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MANY ways to spell good night.
  
Fireworks at a pier on the Fourth of July spell it with red wheels and yellow spokes.
  
They fizz in the air, touch the water and quit.
Rockets make a trajectory of gold-and-blue and then go out.
  
Railroad trains at night spell with a smokestack mushrooming a white pillar.
  
Steamboats turn a curve in the Mississippi crying in a baritone that crosses lowland cottonfields to a razorback hill.
It is easy to spell good night.
  
        Many ways to spell good night.
Bryce  Nov 2018
Somnambulism
Bryce Nov 2018
The coca-cola breath!
Flashing lights, tweetie birds, the rough narcotic stench

The sky is devoid, it is scared of the streets etched in starlight, everything shining-- tangerine and Coit and ohhhh boy
don't'cha know what you're in for?

Twilight and she is a figment on my mind
the bark of cigar is fiery opal on my slender frame
I can hear something along the lanes of love
Echoing behind me, the rising sun

Funny dudes in new suits, pressed, steamed, machine-rolled
pills in the pockets
shipped locomotive
Every etching has its china
every etching is porcelain skin
The fog is a silken balloon, unconcerned, wayward
The men longingly abide in its cool, the breath of an over-excited lover, singing in the showerhead an embarrassing microphone
over the west coast

It's all over! it's the end
the roads are devoid of the things that called you
They are a clarion horn on the Claremont, facades etched with windowpanes
here the americans eat tofu and pretend it's bacon

I am in the rapidly rotating spoke, enjoying the taste of woodchuck, upchucking my guts every Sunday, white knuckle-- praying to god
release
release

what a steal that's a fantastic car for the price!
it is only 10 years of payment
only 10!
House worth 40, kids worth 60, medicinal payments
corn flakes
Fortified iron gates and god says,
naw let them all out until they drown,
I'll never flood the earth but I'll make it puddles
and if they want they can lay face down

I am eating Korean stew and wondering what will happen
when unification builds a railroad from Moscow to Busan
I will travel it and write a novel or two
it will be
"On the Railroad"
and start in San Francisco or a little while outside
on an October evening with not a fog in the sky
Just sky, blue, blue sky
A child on the hillside
blowing bubbles in the apartment complex or the gravel mound
next to new homes, now cookiebread gingerbed frames
Doing tricks on BMX bikes, getting our elbows smashed, a designated paramedic
It's all built up now, concrete streets and lonely streetcorner lamps saying
Hey we're gonna light up this little space
Hope you don't mind
Please don't play too loud

And given that these spheroids are monumentally moving
hurling like a pitched water glass
everything staying put under the motion of it
Such a lovely rooting of mass

I will call alongside it, crawling towards answers etching on murals and on the stamping of curbs
E-5 West main
4451 Lowell Street
554 Happy Valley Road
It's all the fun little tributaries of surface waters
heading with precognition towards seas
roped into it by specific gravity

On the phone i spoke to Mr. Victorious
I asked him about his particular drone
down south there in the more direct limelight of the night
he told me about his uncle, in prose
of course
we just hung our heads over the speakerphone
Not sleeping the way we should
shouldering burdens as ***** in deserted zones
laughing and preaching to cottonfields

Then there was the girl
the one we forgot, truth be told
The one unrequited impetus for all art, all physicality and feeling
loved by god in the corporeal
She is the saffron reed in my eye, the one i forgot to preach Victory to
She that one oblong pebble, rolled by the stream
passing our campgrounds and continuing her journey to sands
small little microscopic tetrahedral perfection
I could get stuck in between my teeth
or perhaps left on the sweat of the skin
the lost moments of beachside living, love for the expansiveness, left in the diner seat of the car, gotta keep moving
Carrying her away and if not careful,
nestling her back atop the summits from whence she came.

it is a cola in the glass on the shores of the bay,
it is a divine moment of contact in the oceans
two sailors acknowledging their vessels
with light shows and the play of eye
off the horizon, a green light o' sprite.
No more Big City
No Working Man Blues
No more Swinging Doors
No more patriotic tunes

No more California Cottonfields
No Bonnie and Clyde
No Amazing Grace
No Always on My Mind

No more the Way I Am
No Waiting For A Train
No more Where Have All The Hobos Gone
Or When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again

Goodbye Mighty Merle
Thanks for the gift you gave
There will never be another
Who can take your place

To me you were the best
Singing for the working man
I only wish my friend
I could have shook your hand

RLB

You were the best country music has ever known.

— The End —