"Can we make love,
at least a couple more times,
before we never see each other again?”,

Her voice is soft,
sweet,
almost innocent,
and adds an aphro-ambiance,
to the incessant crash of the ocean waves in the background,

her pleading eyes,
intercept my retreating lies,
it can be so hard to argue with the truth.

I am all out of excuses,
as we lay naked as the day we were born,
in this bed at this beachside bungalow in Baja,
clouds gathering outside for the coming post sunshine storm,

two tainted souls,
in a rare moment of purity,
as we lay there I can not lie here,
I can not tell her I will see her again,
I can not tell her everything will be okay,
I can not tell her I love her,
at least not in the same way,
as she loves me,
which of course is unconditionally,

we’ve just made love,
and as she’s mentioned,
possibly for the last time,
and though she wants to make love again and again,
until we both grow old,
wants and realities can compete in this existence,
and in this moment is where they both meet,

“Can we make love,
at least a couple more times,
before we never see each other again?”,

she asks me again,
shaking me from the depths of my thoughts,
she pulls my submarine from the dark depths,
and shakes me out to dry in the sunlight of her attention,
her question,
comes with a hint of offense,
honestly no offense was meant,
at least not from me,
it’s not that I was ignoring her in that moment,
at least not completely,

it’s just that it’s difficult for me to stay in the moment,
when the past keeps dragging me back,
and the future keeps pushing me forward,
and there’s a needy media monster that doesn’t want to be ignored,

where were,
we,
where have we gone,
and what has become,
of the innocence in which we were born?

We lay,
naked as the day we were born,
in this bed at this beachside bungalow in Baja,
clouds gathering outside for the coming post sunshine storm,

nothing covering our skin,
except a thin layer of post *** perspiration,
for even though the sun has already set,
the humid heat still sits there,
like the soon to be cloud covered moon,
that hangs lazily in the sky,
seeming neither amused nor moved by our human drama.

Her question,
is reasonable enough,
and she is,
beautiful enough,
so why,
when she asks,
“Can we make love,
at least a couple more times,
before we never see each other again?”,
can I not say yes?

Well,
for one,
I respect her too much to lie to her,
plus lying to such an honest question,
would seem so taboo,

reason number two,

they say,
we do not choose love,
they say,
love chooses us,
and I do not love her,
even though I may want to,
I do not love her,
because she is not the one Love had decided to choose,

I do not love her,
as amazing as she is,
even if I should love her,
for she is everything a mortal man could ask for,
she is,
a gorgeous and successful model,
with a sharp and receptive mind,
a big heart,
and maybe most importantly,
an undying devotional love for me,
so logically,
I should love her,

but love is not logical,
love is as passionate and irrational,
as the weather here in Baja,
one moment shining bright with clear skies,
the next moment dark and ominous with gathering clouds,

so when she asks me,
“Can we make love,
at least a couple more times,
before we never see each other again?”,

I simply say nothing,
for what can I say,
how can I explain the irrational,
how can I say the one word,
that will break her heart open,
then watch that heart break right in front of me,
how can I say “No”,
to the one question,
that the girl that has said “Yes”,
to my every question,
asks me?

So I say nothing,
I simply open this writing book,
as these skies open above us,
and write down these thoughts upon these pages,
as the desert rains fall down upon us,

I write this poem,
as we lay naked as the day we were born,
in this bed at this beachside bungalow in Baja,
as the incessant crash of the ocean waves in the background,
adds to the aphro-ambiance,
of this bittersweet moment in time,
so that even when I am gone,
and she is gone,
and we are gone,
these words,
from these thoughts,
will live forever,
immortalized in this verse,
forever resting,
somewhere in the collective psyche,
of our unified broken hearts,

as we lay there,
as we mutually mourn,
all that has been loved,
and all that has been lost,
in this impermanent moment called Life,

and she asks,
"Can we make love,
at least a couple more times,
before we never see each other again?”,

∆ Aaron LaLux ∆

Hip Service
By Julian Malek

The zeal of cobblestone tolerance arrayed in fashionable hues masquerading as crimson secrecy, elevates the tide of man but some boats leak in their foundations. Therefore a cork to every exuberance and a triumphant torch for every sorrow lives onward in collective time. Larks that abound because prescience and PUGET sound, that brown has become the new orange which in turn prowls as a concealed swarthy black. To antagonize the willful and frenetic pace, a prodrome of lasting but memorialized disgrace. Should I move to a state by first or last name, or is the final appellation worthy of much more lasting fame. I scurry down the aisles, bemused by shimmering tiles and the beguiled audiences who see much in my limitation but doubt little about my debited elation. Ringmaster Barnum, how much horticulture is needed for assured superstardom, how many cloisters must we evacuate from the incendiary plumes of a metaphorical Harlem..  But know that no virtual reality can supplant the reality that does truly exist, or at least our time is too infernal and purblind to resist. Carrey the tops of mountains in the humor of wellsprings and fountains, we engage a menagerie of egos lilting of an etiolated pragmatic concern. Evicted from paradise, littered with say-cheese demise ensnaring three blind mice eaten alive by snake-eyed vice. To feel good without incorporated tyranny, we must see blue and red as alternatives to the same destiny. A world that reckons with the futilitarianism of pacified malcontent and astroturf monikers that lead the impressionable into a slaughter shed. Established or not, any enchantment under the sea must include fishes once a pastiche of me, but to them I avoid their courtesy flush and never even faintly blush as my egalitarian statements are lavish thrush.

Five TO Won baby one in 99, everyone here aboard the titanic stays alive, you got your boat baby and I got mine, gonna make it with babies numbered in surreal primes. Halt the slots game the nines, a stitch in time is going to turn out to be Mine. Flanger goals, girded piles, liminal like an aborted Harry Styles, we climb mountains we issue tithes, and the turmoil is etched into 45-notched bludgeons and two-tucked knives. Excuse you, where have you been all day, have you been sauntering in a gentle rain or a genteel pain, have you wallowed beyond the mires of doubt and ranked above David Blaine. I hope you tell me of your magic tricks, rather than your other flicks endeared I stand to fight an ineradicable itch. But if not, you placid pond dented by so many rocks and so many ripples give your heart over to me, before I clinch the special Olympics *******, we ran, we span the homespun garments of your left and right hand, but death is a specter that ghoulishly carouses along the carousel terminal disease we call life. I beseech your deepest affection and want to console you for your deepest struggle, to be there every time wed with time rather than a throttled scuttle. Moons make you guarded but maroons leave me desiccated, don’t ever let that wilted flower die, always water it with a rich but gentle ties and widened deck for all to at once marvel and pry.  Monsters of Mars Attacks once flanked my bed, as though the **** brain scared every gooseflesh and restrained every frisson of mystery. I lampoon myself for those cold Dark Knights and the protection ended by the plight of the poor mattering nothing to the deliberately internecine rich. I struck gold in a valley somewhere, an oxymoron of paradox that now you have the privilege to dock, to stay aboard to be a vessel of peace less widely deplored. Even if we don’t sprout wings, we garner the exactitude of measured things and our glass elevator though easily shattered by the glower of enslavement is actually our vista to heaven or listening to brethren tingles for rich mans trinkets and other things. For humanity deserves a legend and a princess, a regimented desuetude and a flanged lust but in our mistakes wildly flouted in momentary moments we become purified by the temptations of an alabaster palace.

***** the left-field wisdom of a pragmatic paragon ellipsis in prison, slip between the cracks and let my suburban muse become your urban ruse. To enchant a caged world beyond a reality delicately and deliberately unfurled. Squirming toads on highways enchanted but dead, are graves for the blue becoming purple in every dignified red. Gainsay assaults me with platitude, a repeated hitter quit on the first bunted ball into foul-line territory. Those gripes are swiped right in all circumstance no matter the plight. The pronged hearing of a trident sensitive to ambient collection, and suddenly we are all in the mad house even though the house of profaned pain is much worse. Glimpses of gambits that gambol for nickels in transit as occult grenades and known dice waddle through without artifice or device, and the laughter and slaughter that trains collegiate minds, differs no more than the tropes of a glamorous violence articled in sordid rhymes. This surfing movie means so much more than Surf Wax America pristine in limited but sacrilege nirvana. Teen spirits smell muskier than 90s pop dreams, the grasp and grunge of gouged eyes becomes a mummified staid, a scarecrow to those who disobey. Childhood flashes with blinding light, and new sight illuminates darkening blight, A blight eradicated only by two magazines and including one that houses the bullets that ***** themselves between death and comatose dreams both within astral sight. Littoral harbor on a seaside town, a shanty with a brackish gown that glides the gourmand to the cosmopolitan eatery on the outskirts of lost & found. But forever lost in embonpoint and forever gained in chavish that exonerates the gaunt, the etiolated prince in heart becomes irrefutable marrow in minded souls.

If I am a spy you are an ESPY, and if I cry than you are a baby,but since neither are the case my wiseacres will cultivate lava lamp dreams for a new generation and suddenly Boston bets on Harvard, but who knows of this piped blather squirming for relevance rather than voguish but temporary chatter. My regatta knows how to swim, my life now knows how to cringe and yet still win and in stilted plays of bungled sincerity the God of peace reminds us of our transcendent personalities. That we in sincerity top the barnacles of invention a novelty but a rarity. But the guillotine quill of emboldened unscripted parvenus ruthless in their eager dues, outdate and outlive the sued swayed blues that indemnify Clinton and make the atomic dog an amazing Winston hill a church often in sheltered disuse. Imps and urchins sting the sentiment, cloy the alimony of repentant betterment, but neither touches the gilded skies of pleonasm striving for raspy disguise as to dissuade further diatribe investigation. Lurking in those scared days of youth, the gore of unalloyed horror scourged me with a limp, that compassion itself could ever become a gimp. Now years later athletics better and scoring goals making the mildew sweat and the years wetter, not a global warming that can be alarmed by global mourning. Take peace at heart if distanced spears of separation make Idiocracy as a pastiche look exceedingly smart. And spar only with the true antagonists bridging malevolence with expedience. Killjoys sure, will joy even more sure, but still boys fluttered heart stopping dead at a stop-watched alarm the worst tragedy of our sordid sort. Give an African Child a real home rather than a spatial roam, a palatial desiccation of momentary Jonas Brothers snapping back at captives with sexualized foam.

Narrative blinds shuttered in an Island among mountains hardly ever wiser to sanitize the sanitarium among the wasps of stung power. Police crumple their uniforms as they prowl down the avenues, looking for misfits and widened platitudes. Somehow that the vigilance of those corrupted by their very career choice, look even worse when megalomania of private is the limelight of public, to their defense few turrets I can muster but castles in the sky will be the apartheid judge. Those that cling to virtue to eradicate Porsche-driven faked or real deaths at the most breakneck speed, that Fast & Furious operation if disclosed completely would turn the Shire of the ring into the hatred curtailed by a song in Sing-Sing. Immunity must not Yoda implore, that livery Liverpool marooned on islands can also to deplore the R.E.D. and still whet the sharpened stead and the fly-by-night Manchester United alights like militant peer pressure for wranglers in tights. But beating the Beatles at a game of Walruses and egg-shelled eyeful towers likely impedes rinkside hockey from anything over bellicose ballyhoo…it exists as a transient fixated glower. But who knows about soccer speculation when love is the transcendent temptation, when nest-egg hens rather than neglecting rig Bens of clockwork and clocked words designed arise better for their token ken. Do I must repeat the subtext of submarines, yellowed as though ugly unused as though unseen, as though the quixotic earthquakes of tintinnabulations Avatar dreams. Wafted souls console the disheartened thoughts of a dashed dream that Berlin hates more than a Furor’s unbridled and useless scream.
Demotic clips slinging from the bedridden silence of a token moon and its token friends, swimming in a shore of ambiguity whether history mellows or whether its furor melts away momentary doubts. I want to avoid the sting rays exorcised by due providence and become the amalgamated talents gentry and of course the upstart swagger of Jack Dawson. But with the psy-op going on, the people manipulated on all sides of a gray picket fence will the relationship bloom without muttered dissent or pretended smiles. Will we take upon the shuffled shuttle and dig with shovels deep-rooted Christmas trees and toast our lives to Dos Equis. We may never go out of style, but the treacle of illuminated imagery when divorced from sentiment bristle shows a swagger that prioritizes rather than amalgamates all love. I love being brash and brazen and honest because when she finally ditches the grandstand of delayed frenemies fandoms of other tinsel decorations without any substance beyond meretricious thrill. You want a roller coaster on some days, but most often you want the nutcracker to elope to secret hiding places. Swim with adventure not just in love, not just in affection with the starlight now matter how luminous, sixpence all the richer is no centuries any poorer and we could be that gilded couple of star and screen and if we ever have to scream, let our screams unite us in passion, rather than a milquetoast deference to pedestaled beauty. but of course the end times don’t laugh at your crumpled wizened relapse. Not out of convenience wed by a discriminating genetic harvest moon but a deeper engagement that flatters when stylish and bristles when romantic but never defiled, never riled of specious pretense. Promise me that you will always remember me in my flaws and my faults, in my scause factory destructions and the penults of PEN-ULTIMATE wisdom that comes before the grace of God in the annihilation of passion for eroded omission. If your goal is to be remembered, check that out…but the most admirable goal is as the propinquities of souls dusted in the wind returning to a spring equinox of passion and if you find in yourselves reservations do not depart from sacred land, and never jilt me because of a boisterous and menacing friend. You are everything to me right now, and I Hope this persists despite the vicissitudes of star-favored afflictions mixed with utter benediction without the pontification of stilted Benedictines  or rather the hyped ludic effrontery of termagants being made of younger and younger women. Leave it at this ,32 leaves the royal secret in royal hands and the Knights Templar and us we altogether hold hands, if only a prelude for a masquerade ball. But the stilted embarrassment of crestfallen time, let that be relegated and emphatically lets embrace what is like to not ever need a real white horse to get back into your favor, because we never go out of style we can brandish the best elements and reject the sentiments of the too newfangled and the too stodgy. We in our crenellated pleonasm can eager ride the lightning to another tomorrow and another yesterday and if even not that, we virtually make an indelible impression of embroidered love not too distant in ivory towers and not to vulgary( catering to popular sentiments) to become a trash glam movement. We soar, others deplore but let their purblind doubts render them blind to our burgeoning love.

Forget the brisk trees dangled in the wind on winding paths through haunted forest or remember them because of ghoulish fortress but with our apotropaic lamp we can avert most evil and call the rest fun and gains and shun but fames never profaned, never inalterable a destiny to magical to be some whimpered catcall. Or we could linger beneath lambent street lights disguised as though wilted garb, attrition of circumstance waiting patiently for the matinee and the vintner to escort us beyond the garb of pretense in a city so abundant with it that it deserves castigation. But I digress, a beachside cliff overlooking tepid waters tumultuous in their power but august in their noises, the cadence of love will sing a half-moon bay on full-moon nights and we will frisk each other like grasping at straws of permanent tracks trammeled of the elite and a sidetracked basque bet. Trim those antlers and instead grow metaphorical wings, to us we all sing but few can match your elegance and everyone would be crazy not to see your ennobled age and together thrilling songs to emulate thriller in sales we will collaboratively sing.
Haughty sneers from lifeless lycanthropy straggling furtively along the pastiched sidewalks of grime, livid because they can’t share the lingering limelight, with as many guarded perks of privacy clambering like a hive of snarky sharks. Lets ditch the big town dreams in terms of posh and stature if only for a caressed moment beneath the unadulterated stars and if you find spars **** to the extent they are amiable than I say guess what my name is Lars! Or wait a second, paused in the big city spotlight our stenciled hearts will guide whatever progeny is yours or mine or ours together we will sing the most comforting lullaby, and caves no longer must we abide. Yearn and earn every inch, as I gripe with my delicate saddened pinch but I think the innuendo speaks . Ripen with our trips to Napa, long afternoon sunsets swim in our hearts as we taste the vanguard’s toast on elegant wine.I console with entreaty to disavow the omen of that San Franciscan church October 2008, the doom implied by Einstein, the raillery of a world grinding down the endless decadence of a railed future inalterable in destiny or partialy amenable to widespread coquetry.

Forget those rumbles in your past that made you feel partial to insecurity and learning the ropes you transcended all and live in all eternity. Thimble and brook, tolerant of all those tokes I took your rebellious side flattens the yeast of Exodus raspy in its begrudged clapping. But the Pharaoh of the modern world sheltered me under his prickly thorns, shielded me from the sickly things that life adorns. We have the numbers on our side, the weight of destiny on our shoulders, dedicate yourself to yourself and I will preen the most vibrant wisdom and love will leap like Apollo across all borders not for camel-****** hoarders. We are culminated destiny in the wings of the best daydream

Untouched moments, untouched skins,
An untouched moon under one night’s
Ocean blue, and it was just us two.

Beachside sights, toes stuck in salty sands,
Life is an offshore view of foreign lands,
And I threw a watch in the waters to wash off the
seconds. Where sun and moon both kiss the same sky,
Is the light to the open gates of Heaven.

Angels with their great wings; are a soaring escape,
But narrow did this paradise seem afar in my eyes,
Two thousand tears fall, in life's heavy grey rain,
As kingdom come reins, we hold onto all that we have,
Holding hands together to say our daily Lord’s prayer.

“Our father, who art in Heaven,” a place love resides,
And with it the many blessings.
“Thy Lord be thy name,” we call upon Him to be saved
By His grace, gracefully still stuck on Earth.
“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done," I hold tightly,
In a prayer with my imperfect love.

Time is lost in all of a man's final words in death,
A beachside prayer, I'm washed of a past in new tides,
If I drowned in all of my regrets, don't let the anchor of
Sin keep me down at the bottom; Oh Lord. Amen.

you were
a drug that only worked when i didn’t need you
a run down
crimson chevrolet
driving so swiftly down
the beachside boulevard
nothing but endless ocean to the left
and a booming city at rest
to the right
i needed you
i wanted to come home
to lie next to you
dreaming of a life full of
daises
and strawberries on silver platters
in the summer
blue skies
forever

star light, star bright
the first star i seen that night

never worked

The conch poked and prodded bursts
Into multicolored fragments
Startling the gulls into
Bewildered flight

The beach cakes my insides
Hand and foot and head and heart
In the sun’s heat it turns to glass
Splinters tear my mask

Loneliness fits like a glove
It rubs like sandpaper
On my sense of self and us
Gradually we erode

Ideas like octopus arms
Multitudinous waves forth
But are concealed by
their own black inky mist

the waves rise and fall
unaware and unconcerned
but we too frail too unimportant
in the larger scheme of things

- Vijayalakshmi Harish
01.01.2013
Copyright © Vijayalakshmi Harish

Smooth, smooth, fringed by yellow smudged, hard plastic
smooth, left to right then a painterly inconclusive running
out, the stroke all 60” expires into the yellow, then a firm
vertical orange stripe, a bookend, a hot surface elevated
upon a warm yellow bed, exotic, turmeric, heated from
below, as though from another world, a future planet found
in Manga, gum wrappers, belonging to the wedding
wardrobes of older women, and those with impossible
shoes, maybe a scarf, definitely lipstick and small Japanese
cars, decorative paper, a can’t-miss logo, as when I close
my eyes in the act of love, holding your kneeling body to
me I lose myself in a pattern of flashes, the bright play of
light and colour, a sensual play of pigment, blue and red
wavelengths, fuchsine, electric, electric, and the aura of
artists, such latent energy, hidden passion, rich in ******
fragrance, edged with desire.

The path of the brush now right to left yellow exposes a
yellow bookend at the left hand edge, there is a roughness
here in its covering of yellow, as though applied in haste or
in a single gesture with a large brush, it is thick, thick and
rough, but the yellow is almost present, a hint, a reflection,
as in the petals of the Bellis Perennis, you open your mouth
breathing, breathing your lips frame such perfect teeth as
day arrives,

Left to right, the paint thick then thinning to a broken
tailpiece revealing yellow on magenta, again, again, again, again,
how little I yet understand your body, the innerness,
the sheltered regions of your desire, I am afraid to harm this
preciousness, be disrespectful of the tapering valley where
love’s caress and kiss meet, are multi-dimensional, the
rectangle is not charcoal, but deflected, hesitant, to the left
the darkness of chocolate, to the right a greyness, a *****
grey, a dusty dark dog, loamed, a depth then play of
shadow, dark, textural as your maidenhair under the covers
above my right hand as it spreads my fingers across its
darkness into deeper darkness, a flat stone, its left end
washed by the cold tide, olived, clothed in mourning, there
is unpleasantness, some distaste, a little fear, the unknown,
the unknowable.

Daisy petals, opening in the morning light, the clapperboard
house on the Block Island beachside fresh-painted every
spring, immediately weathered, porcelained sea shell
textured, turned, tumbled, a dawn sky after rain,
ceramicised fungi, plain flour, acidic, taut, the moment
when the heart and breath seem to pause as we join each
other’s flesh as though this cannot be cannot really be.

Unrhymable this flower shade hued pigment deep saffron
vibrant, phoned, not quite of the fruit, a different tang,
sharper without sheen, magenta beneath its smoothed
surface up to left and right edge, (but for the yellow
frill beneath), lip covering, silk-scarfed, not autumnal yet, but oh
those Californian poppies, those desert landscapes as the
sun sets,

a single uneven gesture thrown left to right, an island
in silhouette with a rocky foreshore spreads into distance,

a bed of sylvan jade, an oasis, this an aerial view of tree
tops modulating to grassy pasture, a down-stroke western
boundary, an edge of surf on its northern border, perhaps
the brush formerly coloured has left its trace,

the main body of this Australian desert seen from the air,
Sidney Nolan’s bush, aboriginal earth, coloured mud,
unguent, the sense of liquid in your kiss, its warmth, the
very tip and corner of your lips, the brush of hair as you
move your head to my chest, the rubbing of hair on hair,
under your arms this play of sensation through the lips’
touch, then the shore, the sand no sand though, only in the
brochures, daffodilled perhaps, unsmudged, fresh,
vigorously golden, well-watered.

the story went as though
she'd always known the sea
and trusted in its depth
to mellow any ill, caress her
open lovingkind as in a dream.
and dream she would upon the waves,
having settled into floating reverie.
she'd close her eyes and inhale being
there among herself caressing only
ocean, only breath, all sunlit space
to draw her earthly trials gently out.
softened beachside noise would fade
and let alone her ears to hear
the water oneness dipping clear
and deeper in the troughs, for distance
from the stranded holidays,
the beachy noise of seaside frills
and bear her boyancy to rest
in lilting motion, peaceful cresting sleep
atop an intercontinental,
earthsize water bed.
her trust profoundly spanned
the trans-atlantic rift
and any rift to set apart her undulating
ancient ocean mastery. moon
and sun were kneading vastly where
her snores were lost in starfish whispers balancing
the tidal volume set
to always fill and keep afloat,
or otherwise to wake in
sputters and a salty throat.
her body settles into swinging comfort
napping over waves so deep the shore recedes...
... what bright, kind, clarity cascaded in your dreams?
what heart you had, embracing open quiddity,
never sinking nowness breath alert in lucid sleep
and water surface mystic skyward shallow course?
to merfolk gazing up in wonderment
you limply crossed their bouncing sky,
just another flight of fancy in a world of mystery?
did you dream you were a whalesong
sphering out to carry sadness sonorously? did you
school the many impulse-thoughts to clump and flee
the jaws of time? did you bask in light
and find a shining womb of self
to nurture once again and labor out anew?
did gravity make sense to you?
i float sometimes and live that question true.
sleeping far you drifted out and out and in and out of view
and whistles drowned in gathered drama fear
'my grandma! my grandma!'
screamed my cousin at the lifeguard
sweating ******* and leaping over stroke to spash
into your side a breathless shouting mess for you to calm
and ask 'what's wrong?' and angle slowly back to shore
in fits of giggles, bubble laughter at commotion's reach.
they blink in crowds, standing herdlike on the beach.

and now you swim your last,
another summer day.
like any other i awoke
and fed you eggs, so soft
     (at first it wrinkled my nose),
but taste is strange, and slimy works
just fine sometimes,
like in the absence of teeth.
she never liked her dentures,
     (she said she couldn't taste her food)
and gummed her frozen dinner meals with a smile,
like it was the greatest thing in the world.
     (in fact she'd often say, 'that was the best meal i had ever had',
     and with a force that made me happy to suspend my doubt)
and who am i, judging
that which you select? your pills,
your diapers and your vote,
your shows, your nursery rhymes,
your crown manipulation,
your age?
i use abjection well,
as something not unlike a whetstone for denial.
performing daily rituals i abhor
i retrain and edit, revising social eyes:
dilapidated fictions, safer norms
and mores tailored to a loan
with interest from the self.

she didn't call herself a 'nudist,'
though she lived beyond the fence
living **** for decades saying
'i'll never leave, i love my home.'
we played dominoes 'til noon
'another kind of indoor game, one on a side'
her interpretation of my being there
changed soon, like my aversion
for the liquid yoke she buttered with a spoon.
our neighbors loved her and i,
and to meander down our path,
lay their towels and sit
like all there was to do was visit.
lunched,
she hobbles from her plants back to the sink,
and filling the cat dish, stands
century-old arms akimbo
in the doorway, with a sigh to wake the sun.
being of caretaking was never so fun.
holding hands i help her over roots,
around the rocky sections, through
the easy path and level now
she hobbles sure, the cane a decoration
for her pride at being old and young
at heart and quick at stories overtold
in grooves to satisfy the sense of time.
greetings shower us with beaming smiles,
inching to the sandy edge. denuding,
joining everyone, we stand engulfed
in air. modern digambar to don
a vaster cloth of letting be.
skinny dipping grandma, and me.
the water slips around
her fraglile skin, human driftwood
knotted with a smile.
a grand mother slipping through akashic cracks
to undiscover friends their seeing core.
they wonder at the shore
of hoary plight
and wonder on, once we're gone.

Waves of sadness wash gently upon the sandy

beaches of my soul

Their foaming caress my constant companion,

churning, ever churning, remorseless, relentless

unstoppable.

The expanse stands bleak and desolate,

littered with the debris of time, scarred by

the harsh changing seasons.

The wind blows cold and hard beneath the

forbidding steel sky, weaving it's way

between and around the immobile faces of

the time worn stones, occasionally stirring

the rippling sand; but always, always,

imparting it's bitter chill

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.

Undulating jade , juvenile days
Cold , salty rain
A seventh floor balcony
The gulls , the pelicans , the
sandpipers and me
Precious memory , precocious with crab bucket and flashlight ,
cut squid , open face reel , Panama
Jack mariners hat
Snorkels and sand dollars , shells , frothy
waters
Daughters , saltwater taffy , dolphins ,
mullet , catfish and boogie boards
Early breakers , soul shakers , thundering surf
The release of material worth
Sun melting into the western world
Gulf zephyrs kiss naked flesh ,
softening the man* ...

‘You’ve come to the end, it’s sad, my friend
But there’s nothing more we can do,
Your kidneys have malfunctioned, and
You’re at the end of the queue.
You’d best be making your Will out now
Or you may run out of time,
There’s just a question of fifteen thou’
You owe for our work, just sign!’

‘I’ll not be signing my life away
Just now, though it’s almost done,
I may be taking a walk someday
But not ‘til I’ve had some fun.
You say I’ve only a week or two
To spend, and that’s at the best,
I’ll cram the rest of my living in
With the help of a Prescient Vest.’

The Prescient Vest, the brainchild of
A Silicone Valley clone,
It calculated the path of life
From the life already known,
It fed its images through a brain
That would never live to see
The normal span of the life of man
Through some abnormality.

So Kevin fronted the Institute
And was strapped into a chair,
Fitted with Vest and Headpiece
And was virtually aware,
It drained the memories of his life
That flashed on past his sight,
And stored them into a tiny file
Just less than a Gigabyte.

And then it started to calculate
Beginning with his wife,
It showed her having a sweet affair
With the boarder, Stanley Smythe,
They both attended his funeral
And she leant upon his arm,
And held the wake with a Currant cake
At Stanley’s father’s farm.

Then Kevin struggled within his bonds
And tried to say, ‘Not true!’
But then his favourite daughter came
Quite suddenly into view,
She stole the funeral money he’d
Been keeping in a jar,
Then jumped on into his Thunderbird
And drove off with his car.

She let her idiot boyfriend in
To sit behind the wheel,
But all he could see were dollar signs
And a car he’d like to steal,
He dropped her off at a candy shop
Drove off and left his Pam,
While only a half a mile away
He ended under a tram.

Kevin suffered a minor fit
At the wreck of his pride and joy,
But didn’t suffer a single qualm
At the death of the stupid boy,
His job had gone to a minor clerk,
Dumped records in the bin,
The careful working of twenty years
That he’d spent compiling them.

Then Stanley got at his savings and
He frittered them away,
His wife was clueless, she let him sell
The house he’d slaved to pay,
The future, once he had gone was not
The thing he’d visualised,
He strained and screamed at the Techs,
‘Just get this thing from off my eyes!’

He staggered home in a mood and took
Some gas from out the car,
Splashed it around the house, and took
The cash from the funeral jar,
He threw a match and it all went up
Though he didn’t know or care,
That his wife and Stan were up above
When the flames went up the stair.

He jumped on into the Thunderbird
And went for a long, last ride,
Along the Beachside Boulevard,
And once he had stopped, he died!
They’ve banned the use of the Prescient Vest
With a raft of bills and laws,
‘The future needs to be locked,’ they said,
‘For the damage it might cause!’

David Lewis Paget

We could build a castle in our dreams
On a peaceful beachside
No cyclones can blow it away
Dress up like a queen of my heart
You deserve the diamond tiara
We could walk ashore bare foot
Holding hands watching the sun set
Like a gold coin dipping in water
Hear the breeze singing memories
I would carry you in my arms
Back to our palace, lay you on the bed

she says that she's been scared a long time ago.

that pink dress only gets worn in special occasions, mary lou anne!
so lost here, in a crowd with my fingers crossed behind my back, talking to a wall of pictures
--what she means is she's a queen of Chopins, the queen of *** covered mountaintops--

the hair dresser shall pin your hair up later at four, dearie.
she says that he was a man a long time ago.
mother mother, is lost in Kuwait. father father, is troubled with apple turnovers.
if this isn't right, then nothing will ever feel right again.

madam, please stop fidgeting with your dress.
a kiss has been seared onto her breast,
making the tissues underneath
smooth and strong.

darling, you look beautiful.
but somehow she's been buried there, with her daughters, her sons, and 200 families.
in a sundress by the beachside.
she says the Ripper tore her ******* open a long time ago.
music boxes tells her otherwise
that in his arms there are no more pink tomorrows.

Inside the brightly painted hut
crinkle cut and candy flossed where old men dossed out of the rain and one more stain don't make no odds to Gods who '**** a deaf un',
sits Johnny Stone,
among the brittleness of skin and bone, he wears his worries and his cares away by sniffing grey hairs up his nose.
Posing every now and then for beachside surfers who,when they see this man survives amid the torture of the lies that haunt his face,move on to another place and forget they've ever seen and glad they've never known
Johnny Stone.
In this tinsel town one more Stone goes down and one more becomes the one that's trading places,revolving dreams on sunlit faces and a bigger pile of luggage cases for the dustbin men to take away
Stay at home,carve your dreams quite thinly off the bone, or you'll end up like Johnny Stone,
hungry
and all alone.

Bittersweet butterscotch summers
Beachside with you
Seasalt caramel evenings with beer
So saccharine sweet

Baby, please break my heart
Chocolate mint biscuits
Break easier than my heart
I’m a lolly shop of love
And I thought I had the flavour
You would take upon your mouth
But I was wrong

Take my feelings
Snap them like honeycomb shards
I know you can do it
Nothing tastes sweet for me anymore
Please, I’m sick of stirring batter
That I cannot bake

I’m choking on bitter almonds
But I would never feed you
Cinnamon cyanide cupcakes
Take a drink from my angel cake cup
Honey lemon tea from me
Or drop the tea cup on the floor

Burn my dulcet agony
Or listen to the tick-tock timer
Because I want to close up shop
Break my candy heart
Between your teeth,
My bubblegum boy, and burst your bubble
Or kiss me with your laffy-taffy lips

Sweet temptation
And sweeter bliss
With this power over me
The choice is yours
But please, break my heart,
My sweet heart

I've written a thousand words that have trailed behind me for decades.
If I attempted to turn around and pick them all up as if I'm collecting shells from a beachside, it would be wheelbarrows full.

Write.
Just write Natasha.
Quit attempting to perfect this gift and just let it unravel.
Don't criticize, judge or feel
Guilt over your need to shut away and bleed the thoughts that you're unable to speak onto paper.

Release the fear that captivates you. It's that uneasiness in knowing the pain that spills once I form these words into being readable and they sink into my heart and become truth.
Truth equals pain for me.

It's the fear that this truth might just **** me.
Is it possible to die of a broken heart, I often ask myself.

Battling this fear to write this novel is the one thing holding me back from healing.

Allowing my entire being to sink into it, and rage against the words as if I'm the flat of the ocean being ravished by the never ending waves.

Tossed and turned by the emotions that come with the process that forces you to heal.

It's the still, that resides between each word written, that quiet space that leaves me restless.

Calm the infuriation, unclench your teeth and let the words be written into reality.

My need to burst into a blood pumping release that lightens my heart from this heaviness is enough to shake the floor of the ocean.

The last beachside I visited your own funeral.
I remembered the drizzle fell for the first time,
when I led you home first.
When the seagulls fly low overhead,
then the wind blows north,
and the beach sand embraces our cold feet,
it turns out the sea is where I no longer find you.

Chanting sounded like a curse of freedom.
I don't hear your singing anymore,
when I once decided to **** myself
on the cliff shore
where many thistles grow,
but you
invite me for another time.

I can wait for someday-
I do not ache for companionship and everlasting love,
Nor am I prospectively naming my future children.
I am not picking the linens for my home that could be beachside or suburban, city dwelling or atop a mountain.
I do not know precisely how I will sustain myself,
Or when I will retire.
I do not lose my days to planning too far ahead
So much so that I lose sight of today.
I can wait for someday
Because some days all I need is the day I have before me.
Someday will come, and I will look back
And be sure that waiting around for someday was not the way to live out the moments until then.

it wasn't until years too late
that the oceans once painting
your skin into a weepy
vacation canvas finally
dried and made their salty
descent down your throat.

i hope that one day
you find your mind wandering
back to some sunbleached
air conditioned antique shop
a cool and dim refuge of
kitschy proportions

and i hope one day you can finally
appreciate an afternoon that
may or may not have held
your greenesque day of peace

(by greenesque i mean that
not only was it green but
it also held whispers of the last
chapter in your favorite book
the part where all the pieces fall in place
and nobody is happy with the outcome)

you're just a bundle of
nerves and memories
the kind that keep you up at night
and your hair uneven lengths
the kind that flash before your eyes
through grainy old photographs
and pictures engraved so deep
inside a screen you question
whether or not they
ever even happened.

there are gravel roads
somewhere out there
that smell like home and
kind cold water in a july drought

and i sincerely hope
that you someday find
one of those state-parkish
leafy hollow spring hills
settled deep somewhere
inside your heart

and i hope that someday
you drive all alone for an hour
park on the side of the road and
watch the woods for no reason
except to listen to every love song you
ever knew in your youth
and i hope that your breathing stays steady
and your eyes stay dry and starkissed.

i would cross my fingers
shut my eyes and tie my
esophagus in a knot if i knew
my wishes could grant you peace

and i hope that when you're older
your beachside sunburns and
deep fried fatigue are washed away
by all the seasons of upstate mountain air.

that night
remember
i'd dug a hole
sick, the sand cold and wet

you ****** me
the room spinning madly
my eyes silenced
& my mouth pained

your need outweighing my own
you are spent and my urge to die, passing
silenced, your heart betraying even there
beachside villa

The smell of sunscreen and salt
as the beach winds blow

her bikini strings flap on her back and hips
as I study the freckles here and there

following her spine down to
the ruby red grapefruit colored bottoms

round and full as ones on the tree
I am positive just as **** and sweet

her sweat in the summer sun
seasons the sweetness

like the drink in my glass
of the same colors

enjoying the views
from the beachside bar

My first love did not take me by the hand but rather by the ear
He was a ghostly music man who sang of sweet violence
He would chide and chide again of my innocence, my ignorance, my insolence
Through ghastly and grief-ridden streets, he would lead me here.

My first love was my first enemy though,
Gnashing teeth and pointed tongues lashing upon each other
For long time come, this hatred and distaste would not fade low
Forever in stinging words but there was change soon, a change to bid him my lover.

First breach of a tiled, misty dream, he has earned no right to my mind’s unreality
Again and again, his visage haunts my most inner eye
Second breach of a buzzing, glitzy dream, it has become a wish of reality,
Strange and unsettling, distorted and pale; a most convincing lie.

Unfair September echoes in my heart as I reach for his memory
An ethereal grip on a hand that is no longer there; belonging to a beachside now
How I long for a scent or touch of remembrance of him upon me
Practically lands away from him, fog kissed hills of the girth realm glower.

We are but fools in divided courts: winter and summer
Belonging more to each other than the seasons of those who divide us
We hail to ourselves and each other, giving bitter thanks to our monarchs in murmur
Dangling upon a cliffside, will we or won’t we? There is no try, only lust.

I long for a simple kind of closure.
Wherein grief does not desecrate the faded memories if once happy folk, now ghosts
I long for a battening down of cross-hatches of emotions and composure
Wherein tears do not tear away the ghosts in my mind where dwells my sacred host.

Confusion burgeons and blossoms in my mind
Excess of people draw close to me but there is only one for the companionship I seek
Do I love him, do I wish to make him mine?
Through embarassing lovelorn writings, at my own heart I dare to peek.

My first love was a ghostly music man, forever marching off unto paths that wind.
By my ear, he would lead me heavy as lead
Through untold streets where grief was forever upon mankind
Through streets that did not exist, only in song, only upon my lips and in said.

Behold! The agony of love,
Hidden through receipts
In the leather folds of
Pocketed wallets, and
Phantom habits exposed
In ordinary scenes,
Perhaps
On the beachside street
Where
The wind took lead
And all bare witness
To blossoms in Spring.

Behold! The agony of life,
Begging me to ponder:
Do I waver?
and do I waver?
In the face of love.
Do I seek equity
From up above? Or
Shall I trudge ever on
With my naive heart, and
Veteran laugh? Oh,
Shall I linger?

No -
Life and love
Lay dormant
At
The edge of every smile
And in the canyons
Between stale fingers
Where lovers
Once rest, or perhaps
In the words
That come knocking
When we fail to see the door
Momentarily ahead.  

And on I waver, and on
I waver; but the
Face is anew, and we
Trudge forward -
Ever braver.

Empire State Building, floor 102.
That’s where I’ll be waiting for you.
You guys are like family, I love you in a way.
I’ll be your friend and solace, strong roof over your heads.
Pull up to your wedding, be your best man, wipe your tears when it’s over.
But don’t jump off, babe, soon we’re all going to be happy.
In Empire State, someday we’ll all be free.
I wanna fall in love at least once before I die, even if it brings me down.
So don’t jump off, babe, soon we’ll all stop being lonely.
Empire State, someday we’ll all be free.

I can see the words trapped in your eyes when you look at me.
Someday you won’t have to fear it.
We’ll hold hands doing laps around Central Park in summer.
We’ll french kiss on the subway like some blazed down gunners.
Don’t be afraid of the dark when you feel it.
Someday you won’t ever have to fear it.

I’ll go to New York City, I’ll be grateful to stand where they stood.
I was in heaven when they were dying, I swear I emphasized with them when nobody could.
It’s sad when I think what my brothers and sisters have suffered while I sat on Jesus’s lap.
It’s not my ******* fault that Jesus made me gay as ****.
I’m looking in the wrong places, forever out of luck.
But someday I won’t have to wander.
Someday I will open my blinds and invite the light in.
I’ll be at the beachside, old and happily married.
In a townhouse painted green which has a garden of hydrangeas, nourish me.
I’m a hemlock baby, fruit of toxicity but I’m still beautiful.
Step on me all you want, but I’ll still do lots of good.
The empathy within me is as strong as a stone wall standing tall and lingering on.
There’s radioactivity, discovered by Madame Curie and I’m carrying it along.
But I have faith still
that God loves me
I wish to love another in the same way, Lord let me.
I will give you
roof and solace
Someday you’re gonna need it before you get to give it.

I can see the scars on your soul when you expose it to me.
Someday you won’t have to loathe them.
We’ll dance with locked hands jiving to music of liberation.
Remember what they took from us, be proud of what he had.
Don’t hate yourself and don’t think you’re broken.
You’re just beautiful in a world that’s not yet awoken.

A songbird once sang to me that someday we’d all be free.
The pain that you endured, it will be your strength, it will lead you forward, it will hold your hand.
A songbird once sang to me that someday we’d all be happy.
I’ll come to your wedding, be your best man, cry with joy as you’re standing at the altar.
Empire State, we’ll throw baby showers, grow vegetables together, perform in gay bars on street corners.
In Empire State, we’ll kiss on the subway, be invisible, marry each other on floor 102.
I wanna fall in love at least once before I die, I just wanna fall in love.
It’ll be okay,
we’ll all be free someday,
Empire State, don’t you jump off.