First Avenue Downtown San Diego
So I beat the pavement
for a while
dirty shoes keeping time
black teeth,
drowned in coffee,
feeding time from a weak mind,
drenched by the poison cloud
of downtown haze,
I head toward the ocean,
for a piece of salt breeze,
and hot black coffee. Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s eat out all the time
If you’d looked
At anyone
Else like that, they’d
Have taken you for a vile
Specimen
I guess I don’t
Know any
Better
Ha
Ha
It’s OK to laugh
When you’re
Not around,
Generally I mean Read the rest of this entry »
Pirate
Your father burnt you in ways
That make the nights long and wrecked
In a way that my tongue
Free of blasphemy and coarseness cannot soothe
Your father told lies with his hands
Now you walk without delicateness or trepidation
Look at you plundering the seas, sea plunderer!
Taking what you can, sea plunderer! Pirate! Read the rest of this entry »
Inspiration
found at the bottom of a can of beer
or in the midst of the final
exhale of pot smoke
a good book
a bad book
a song that makes sad people happy Read the rest of this entry »
drive by lover
the soft gasp of your surrender is deafening
in the fast lane i steal your breath
because i need fuel to rev up my idle heart
my tongue aches to dance inside your womb Read the rest of this entry »
Dreamers
I dreamed delectable dreams of her.
She dreamed of dead animals littering the floor
and her being forced to walk over them. Read the rest of this entry »
Cleveland
I just walk a landscape
littered with lost souls-
Fatherless black girls
strut their bulging asses
along ghetto curbs,
An assembly of street dealers
Thieves and pimp entrepreneurs
The sun never shows its face Read the rest of this entry »
Year One
You dragged the mattress into the living room, citing
how insomnia has crept into every Sunday
of your life and how white noise somehow
soothes the beasts in your head
to rest, just enough to sleep.
At first I felt internally resistant, struggling
with lights flashing in pixilated repetition
around the dark room, each sound
from the television a knife
running along my nerves. Read the rest of this entry »
Sappho Dancing*
Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirring me-
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in,
who time will now call Melissa
*
Sweet mother I cannot work the loom
I am broken with longing for a boy by slender Aphrodite
And she has chosen cruelly this time:
his stomach is hard
but his head is soft
Still I long for him to place flowers
in my giggling hair Read the rest of this entry »
Bi Polar
I drink and I drug because of this
And there is nothing
Unique honorable or special
About it
It’s just there
At times it’s a muffled frustration, which
Begs to be set loose
At other times u are the best thing that
Ever happened to the world
A lot of people in my family have this
Affliction
It’s nothing to be proud or ashamed of
It’s just there like a
A Peregrine falcon perched
On a tower waiting
For it’s prey and very quiet
And focused Read the rest of this entry »
I Am Sitting
Looking at paintings by Purcell
one especially of a hanging
and it is the year of the DOG.
I am sitting, staring at a 4X8
photo of Bogart nursing his drink
in the middle of my bookcase
between a history of England and the diary
of John Evelyn.
He has been nursing that drink for two years
while my mother and father gaze
in a gold frame gave at Shou-hsing
god of longevity
carved from ivory.
Shou stares out at a red candle
on a coffee table
and a sign on the wall above that says
REMEMBER.
Muse On My Staircase
not your regular water nymph
or white-robed rider of hippocampi
flitting through small
spaces, or Melpomene gripping
the open-mouthed mask head
trailing saliva no match
for the sweat that gathers
before the morning’s first drink
dripping from the jungle ends of his
hair and tearing down his forgetfulness
as again you ask it
what the hell
happened to you