After the First Beer

After the first beer
I looked around the bar.
A long-haired middle-aged lady
complained about the music.

She said the song Creep
triggered her. I looked around
and spotted a golden-haired lady
complaining about a dirty glass.

There was a cacophony of voices
at the bar. A lean, red-head lady
with her man, laughed in unison,
drinking what looked like blood.
Every man and lady appeared to
be of the vampire persuasion.

There was a woman standing at
the jukebox swaying back and forth.
She told the bartender, Aphrodite

was her name. It was getting late.
The beer was getting warm
and bitter. I felt like I was being
bitten all over my body.

*

Remember the Rain

Did you remember the rain?
Wasn’t it beautiful?
Waiting under that awning
with all the other patrons
waiting to partake of red
or green chilaquiles or
enchiladas, or the fried folded
tacos with shredded beef
and cotija? The rain that
came down sideways
drenched our pants and shoes.
It was a summer morning.
We met up early and battled
the traffic and the rain
for about 10 miles, while
marveling at the needed rain.
It was only a day or two
when we complained about
the heat, the worst in many
summers past. We found
a new spot where the line
suggested this was the place
to be in Bellflower. We waited
over 30 minutes, maybe more.
We disposed of breakfast
quicker than the wait. On
the way home the rain
blessed us all along the way.

The Poet’s Pick-Up Lines

I must apologize well in advance
For the sticky sweet romance of valentines
That shall come your way this February.
It will take you a while to read them all:
For everyone knows, I have a lover’s lush vocabulary.
The truth is I woke up today to discover
That my heart had become a porcupine:
Bristling with the well-aimed arrows of eros—
And glistening like an unstained medieval shrine.
Did you know that porcupines are mostly nocturnal?
Unlike my love for you, which is totally eternal.
Day or night, my desire blazes beyond the verbal
And this loquacious inferno of combustible confessing.
Please, let’s move past these mere externals—
And commence with the Great Undressing.

Wide Open Decadence


It’s not common knowledge but a cult sort of thing –
the Nevada desert – where anything goes.
Decadence in the desert – Babylon reenacted.
In casino towns it’s a marketing ploy,
“What happens here stays here,”
so act as irreverent as you want.
Money flows freely with no holds barred.
Don’t dare criticize the prime
economic driver for the state.

But it’s not just the urban cities
that boast unbridled debauchery.
In an ephemeral city out in the wilds,
it’s a rave of artistic experimentation
in a place so remote you can hide in open sight.
A skating rink of Black Rock,
the playa hosts modern day beatniks,
all of man’s inhibitions shed in one place.
First-time visitors’ guide warns
of possible culture shock –
make up your mind ahead of time
to be participant or voyeur.

Hanging in the air the malodorous
smell of naked unwashed, bodies –
sunburned, dust-covered and ungroomed,
many covered in body paint –
appearance and identity ceded.

Building three-story effigies of
pop icons in the name of art,
rickety towers like golden calves –
ecstatic climax when lit up with fire,
like a fever devouring the fabricated effigy
til nothing is left but piles of sticks and ashes.
Festival-goers wonder if these constructs
of imagination really existed at all
or were they just a psychedelic dream?
Brushing off the dust, bathing, and packing up,
they attempt to shake themselves back
into reality as they leave.

What’s left is a dirty playa, filth and debris.
False claims of keeping it clean
prod the land managers’ Cheshire grin,
while the festival fees poured in
to fund more razing somewhere else.
What is there in the desert to ruin after all?

Days Long Gone

Have you ever dreamed of
Living in childhood again
What would you do, or not do
If a second chance began
Wow, too many to name them all

Would you want to run away from home
Escaping your parents’ gaze
Or rather have them decide
What you can or cannot eat

Would you wish for a free day
Skipping school and doing anything you like
Or simply lie in bed
Staring at the ceiling or the sky

Have you ever thought of
Inventing a game, inviting your friends
To play at your house without parents
Wouldn’t you feel like the boss
Making every rule in a world where everything arrives
On time and kindly, where nothing goes wrong

Perhaps you’d want none of these
Only to relive and feel again
All you’ve enjoyed, endured, and envied
Just to taste the sweet and bitter, one more time
To hold the love that you once received
And never want to let it go

O, those days are forever gone
You’re no longer the child you were
Your parents, alive or not
You may or may not have children yet
Suddenly you just wish
To be a child again

AFTER THAT BREAKUP TEXT

                                    You will never know

                                    How much it hurt

                                    In the heat of summer

                                    To be left out in the cold.

A Boy, a Dog and a Mortar

This is not the end of the earth
for war refugees, the end lies a few
miles down the mined highway
or in a ditch nearby, an overturned
vehicle or in a sudden cross fire
between dissidents and government
troops or in a strafing run, carpet
bombing exercise co-ordinates called in
by in-advance-of-a-mission scouts
or by non-existent spook soldiers
on a run through the jungle to nowhere
using non-existent frequencies, dead air,
to broadcast positions of another life;
this is not the end for a young boy
holding a malnourished dog to his chest,
the animal’s discontent, resignation, no use
in struggling look, mirrored in the boy’s
thousand yard, staring into an endless
jungle, look, the boy’s down turned lips
signifying that another move means more
of the same, more loading onto troop
carrier trucks, just another illusion of
mobility and escape, the mortar propped
on the family’s meager luggage the essential
component, to taking the next giant step
toward what lies just beyond the end.

Mediterranean Landscape Fibonacci

Hey
there
master
Nicolas
de Stael, yes you who
vacillated between gloomy
abstractions and luminous style
where your canvases captured chromatic resonance
structuring geometrical
forms, horizontal
planes, cobalt
lead-like
bleak
tones!
Dazzle
me now with
linear landscapes
graphic masterpieces via
applications of grey, blue, and ochre impasto
brushstrokes bold, palette knife severe
leave textured crests where
intense and
tranquil
moods
meet.

Losers


We can never be good enough,
because we are losers,
stamped with ‘rejected’ on our foreheads
right after we popped out of a uterus.

We can never be good enough.
That does not mean we won’t try.
We fight and claw like the bastards we are
or should have been.

It might never get us very far.
It might be better of us
to stay at home all the time,
never leave our rooms,
staring only at the television
and blank spots on walls.

It might be easier, but we can’t do that.
We have to fight and keep fighting
until we have blood on our faces
and under our fingernails.

We must make the world learn
that we have the capacity
to hurt them back,
even if we can never hurt them
as much as they hurt us.



Boxed In


Please, for a moment,
see the box you are surrounded by,
as I take a look at the box
I am inside.

Then let us both try to remember,
as far back as we can,
a time before we were put
into our containers.

Could you do that?
Could I?
Could we become
as we both might have been?

We would need to learn
to think again, speak again,
live again.

Should we try to break out
of what we were never meant
To be?

Figuring Out


Reading lyrics and listening
To music takes me
To dusty roads,
Not just dragons and fairies.
Alternative rock music,
Alice in Chains.
I read the lyrics, it is a piece
Of my heart.
The music strikes a chord in me.
Outright bold assertions
Almost like facing
Truth and consequences.
Some weakness of mine
Also becomes dust
And blows away.
“We chase misprinted lies”
Says the band.
I think of indoctrinated mind,
Pink Floyd says,
No thoughts control,
I think of George Orwell and 1984.
Surely, Big Brother is Watching us.
AI is a new watchdog,
I think of ethical journalism.
This poem is loading
As I figure out
Each line to write,
But I am a human.

All is well

My feet move Slow
On a country road,
The wind blows gently
Upon my back.
White clouds sail south
On a clear blue sky.
Buzzards soaring in circles
High up above,
In their search
For dead treasure below.
Cicadas signal summer
Is near to an end,
Corn stands tall in the field.
A full yellow moon
Will soon rise in the east.
Everything is as it should be,
Beauty with peace,
All is well.