Fall is a Beautiful Liar

There never were words to describe it -

The cicada song grows wearisome and
he sings despite his wings
being seared away by August.

The jade velvet of flower beds
has not weathered well under
the heat of fevered weeding;

always stroking - twisting - pulling -
where has the ease of nature gone?

The lily's curves have turned to wilt
and the morning glory is sleeping in
past the humid languor of summer.

All that remains are grubs that thrive
on the chilled skeletons of September.
There is no promise but that of death

and there never were words to describe it.

On Letting Go

These years will soon go by a-blur.
In a lonely room somewhere,
I'll live the past, the times with her.

Voices trilling in song or cheer,
Frills and laces, ribbons in hair,
These years will soon go by a-blur.

I'll think of eyes of twinkled laughter,
Monsters in closets, dolls in her lair:
I'll live the past, those times with her.

Of a child's kisses that healed a mother,
Adolescent fears and misread care,
These years will soon go by a-blur.

Shadows will sweep a desolate shelter,
No more now than a threshold bare,
and walls that whisper of times of her.

For I must know she's not mine forever,
Or else the rest is round despair.
These years will soon go by a-blur,
I'll live the past, the times with her.

The Pot

At a 'tea' party hosted by a gay Russell Crowe which is happening down the street from my old Bellevue Ave. digs near Silverlake. I'm on the toilet in a blackandwhite tiled (Moderne?) bathroom with contrary curtains---like doilies hanging on dark stained and burly woodrings---all of which makes me mind-flit to huge sailboats and Russell Crowe as Fletcher Christian in some new Hollywood bounty mutiny---now wriggling my toes in the U-rug---and why have I taken off my shoes and socks? I'm sitting on the pot but no action. Freezeframe. I'm trying to catch the conspiratorial falsetto conversation of gravelly-voiced Russell and (?) in the next bathroom. He's raving about some sensational loverboy he's been shagging and once again everything goes quiet---the medicine cabinet mirror over the sink swings open and he's back in his world-famous butchtones and tells me: "Take your fucking dump, flush and leave!"Then he smiles and immediately bellows "Mates, come check out the joker taking a dump!" and the bathroom door handle rattles a bit, then swings open onto a spectral corridor of backlit faces, all peering over one another to get a better view. I'm thinking speedily about how to get out when suddenly all goes silent and my stomach starts rumbling out of control, then lets out a tremendous bronx cheer with reverb effects. I'm feeling overwhelmed with shame and Russell yells "CUT!", and now everyone is applauding wildly at my 'performance'. A picture on the wall next to me pops out and Russell sticks his head through and he tells me "Mate, this is gonna be a world-beater. You've outdone yourself". I can see his face powderstreaked with stray eye-liner tracks and am wondering why an actor of his stature can't get better makeup. He says: "You still haven't flushed, mate. Flush and take a bow". I reach behind and find the cold metal handle and plunge. A muffled gurgling and my balls now getting submerged and I'm hopping about with ankle pants while the water rises and my turds (a baker's dozen) jostling each other over the gangplank and onto the U-rug and Russell's beside himself with joy and yelling out: "You've seen it all yourselves! A star is born, mates!"

Plutonium Child

I'm anxious about revisiting the bungalow on Ambrose Ave where I once lived. The same laconic Gene Autry cowboy from Saturday t.v. matinees drawls: "There was a little girl who lived nearby. I don't know who she was, but I seen her in my dreams; I'm certain she's the one and it was here". I don't know that it's me talking or some other. Or that this is an old song I've nearly forgotten. But this is like the long ago dream about that same talking, pull-cord baby doll that was both fictitious and real. "You can't possibly remember anything because you left this place for elswhere". At the door, I press on a sad little bellbuzzer that's hooked up to springy electrical wires and hanging from the same battered fascia board and feel the mild charge in my fingers. Brrriiiiiing brriiiiiiing! Behind the blackened screen door I can see the same dark gray corpse of a crone smoking in her rocker. What was her name? She was the woman who used to plant things only at night. The vapors of her cigarette are trailing towards the gridded, galvanized mesh. The smoke comes through like Indian signals revealing that she's got the doll.

At the tail end of a snaking customs queue with Ty, Elena, Geoff, and a much older Gena. They're each wearing a wreath-like "crown o leis" chin-cinched with vines of cascading holiday tendrils. Their heads are bopping to some sort of Hawaiian slide uke that's playing over the p.a. I'm not partaking of the festivities---I keep bumping up against a hodge-podge of dented, military-issue jerry cans. The canisters are stenciled with stippled white symbols, all of them visually suggesting the direst warnings which my dream mind runs with: plutonium, aids ebola, cholera and bubonic pestilence. The "family" directly in front the containers seem infected---something is seriously wrong with their skins. The pink freckled dad with his flattened haircut has got something to do with all of it. He's got the girth of a savior, but is going down with the wife and kids. He's got scabrous blotches coating the back of his arms and neck----poking through the appendage openings of his pristine starched white shirt. He looks like something ancient...beached. I'm trying to get the other four to notice all this, but they are now far back towards the tail end of the line. I'm yelling and waving while the crowd surges, but my vocal projection is chord-cut and feeble---drowned out by the funky cacophony. The four of them are now clapping, stomping and whooping it up---entertaining the crowd around them by weaving a Celtic knot of a well-rehearsed barn-dance. The Hawaiian twang of the p.a. is metallic, hard-edged and deafening. We've moved forward in the line, but the canisters, and the family in front of us, are gone.

portrait of her self kahlo

Autorretrato, photo of my self :D
Vía dadanoias

From an Author to her Child: on writing

From an Author to Her Child
on writing

I have written a tome, a lexis
to define this vocabulary of pain,
and with the aged leather of my palms
I have bound the words and held them near,

as swaddled infants
in the darkness,
where comfort and clarity
are elusive.

Bent-backed silence
has borne witness to the gilt
that edges each page,
and the font has faded
from nights of restless fingering:

your lip at my breast,
the curve of an ear,
a lock of ebony.

But memories refuse to fade.
They seep, instead, like ink,
into the ridges of my fingertips
where text does grief no justice.

Failing to adapt

He was sometimes, she was always.
Sometimes always doesn't work.

The gods

The gods arrive...

evidental[l]y

evidently
"apparently" it was sad few showed at the funeral, your funeral guess no one "care'd" after all "so it tis was is" that makes sense in a sort of dime when the flaws have showed in the libidinal book the liability books and you can never get detached enough to escape the movies and movies is what its all about after a fashion something like never havin' your desires gratified met purchased needed watchin’g the rive rrr of ccrimed take it off away as usual. So then all your periods are ended and esc ape ba ck to Europe you must because this is not your climate but then where do you find your place except in an English country garden and an espionage scenario and other useless things which echoland and the anxieties abound but like you reader I am so flippant with these so called purging of the soul I cannot she cannot believe there is any

mean time another makes a dollar a day a day a dolore so spent within its wishing now back to the friends' work another monster mountain like yourself

.

in the elegy of your passing there is nothing, a wave drifted to sea .
the swimming song of your body .

first saw

Oh ho ho and a bottle of heigh Heigh ho the ninny pushed by water and so it goes when she first saw my lips wangled she reckoned by the flay of their stoppage I a recondite deer twittered against the window of winterage and husbanding my land I awful I was the Irish accent of the voice reading Finnegans Wake when a young lad a young ladding and spinny as she was there was no choice between theory and practice and the boat we rowed was like this against the territoried god against the deterritorialized sinner chained in his shackled husks by the sea the sea of alcoholism which made the books of the sea and this what made what we are throttled by night and height we sang the song of rushed trout of boy scouts not cubs hammering down motorcycle hill and I missed my youth and missed yours as well the skinny boy I was spent too many years alone friendless homeless sexless no wonder she was crazed crazy when founded out to the foraged field

Now be my lip O lover of memory

__
So the envelope speaks

Spin-Out

Unprovoked, you slide away - slick,
like a wet road at midnight. You slip away
into your distance, oblivious
to the spectators lining the shoulder.

Exhaust, perhaps a final breath, lingers
in the inky absence, and
the chemical smell of your departure is choking.

But the gravel will resettle in your wake,
the fumes of your passing will clear
and the pavement has already forgotten
your name.

Learning to believe

Time comes and I discover this
place, that I don't even know
yet, but patience touches me
and says its all going to be
alright, now.