Strawberry wine, Kiva

rain in the desert

Virginia creepers

drinking down

death of all forgetful things

we were supposed to

rise to greatness

not for them but

for us

we

were supposed to

taste this rain in Spain

but

you're in the ground

the moonlit Balearic Sea

reaches for us

while above your grave

I sit and wait

on the smell

of something familiar

the heart of us bleeds

for half

half a dress in the wind

half a kite

half a fuck

half a bed

one half left of

a burning thing

half my words on

paper

the rain falls upon

the desert

empty pool

your grave old

and fresh

the wine burns my throat

your ghost hair

around my lips

on the bottle

my heart half a heavy

drop

of blood

where you are now I

hate to imagine

your stone a mystery

your heart lying beneath

dried to dust

and untouchable

the rain falls on the desert

the moonlit Balearic Sea

reaches for us still.

The desert met us at nightfall in New Mexico, but we had stopped in the Texas Panhandle to look at the stars. They were bright and close to the desert, dusty and forever, and bulging from their firmaments—swirls of galaxy and all things mysterious, the beauty of our pilgrimage wept in blinks of white and silver, and flashes of modest reds from the convex sky. And there at the turnout we undressed and fucked on the hood of the car, our bodies a speck of tongue writhing beneath giants and fleeting space junk.

tore back

3:37 p.m.

24 hours of a

drunken dream

no shore

no horizon

but in full color

money

whores of every kind

instincts ignored yet tested

booze, food, booze, food

nap, booze, food, walking

carpets lit by losers in lights

struck by the visuals

the bare thought of

what if

-the dream that has kept

this town alive

I watch the asses in tight

skirts whisk past me

arms locked in the elbows

of cheesy men

hair product

biceps

shiny pants

the people flow through

the floors with such energy

past the old,

beaten down to

coins and leather

faces

feeding the machines

I walk the carpet drunk

biting down on

an overpriced cigar

and I have

to laugh

through the stupor

of us all.

morning

Seattle

rain.

coffee and the burning of incense

my plant on the sill absorbing

the rain, wind, and album

while it rotates on the player

my dogs full

head full

all the decades lost and drained down

my feet bare against a throw rug that costs

more than my last car

and my blood tricked by health

my body snapping back into form

mind tricked by money

but today remembering the old days

the shit days

the days of running on fumes

in every sense of the phrase

an inch close to suicide without

even knowing it

the road and cities and sabotage

the faces and

the teeth in those faces

the rats inside of them

the roaches inside those

and the rotting insides

of them

but I sit here and drink coffee

Disintegration belting out from the

speakers

a nice contrast to Bad Brains

while I fed the dogs

and stretched

-yeah, no shit, stretched-

and watered the plant

which I’ve named Tom Araya

because when it was given to me

by some woman last year

it was just a stem and three leaves,

and it was thirsty

and shooting up from a

small, dark pot

and for some reason,

my mild synesthesia

placed a summer orange glow

around the

dark blue planter

and I heard Araya scream his

famous intro

on Angel Of Death

I’d never had a plant before him

and today Tom Araya is much taller

and living in a much bigger planter

15 or 16 leaves, his stem supported

by a bamboo splint

and next to his trunk in the soil

a new part of him is shooting up

in three stems from his badass

origin.

I sit here and listen to the rain

the album

the burning of scent

and time

and maybe wonder

but that’s what age

must put between us and

the world

and it’s what we use

to keep feeling like there’s

a fight to win

but I think about my plant

both of us abandoned by whores

after birth

both of us rescued by

soft hearts

and grown

from those hearts with

the best that they knew

and even though

I let time and populace

and myself break me down

from soil to trash to nearly saying

fuck it

I held on through words

which became my own soil

and I became their synesthesia

a slave to the source

to that place, the core that

has never stopped burning

toward a sky that we will

never know

regardless of how much

we praise it and mystify it

and give ourselves over

sitting here in Seattle

the rain tapers off

and I glance at Tom Araya:

I’ll keep getting richer

and you keep

getting

prettier.

A kid was thrown in, and he sat by the toilet, which was in open view. The kid was insane, sores on his face, a tic that made both eyes jump. But after the spasms, a look of pure psychosis took him over, extended his frontal lobe and made his stare sickening. One of the inmates looked at him, at his hair high and scattered, at his facial hair just beginning to sprout, and the inmate laughed.

“Looking pretty on top of your game, homie.”

The kid sat there and stared at him, and the stare became worse, Helena. The kid’s eyes were killing him, and a half-smile crossed the kid’s face. The stare began to eat him alive. The inmate, a big, black guy with short dreads, cocked his head at him:

“You lookin’ at somethin’ motherfucker?”

The kid stared harder, the smile became worse, and the black guy got up off his chair and threw his arms out.

“What, motherfucker? No, you ain’t fuckin’ clownin’ me, dawg. I’ll clean the floor with your goddamn peckerwood ass!”

The door opened and two deputies came in holding their pepper spray. The black guy ran back to his chair and put his hands up, but the deputies only glanced at him. They stood over the kid. One of the deputies looked at the other.

“They fucked up. He was supposed to go into a single cell.”

They took a step back.

“Alright, Rodney, you’re going to have to stand for us, do you understand? We don’t want to have to spray you again, and we know you don’t want us to.”

The kid looked at me, but it wasn’t a look of madness, it wasn’t a look like he’d given the other guy. It was a look for help behind the calm psychosis. I raised an eyebrow at him, tried to think to him: stand up, kid, don’t let these fuckers take you by force, it’ll only hurt you down the road. He stared at me, and I nodded to him. He looked back up to them then stood, turned, and they cuffed him. The black guy nodded at him, “Yeah, bitch. Best to get your punk ass out-my cell before I kick your little bitch ass back to the suburbs.”

One of the deputies turned around.

“You’re lucky we didn’t let him rip your fucking head off, player.”

They walked him out and put him in a cell across the hall. The black guy leaned back.

“They just did that motherfucker a favor.” He looked at me. I walked over to the toilet and pissed, flushed, washed my hands and sat. A group was called out, four of them, chained and walked down the hall to a courtroom. The black guy stared across. It was the two of us.

“What you in on, man? You look like a smart motherfucker. I know you ain’t done no real time, because you got some real color in your ink.”

“Don’t talk to me, man.”

He leaned back and laughed.

“Oh, one of them strong, silent woods. How about I come over there and slap the shit outta you, boy?”

“I’m not a wood, motherfucker. But be my guest. Catch a new charge. I’ll let you hit me right in the face.”

“Chickenshit.”

“Yeah. I’m going to trial. What are you pleading out to?”

“Man, fuck you.”

“You’re not my type.”

He rested his elbows on his knees and looked at me, then broke up laughing. I stared at him while he laughed, and I looked around the cell. Bars, concrete, a bare toilet, and screams from the cells across the halls. I smiled at him and had a laugh. It was all that was left.

typing on the empty side

of an abandoned letter

but you will not see

the mistakes and laziness

-just the finished product

of another

motherfucking

poem.

White wine

scallops

the ocean breaks the shore

fucked up thoughts

pervasive through

the centuries

drunk and sober

the failure of love

the failure of time

the confused and hungry

years

failure is the heart's

excuse to accept

mediocracy

do your best work

piss gasoline

on the flames of fear

failure is

for the rest of them

not you

not me.

hammered and on fire

in Santa Monica.

birds

hovering

prey

beyond

the big sheets of glass

while the wine sits

chilled

and

the world fails

with

poetry.

the clouds above California

have burned to waste

from their film

inward

thinking about

Hemingway while

I walk my dogs

thinking about

Ask The Dust

and Fante's

inimitable beauty

of language

and the way they both

went out

the beard ate a bullet,

and diabetes took

away the living heart

of Bandini,

took from him

his warm blood

that became mine

and many other

writers' reason

to keep pushing

the sky burning

blue

the fur of my

dogs getting warm

I stop and feel the

street and it's still

cool enough for

their little paws

and my warming

skin

watching the Sun

up high

and remembering

nothing at once

then everything at once

and across the street I watch

two yoga moms stretching

and bending

shoving it high up

from their palms

their shoulders

beneath a bright sky

devoid of clouds

ripped bare

of Bandini

and the

old man.

Riding through

Sacramento

toward the old part

of downtown

through the marina

just over the tracks

the homeless fish for

fuck knows what

kind of sewer-raised fish

in that water

my buddy is on his

beach cruiser and

I glance back

at him

while we pass along the water

old tents scattered

lives scattered

from meth

or methods against

law or society or

another person

or maybe the one who

is trying to make eye contact

with me is just an old fashioned

junkie dead to his dreams

and alive to his fear

I keep pedaling

and remember the good

things

the warm, salt water

of Puget Sound

the taste of good

wine and the sound

of warm waves

beneath the summer

of home

and above the

circles of whales

of seals surfacing

to bark

of crabs walking

along the sandbar

by the jetty

while my hands meet the water

from the dive

with the white

jelly fish safely

around the shore

of Alki, floating between

the city and the West Side

the water fronting

the buildings and

shores and islands

like

a

spectrum almost

mysterious to me

while we ride past the

marina and

into the beauty of

Old Town Sacramento

the city has a pulse

a vibrancy

a mix of every place

in California, when I

really stop to

think about it.

We sit and slam coffee

while I watch the

people

and think about

the shores

of summer

-burning alive after

the rain, the water

awake and stretching

for dusk

the waves rolling

across to meet

our feet

-warm, sun-soaked

and

waiting.

What we wear upon our skin

comes down to how we

hold ourselves in light against

the grief, the bullshit

-the photos we carry within

are what we use

-hope against routine

the old poets are dying

today I read a poem about

Philip Levine by a writer

on Prose.

who goes

by the handle of

justinbarisich

and it took me back

to the days when the poets fed me

clean blood

before I became old and closed off

before I tired of the complaints

of the ages

and burned alive and dead so many

of my heroes because I began to sense

falsity in them

but the truth is and always was

what I know now

time only gives a sentence so many

ways

regardless of how we do it

I think back on this and I feel

somewhat bad for walking away

from them

when I should have realized that

I was one of them

even though I didn't want to be in

that club, I was born in it

not to spin this around on myself

but the weight of things for me

comes down to the word against

the page of the world, the old world

the new world, the world we will leave

and the world they will leave

it all burns in a circle

it always has

-a factory in Detroit harboring

steel poetry

-Bukowski's widow laughing to me that

their house will probably be a museum

-the sorrowful exit of Vonnegut against marble

-Hamsun's shamed picture next to Hitler

and all the deaths that carried the weight of beauty

into the ground to be buried and remembered only

by the readers they touched, and to be less and less

mentioned by those of us who have the reach to

remember them in poetry, in stories

all while containing and preserving our own

precious voices and self-respect

our own bullshit

that some other

fucker pushing 30 or 40

will start start detecting falsity in

and less of them than us today

will record them in poems

while those of us remaining

will constantly reach for the

resonance of Whitman

and other timeless entities

to ring through space after our deaths

but we will also forget this

during the course of things

and regardless of

whatever this is

we are only fed

by the hot blood

of artists.