Bi-Coastin'

L A X terminal, waiting on a flight to Newark.
No one uses deodorant, locker room funk and rolling suitcases.
Tonight I’m steady people watching, an intergalactic observer
soaking up the mostly non-local color. So many different nationalities
waiting at these gates, characters from hundreds of stories in different languages, sitting
like a Rainbow Coalition in faux leather seats, reading Us Weekly and USA Today.

Could've sworn a man speaking one of the two major dialects of Chinese yelled

“lesbian!” in a moment of English clarity. Scottish grandma offers
a candy cig to a repulsed granddaughter, too young to realize it’s not the real thing.
Off duty yuppie in a suit, rumpled slacks, slumped down, Corey Hart nighttime shades

because his future is so bright. Fred Schneider in Buddy Holly glasses says,

“This is going to be fun,

this is going to be fun.” Poindexter in skate shoes reads Wired,
the cover story posits whether Craig’s List has been the source
of one too many dead hookers. Inquiring technophiles want to know.

My father sits breathless; he can’t walk five steps
without his stomach acid Santa shooting back up his throat chimney in retreat.

We’re going to visit family upstate. Albany in August, humid and damp. Sunshine shinning

through chinks in grey skies.

Bugs sound like buzz saws and sci-fi laser fire after the rain.

Butterflies flutter freely

without fear or worry about droplets weighing them down.

Nameless birds in the distance call to their children or lovers.

Cottontails scurry away from footsteps coming off

porches of multi-million dollar manmade

intrusions in this Endor-looking landscape. Simply put,

it just all makes me want to smoke pot. Nature encased in a burning Zigzag

and that's paper, what’s paper but trees,
these giant arbors reigning over this land
long before the people who own them now.
Just want to sit in their shade and feel my mind sink into a foliage-laden oblivion.

It's Out There... For You to Find

It's out there, a chapbook of some of my work. It's from here as well as there. I'd like to thank Vita Vox aka Marna for putting it together. Hit me up for one and expect more in the future.

Poets

Poets, I read them
and there is always more to read. An unfillable void,
a vortex of not having enough time. Life is not only short, but a progeria case. It grows older, but stays the same size, a distortion of the fullness of the generally held average of height, weight, width and overall appearance. Creatives live a doll’s life. Innards still grow old
and die. The body of work stays the same,
hopefully a carefully crafted carapus,
eventually a sarcophagus
of loves and laments, musings and music.

Poets, I read them and poet, I am one or at least I pretend
and play at it. Imbibing their midday Meyer’s Rum, white chocolate liqueur and soy milk. Gulping half the glass, I stand outside, weed-tipped cigarillo, sparked. Gray hot Long Beach silt under
and over my feet, covering and filling
the tiny crevices and ridges of my toes.
This soil is to dirt
and sand as a mule is to a donkey
and a horse. Yet plants grow
like the Lewis Carroll orchids to my left, who sway
light crimson in the breeze with indifference
over the spotty patches of grass, the ground’s pubescent attempt at facial hair. Going further, being wary
of spider web tripwire, I stare at the trap’s maker,
its engineer
and I wonder how does
this little eight legged brown thing
survive? How does it get out amongst all this? I know how it did, “they were here before us,” a voice says
as the brown leaf paper is almost
burning my fingers,
singeing the first couple of layers
atop the musculature and bone of my pointer, my index. Scrunching it into the base of a planter,
I dance across the hot gray Long Beach silt.
The mule dust’s heat, a test of faith and self. Rocks
and white dog shit in the noonish glare, obstacles
to keep me away from

poets, so I don’t have to read them, and a poet, so I don’t have to be him.

1003 S Beacon St San Pedro, CA 90731

All the drunks
and the junkies
and the crazies outside Beacon House
could fill tomes, scrolls and gossip columns
with all the shit doing the backstroke in their heads.

Acid washed theories and treatises
on our healthily unhealthy love of sin
and all the other puritanical nonsense
turkey basted into the collective conscious
of suburbanites, city dwellers and the hicks
shitting bricks out in the Styx
with all that old timey fire and brimstone.

Every time I drive past Beacon House,
I see someone new like brother man
in a red polo pullover
saying words unheard and unheeded
to every driver that scoots on by, trying to be incognito. Looking straight ahead attempting
to ignore what could be freestyle raps,
evangelical ramblings or regular, run-of-the-mill-bullshit.

I’m one of those motorists, but not before I pass him.

Our eyes deadbolts for that ephemeral spec of time
and that does nothing to assuage him.
Now there for that smattering of seconds,
there is an audience and I’m writing this,
I wrote this to prolong his exhibition,
his soapbox’s longevity just a little longer.

There’s no rampant urge to go back there
and search him out to Rotorooter his conceptions
of truth, love, good, evil and other such vagaries.
I’m content to have this as measuring tape
for my own battered semblance of symbolic normalcy
in the comfort of this mobile room I pay for.

Content to snicker and roast
as much as to be an empathetic voyeur
speeding away in a Corolla of secure separation,
the ultimate segregator between an us and a them.
The only way to see the world
without ever having to be there yourself,
just a submersible under the tides of psychic pestilence that is wrought like so much sewage runoff. I love what you do for me, Toyota!