Standing on my beached heartland,
a few hundred thousand bleached granules of sand
trickle through thick slits in my hourglass hands.

The dry-stream sands my fingers to periosteum as
my head walks the neural gallows,
last lines on the tip of the tongue.

He was a runaway circus animal,
the theme I hunted in vain.
He was my solar eclipse, my waning moon, the coastline;
he was a garden, a sculptor, an elaborate stone trellis;
he was frightened, he was in love, a philosopher without a cause;
he was Michelangelo, Camus, Akhmatova, Kant, Blake and Crane;
he’s the executioner, the brief reflection of a solitary grain
sliding down the boney hourglass
as the blindfold does the same.

was an aperitif to an aphorism,
an apothecary of aphrodisiacs,
an apiary of my ever-buzzing thoughts.

She slipped streamline as maraschinos
into a Manhattan, that strike of sugar
staining the most bitter days a color no chemical dispels.

She was an enigmatic row of beakers
shelved in an ancient pharmacy
at the base of the Janiculum.

Her shape was incense wisps, her
touch a song sung in 1940s noir,
her locking gaze acrophobia itself.

Alliteration ran thick through her blood,
she painted like Debussy composed.
No single organism in the universe could’ve imposed

anything on her – well, maybe.
Maybe she’s just a girl, the way that I’m a boy –
no air of denigration here.

She was intricate, but altogether simple. Empathetic-yet-
tangible, her character was incredible.
It was not the beauty of her face, the body

that held her mind and laughter,
not the dazed sting in my hand as it cupped
in hers – it was her autotelic way and her hope.

And now her imaginings hang,
framed in my house; little landscapes of the heart she left;
retreats that prove I’ve loved and been loved.

One morning I find my f(r)iends’ eyes are lead;
That evening I pace in gullible love.
Night falls, I find wished-on stars have fled.

With intravenous need their hearts drop dead:
The death boyhood knew nothing of.
At daybreak I find my f(r)iends’ eyes are lead.

I walk encased in a narrowing shed
That keeps me hidden from the sun above.
Night falls, I find wished-on stars have fled.

From the pulse of my trusting veins they’re bled;
The needle fits like a vinegary glove.
One morning I find my f(r)iends’ eyes are lead.

In them I saw lunacy's fountainhead,
Drug-sickness, soul-loss, young skin grown mauve.
Night falls, I find wished-on stars have fled.

Maybe if I’d not trailed they’re pitch-black tread,
I’d be whole: A full, unpitted olive.
One morning I see my f(r)iends’ eyes are lead;
(Nightfall!) I know wished-on stars have fled.

(for the unknown You) –
Sweep up a mound of achievements;
layer dogwood and newspaper beneath;
find a small, secluded shoreline to sleep an endless sleep;
shovel money (in at least twenty currencies),
some status and fame
onto the funeral pyre’s unremembering flame;
write furiously with computer or pen,
fill out the days’ whitespace with enthusiastic fantasy;
revel on a fallacy (or three);
win the gladiatorial games in the Corporate Arena;
rediscover a bit of ancient folklore;
set up nice altruistic societies to make orphans feel infinite;
plant a little garden – give guidance in its growth;
build four or five fine-but-small boats
with richly decorated keels;
fight for something worth believing,
though I’m still unsure what that means…
A(my) guess: lyricism and poetry and prose,
musical composition, simply being kind and open;
A suggestion(for You): lay Your hand on a patient’s slowing heart
in a cancer ward, catch their tears with a jar
and meditate on better things to do;
give the old folks a laugh;
steal the Elgin Marbles back for the Greeks,
or, for the memory of ancient Greece;
find where lay a psychopathic fascist’s bitter ashes
and give them to the conspirators for closure;
(for me) place letters on the graves
of John Keats, Percy Shelley,
Wystan Auden and William Yeats;
rescind, abolish, annul, invalidate
my station in God’s dysphoric, existential reverie;
heap up beautiful words and send them off to sea
inside a laptop on a cellophane-wrapped raft;
(for both of us) think thoughts uplifting;
smile thirty-three times a day (or more);
plan for the future of ourselves and others;
give just a bit of love to our mothers;
sweep the kitchen and the city streets for free;
by your garden plant a tree.
Beyond these things for us to do,
be proud-yet-humble, open-eyed and acquiescent;
just accept; all things inanimate and animate, accept.

Now lunacy kicks its hoof,
throwing dust across my heart.
The taste of sour gin
lengthens out the smart.

All the the things I've ever
felt entitled to are gone.
I've felt deeply about too much,
I've felt it all too long.

I guess I understand now,
if to understand is to think.
Where and when and how
are still fabulous unformed things.

There isn’t much reason
to heave these dense veins
unobligated and alone.
I lay down and let the rain

cry for me instead.
On my face I can tell
it wished it was frozen,
cryogenic as it fell

so it could be solid, strong,
colder. It would never fall
again, just melt to a throng
of puddles and vanish.

I realize now nothing
I thought was mine was.
Not the spectacular waves
receding or the buzz

of beer. Not my guitar,
its rich sounds,
that shooting star
that I wished on in the desert

August of 2008.
Not my first lover
or my big brother’s hate.
Right now I discover

what was mine is here:
my veins, my skin, my eyes, my face,
my happiness and hurt:
small sanities in the rain's lace.

The stream
twists, slithers, binds
two banks to each other,
slinking ‘cross the dry gaunt gulley,
unpaired.

Under
the faded trees’
blinds, I sit on stone from
where riparian-paradise
explodes;
California’s stolen soil, air,
are logorrhea in
the toilets of
my ears.

I sit
stream-like, apart, meditative –
echoes of Kumeyaay
swirl inside
my head.

Around me architectural mastery:
sycamores, embankments, enduring ionic pillars.
I round a walkway bordered by trees,
enamel thawing, gliding off their low leaves.
Beneath the late-May’s pounding sun,
through the glittered trees’ reaches,
a gazebo crackles into sight.
Children in their prime, sunbathers, a wistful portraitist
encircle it carelessly:
a leisured chimney; the billows of life.
The foliage escapes into the river,
purplish, palpitating, cyclic creases
receive the dewy notes.
Kayaks licking acacia-gum-edged
ripples sputter and slip
through reverberations
of leveled white-water terraces.
Blackcurrants in clotted cream
slide on the plush lips of a young passerby.
The 8 above a doorway
dances motionless, silent in my periphery;
“Nicolas Cage just sold the spot”
pops from unknown lungs
inside the Circus crowd.

Unacknowledged, half-proud
hands built the Roman baths
alone, closed-in by such grace,
forgotten, then as now.
I wander these ancestral lanes
more or less alone, the same.