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August, the Red Line,
connected tanks
of bolted plastic vertebrae.

Every seat gone except
five rows up, where a sea lion
sprawls across two,
stuffed backpack, jacket
spread like barbed wire.
His grunt a wet bark
at the glow of his screen.

Middle-school deer slip into the aisle,
chatter clipped when the sheriff drifts past,
their ears flicking, smiles bitten shut.

Not a predator- just a gelded ox,
chest puffed, badge sagging, glass-eyed,
chest rig clattering with blanks.

Two lemur-children cling to their tortoise elder,
her shell steady against the sway of the car.

She filters them from the surge of riders:
loud Dodger blue parrots in cholo socks,
moth-women with painted lashes beating the stale air,
a stray dog, gutter musk dragging at its haunches.

And one gray bear

muttering alone,
arguing with her reflection.

Between Koreatown and MacArthur Park
I feel feathers forcing through my skin-
an alley gull knifing into this clamour,
scavenging inside its exhaust.

The car rattles, its ribs plated with blistered posters:
museum wings open to no one,
‘register to vote’ fading into graffiti script,
flu shots promised by smiling ghosts.

A bruised hatchling staring out beside the words
See something, say something.

The warning lights glow
like eyes hunting in the dark.

From its flanks the train
unfurls iron claws.

They rake
the tunnel walls,
the city’s bones,
the dark itself.
We cursed the dark
but woke the cold plague wind,
cracked summer's 'crypted spell,
talked the pretty into hell.
And so the show begins.

Black cat's-paw on bleeding-stone;
two speakers in a field of bone
bite down a forgotten kiss.
Whispers from the too-full skull
laugh in the pumpkin's cut-out hull,

but never the voice I miss.



~October 2017
October is the month of All Hallows. Today it begins.
It’s hard to quantify experiences, but to coin someone else's
original phrase, ‘you know it when you feel it.’

Now that I’m living in Paris, at my Grandmère’s 76-room ‘hôtel particulier,’ I find myself on the itchy edge of wealth, influence and power and while I don’t consider myself necessarily of that class, I’m certainly exposed to attempts to drag me into it.

Many afternoons, as I come home wearied by classes and braced for hours of study, there are these silver trays with little white, gold embossed envelopes (invitations), casually placed where they’re unavoidable, and it’s not unusual to find that one of the CMs has laid out a dress for me and a suit for Peter - though we seldom attend these events.

I find myself vociferously defending my schedule (for the thousandth time) - and I’ve only been in school three weeks:
“Grandmère, I’m in med-school, I have homework.”

Let’s wax freeversely of the upper-class (as if I belonged)..

In elegant but confined houses
where lives unfold in drawing rooms
and the inhabitants are sharp and snobbish.
They struggle against social and ****** constraints -
frustrations essential to the drama and pathos of wealth.

Let the rabble be messily heterogeneous
and agenda-set “inclusivity.” It’s nothing to us.
It hardly foregrounds harmony or authenticity.

Civilized people are more reticent and buttoned-up.
It’s sexier and more romantic, to drive toward marriage,
where lovers work to deserve each other,
and individuals integrate into couples.

Failing this urbane integration, love degenerates
into solipsist libertinism and eventually, these
sad outcasts catch their deaths - apart and alone.

.
.
Songs for this:
Am I the Same Girl? by Swing Out Sister
It Hasn't Happened Yet by William Shatner
BLT Merriam Webster word of the day challenge 09/27/25:
Vociferous = expressing feelings or opinions loudly and insistently.

hôtel particulier =  a grand urban townhouse (mansion) in Paris or other city.
76-rooms - 37 of those are bathrooms - do those count as rooms?
CM = chambermaid (I think Grandmère employs 12 domestic servants).
Love is blind
Till you can see.
And when you see
and it’s still there
It will be magical.
Love isn’t blind.


Shell ✨🐚
When you see the true colors of someone that’s when you know.
I
        Dawn

The greenish sky glows up in misty reds,
The purple shadows turn to brick and stone,
The dreams wear thin, men turn upon their beds,
And hear the milk-cart jangle by alone.


  II
        Dusk

The city’s street, a roaring blackened stream
Walled in by granite, thro’ whose thousand eyes
A thousand yellow lights begin to gleam,
And over all the pale untroubled skies.


  III
        Rain at Night

The street-lamps shine in a yellow line
Down the splashy, gleaming street,
And the rain is heard now loud now blurred
By the tread of homing feet.
dedicated to all the better poets here...*


don't know much about a quatrain
don't know how to write a refrain,
surely could not compose a
courtyard elegy
maybe after
and still untilled,
I been buried,
'n checked out
the neighborhood competition...

as for limerick,
that is Dr. Seuss
and Ogden Nash's shtick
with whom, eye,
a believed descendant,
cannot compete...

Oh dear me,  
no ode node-ed within,
as for a pastoral,
kinda hard to feat,
where I live,
a pastoral is grass cracks
surviving under,
breaking through to the other side
of concrete and blacktop rulers

Maybe one of you
will haiku,
send us a senryu,
send off, see ya!

the doc once diagnosed
a severe case of inflamed iambic pentametery,
with antibiotics and a diet of Hamletery,
was cured most satisfactorily

this silly pen-man-sinking-ship
ain't capable of dat,
boy how 'bout
an epitaph
for a graveyard stone,
should be plenty of room...
as it will be plenty short...

all eye see and all eye know
is vignettes that birth in me
walking down the street,
that's my bread and butter,
my soul's delicacies...
and moments that recorded
here, for a posteriored posterity,
as noted in my all my living
testaments,
drinking and spilling the vin,
from the uninvented igniting vignettes
that consecrate and connect our
knowing each other though odds are
we will never meet...we can yet
drink together
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Don't know much about the French I took.
But I do know that I love you,
And I know that if you love me, too,
What a wonderful world this would be."
eyes eye eye ** ** ** ha ha ha
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