Our love’s in autumn now, everything falling
and glowing like embers, amber expressions
as a sinking sun
or a heretic on the stake.
The naked Ash baring its veins
stiff with rigor mortis
and the hard ground ages
from nursery to cemetery.

It’s either destruction or lunacy,
what you want or what you should be –
keep knocking it down
or take up drinking with the happy people,
their eyes the same as a hostage
among corpses; is it my fault
I can’t ever choose,
maybe won’t choose in time.
What’s at stake:
You’re supine in the cabin;
the mice act at random above
and the rain piles on
outside the incandescent room,
keeping us from escaping
into the dormant night
as the faucet drips
and the pines lie motionless.

– Los Angeles, CA

Taken in Grass Valley, CA

Another’s coin flip,
my double-sided life…
This melody bookends its constant change;
Imagine hearing it when I’m 40.
80.

White tents in the yellow light,
the night closed around thick
like an iris in a sunbeam.
Ice is agitated, breaking with grace
in polished glass. Linens and lace,
no wrist bare, no hair shapeless.
We would debate our favorite island
and where to take the wife,
the latest Apple device,
electric versus hybrid.

But an honest poem from me
is a poem about vices
and the future being a bank account –
always less than you think.
My road to recovery is like the Penrose staircase;
I sit on the ledge,
and the tune plays as it has
in every chapter I pass through,
like the gurney hits swinging doors.

– Los Angeles, CA

Taken in Los Angeles, CA

Now you wait in the rippling air,
twisting my second self harder than my first,
who waits for you like the Second Coming,
or an apparition, if only you’d appear
and give shape to shapeless thought,
tempest waters between mind and heart.

Buried pain laid plainly on dreamy canvas:
You look different, but speak the same.
A Polaroid bleeds into a flame –
how can you say things aren’t so bad?
I say it’s almost over
and feel how boring I’ve become
and lose you
as San Francisco becomes a prairie
and the stars fall into our shower
where we sit like children
and I look at the faded tattoos you don’t have.
That song plays, I’m stuck in that cold space in Oakland,
stuck on you, old love
in an old city, forgotten and for good.

– Los Angeles, CA

Taken in Oakland, CA

Into Eden, a familiar prison
seen again like remnants
of death camps said to be fiction.

A distant knoll fixed against seared nimbus plumes;
under its tree, The One Who Speaks
appears and the current through the leaves ceases:
The code of Christ
was written
too small for beasts.

Hell is below our vision in the
hot blood of human skin.
Tell me the properties of carbon;
imagine the absence of pain
xeroxed until it is the absence of good
and wonder—to whom does paradise pander: you or god.

Incipient scapegoat pitying slaves,
I know it was you in the garden,
that brief encounter
among the stamp of all imprints;
and I just give myself away
like a blood stain fading into
white, the presence of the monad
forever losing and finding itself.
Earth is now a heaven
as depictions of life are better than living
and hell must be those memories survived.
. . .
Her voice: something must remain of us—
tracing your breasts with cubes of ice
watching the areola bumps rise;
shattered water beating your backside
as I stare through the steam, tapping your
clitoris as if milking drops from a leaking faucet.

– Los Angeles, CA

Taken in Oakland, CA

I am the monad of death left
in the negative and the ego
has burrowed into darkness, continually tossed
into the realm of dichotomy with the tension
of unsettled business.
I am the transparency, the soul is the light
projecting the damage through a laminate lens.

mature soul waiting to age—
another phase goes by, inside of me
there’s a special smile
possessed by your presence;
I love only beauty herself
and she doesn’t care at all. She is like a summer
breeze, the present second
washing over without passing.

I know why my mother is like
a child; God cast us
into a world of opposites to let our free half wild,
to return to the slavery of essence
like a dog tied to a moving car;
I’ve stopped running, drag me to heaven
to learn the value of death like Jesus:
To be is to be parted. I greet it now,
the peak from anticipating to reflecting.

– Los Angeles, CA

Taken in Oakland, CA

Palm trees behind tinted glass; gusts
encumbering still life; the stems
pendulums into the sky, kinetic
like tendons connecting typist fingers.
I’m staring as if at my own becoming
of the decrepit pedestrians I’ve hurried past,
eyes vacant as a hooked marlin on the dock.
I simulated a life without you, the fear of it
rolling in like a dark horizon, an extinguished sun
hung over tungsten city lights. You had already begun
brushing cement onto brick layers; the preparation
is what makes these deaths romantic.
My heart is an injured racehorse and
my mind has a shotgun
in the way all 60 billion of us have always had a weapon.
When my memory speaks of you
it is with the softness of collusion,
a palm on my jaw turning my vision – but
I cannot return to watching shadows dance.
The sun is dead; it remains dead.
And I’ll never be the same.

– Los Angeles, CA

Taken in Los Angeles, CA

It’s been two weeks
since I buried your heart
and now
I can’t be buried by anything.
The minute her hand begins
to comb the back of my skull
I know I’ve got her
somewhere
below the skin, an angler
looking at a bleeding catch
before tossing it in.
It was only to get rid of you,
ghost disrupting my peace
and I’m starting to think
I may have loved you.
This frigid month, the district’s neon signs
I can still picture you underneath
while the tavern’s guts howl
and the skinny street is nothing more
than me and you
me and you
me and
you.
I must be the only one
with lost in my eyes
and here they are screening a memory
onto the rain-spotted glass
of someone else’s car
while she shows affection
and I grow sick of the medicine.

– Oakland, CA

Taken in Oakland, CA