On rainy days
I look up poems set in Seattle,
then look back at the rain set against the window

I imagine the water was carried here
from the shores of their bay
across Pike Place, through Belltown,
in buckets they use
to carry Pacific salmon off fishing boats,
or in lidded Styrofoam bowls used
to take out clam chowder

I practice walking in this manner, sans umbrella, through the parking lot of a South Florida strip mall.

When I reach the 24-hour Dunkin Donuts, past the laundromat and the check cashing store, I channel my inner Seattleite: poised in wet socks,
unrushed as the sips they take from their mugs when its **** pouring outside

I renounce sugary accoutrements and have what they're having:
Black coffee with a splash of rain,
A balance perfected on their slanted hill streets
that breed more poets per capita
than anywhere else in the country

Vegas can have its mirages in the desert
San Francisco, its gold bridge

I think I should just have this coffee,
and this rainy day
as the poem it is.

the maze

inside the rules of the car
you promise me that no matter what
insane or compromising thought might
have arisen from either our mouths,

there would always be the maze to keep us as friends- naked friends. ******* friends. hot, ****, blonde and brown haired beasts summoning our human equity to arouse and arraign each other, each's other:

say,
drowning in internacional shipping bombings, lost at terminals, aboard flights.

noting our beasts

the minimalist pianissimo of black and white keys, the growing spirits of a Richter violin filling us up
with anti-matter, inside this hours black tideless extremes. this place's mooring soporific tinders. You placed this cart of humanness too close to the life you live

even say,

rules i wanted to know but
never have to practise in your absence
nowness self-less and losing to the light, losing to the ocean, each ounce of life is now vastly different

inside of me
where dead worms
cannot crawl
i continue to die beside your sprawl
where heavy night brings memories of
your skin affixed n entwined
each of your twelve unspoken names
each of these hours that won't be mine

and as this box of earth resigns
its peace, i wish never to have known
this haunting sea, where quaffing like
the enigma of misery
my secret voice cannot be free
my eyes cannot bare their sight to see
if ever chance should be

Eroding brick wall
all that remains
refracted, fading
fishermen shadow
red dawn’s early light

brackish still water
shocked violent green
seeps from the desert
to be subsumed
by an unrelenting sea

restless dreamers rise
muscle sturdy pangas
into the churning tide
seeking quicksilver
at the continental edges

returning boats ride low
the shrinking horizon
race to safe harbor
cold beer on ice
under palm palapas

in the restaurant
a young man
shows off tuna
half as tall as he is
to admiring tourists

like me, seeking
the deep, slow burn
salt, jalapeno, lime
a fitting end to this
unraveling dream

Pueblo Mágico
of “no bad days”
walls of contention
in a fractured land
will never separate us

one margarita, two
another raised in defiance
of those who would try
to confine and define
free-range spirits

the Pacific touches
this contiguous shore
from equator to pole
we could catch
a clockwise current

follow Polaris up North
arrive transformed
magnetically charged
disparate souls fused
together bound

This is a poem for me, to me.

You have a horrible singing voice
but God knows,
singing while you wash away
dishes somehow makes
cleaning your heart
less cumbersome.

I've been worried about you;
you seem to be craving
a psychopathic thrill,
the kind where you feel
everything but remorse;
what a change of course,
you didn't let the monsters change you,
did you?

Intensity sprawls over
your dainty skin,
either full equilibrium
or capsizing until you sink,
either confessing to possessing
a soul gone obsidian
or your confessions completely shrink.

Girls like you
are the reason why you don't see
many small kids out late at night;
you're either fully pacific
or completely acidic,
either lulling stability and resolution
or chaos enveloped by your convulsions.

You're a ******* storm...
Now make sure the world knows.

the coast, it is just as you promised.

         elusive--

the white stones shifting beneath my feet,
this wind. this rain,
the way the steely sky
trickles down to kiss the sea,
the indistinct rumors / hints / echoes of mountains
where the mist has slept with the trees.

                       vast, inconsolable:

the cliffs whisper to me
of their endless
journey to the horizon,
and captured in this fragrant
brushstroke of balsam and pine
I feel the damp northwest morning
soak into my skin,
and suddenly there is
an itching of feathers
and salt in my veins.

                                      {evergreen, wild}

                     for a second,
I bite into the marine chaos
of these dancing whitecaps,
and it is just as you promised.

untamable.


      pacific.

Come to me great entangler of speech, until the mouth
is a thicket of word mash, you
who rakes strain out of the day to day visions.

Four nights last week you came in the dream-sweeps
flying at forty-one thousand feet. Encrusting this crimson suitcase of blood production with aurulent Trojan footstep rumbles in the hundreds of thousands.

Are you the new blues guitar, the trill bliss in satirical Dutch painting;
you who wrestles the languages of sleep. To get to keep you we'd **** all mystical beasts, sew treason, and wait naked for the dead things to come.

Remoteness in the time of the lonely.
Where you shed shivers of  sharks
In wild dance and wicked tantrum, lilting
Beside the androgyny of days and Time.
You the dashboard Jesus of sin and canter.
No scurrying footsteps to barge the heavy moods of ****** or abscess.

In half breaths you weaponize yourself,
A take of drink and then with the rest of the aves,
Swallowed by the colossus of entanglement,
Taken beneath the blue awning amidst the company of the sea.

I'm standing at the seashore, the coastline calling. I've got rocks in my pockets and two lines left in the letter. I'm standing at the seashore, bench facing the Squat & Gobble, the tin weir and we're near the roadside. The sky opened wide, this skin drawn with threat, Rhinoceroses, bruise bending the sweet ships of victory backwards into the backwaters of mislead moonlight. Guitars playing, beeps disappearing, pianos sweeping, the hum of percolated coffee on smoke stained night club walls. I'm standing at the seashore, my mouth is a ghost, I've seen nothing but death, I'm name-dropping God and there's nobody there.

I'm sitting in my room with my hands on my keyboard, listening to Danish throb-rock. Riding horseback into candlelight on a wicked wedding of teary-eyed geysers and gazers. Bent by the rocking and the torment, the wild and the weird, the horror and everything horrifying. There is this shadow looking over my shoulder, I'm all alone but it feels like you're here.

You're back and I've only been asking four years and two days. My passion never left, it only paved your way. Outside it's gotten colder than the weatherman will even say. The skies may stay clear but everything is gray. I wait for you on the tarmac with bouquets, four years yesterday it was to be my grave.

Everything and its nothingnesses made me black and blue, I was just ink blotter on a finger's noose, nonsense and writer's gloom. Some of me was hexed by my work, some of my flesh became unglued. My eyes may have resurrected a figure, but I can't be sure it's you. I'm at the Bay Bridge with weights tied to my shoes, where even the water can't judge my moves.

People lie to keep themselves as far away from their truth. Many can't even talk to you unless they have a drink or two. ****** and benzos too. Skinny vexed spirits accrue, walking into the waves until their skins turn blue.

Nothing works out in the end.
All of us will be gone.
Our name will not be remembered.

The signs and lights will fade to black.
The Hollywood sign will collapse of old age, like us.
Poppies shrivel up, their red coats falling onto the scorched earth.
Grapes transcend into wrinkly sacs of bitter wine.

The way your hand slipped in mine,
the fingerprints will rub away.
Our heart beats slow,
diminish.
Our laughter evanesce,
wanes
as our voices descend past the Pacific ocean.