band of kids in a room with no windows. I am perpetuated with the adolescent eternity in their skin (painted in second-thought colors). They sound like Napalm Death, with a drum machine. As always, holding the place in some equation revealing it’s all a toy. Substitution is the medicine.

Toy brains, toy kids, toy music. Generic eyes. Toy lens to see the Great Destruction this music once prophesied. Artificially intelligent toys, a powder of the old regime, toy prophecy, sharing restricts the air, and the room that’s also lost its doors. Doll doors.  Trinket escape.  Boxes shipped. Slapdash designs, easy to wash off, to burnish the pigment. Basal cell removal of what’s counterintuitive. Temporal nativities of form lost in commerce and digital enhancements. Accessibility waters down, flattens, all the hints.

Before you send your applications to Cornell you light the matches of re-gifted revelations.

With my trousers rolled, I scratch in your sound with a stylus of distant horns and angry doors. There is no world to leave you, the “fire next time” already burned what our bloated hearts never earned. We colonized with the reach of our appetites before you were born. We entered the playhouse and didn’t give a shit that there was no exit.  Great, huh?  We leave you our heritage, you inherit no exits. The planet will be fine.  You won’t.