mist

Missives missing marks

lost in mist meaning ether

feelings unspoken.

scarf haiku

the words we don't write

 the way you wore the green scarf

 like it meant nothing

The girlfriend and sundress in question...

baseball poem

frozen cleat marks
behind the backstop
bare branches creaking
in the cold winter wind
the mound stands naked
within an infield
clothed in white
snow on the bleachers
where fans will sit again
when spring comes
dreams thaw
and the boys play
on grass grown anew



60 days until pitchers and catchers report.

While waiting, watching, listening at my son's aikido class

Turn the feet, turn the hips
words, levers, passing lips
finding right ones
forces change
old feeling runs
as ideas rearrange
shocking talking
biting writing
whipped opinions
at the end of a rope
the power to move you
starts with hope.

written narcissist

He's infatuated with the sound of his own pen.

first rain

the dusty musty smell of asphalt at first rain
assaults nostrils
triggers memories of drought and relief
dirty unseen steam signifies the sky's release
before rivulets before mud before lifeblood moistens roots
the odor of filth and oil, spit and piss
called forth by the storm's vanguard
an ugly mirror
clean clouds pour down pure water
and the city reflects back a black dank stink
it reminds me of LA, it reminds me of home.

Something to Think About When You're Killing Time Until Happy Hour

So there’s a guy in a bar at Christmas-time, he was just laid off, treacly holiday music is playing and he’s writing, really gnawing on a pen, and a woman walks in, orders a vodka soda, and pulls out a manuscript and the guy is intrigued but doesn’t want to pry, doesn’t want to be the guy that chats up a woman at a bar. However, he goes on to write a story about sitting at a bar writing and seeing a woman come in and start reading a manuscript, only in the story the man does intrude and the woman turns out to be a publisher and lo it was the guy’s last day on the job so he had taken the opportunity to print up a bunch of his shit (what are they gonna do, fire him?), and he passes it off to her and she reads it and likes it and she publishes it and it makes tons of money and the two fall in love and buy a townhouse on Fifth Avenue and the man writes one highly acclaimed novel after another and some of them are turned into films so they hobnob with movie stars and are impossibly stylish. And, in this story, this fiction, which this man creates, there’s a happy ending because it’s a happy story that Nora Ephron would make into a movie, she doesn’t, not really. It does; however, get published by some small press in Seattle.

In the book, though, the woman who walked into the bar and is, of course, a fiction, was based on a real person, and that real person happens to read the book, because she’s the kind of person that reads unsuccessful books put out by small Seattle publishers. So she sees, she understands that she was the basis for that character. Obviously, she’s not a hotshot New York publisher. She’s just a schoolteacher who was grading papers. She was home in Seattle for the holidays and there was a constant stream of terribly treacly Christmas music the entire time when they were there, which, when it came right down to it, was only about half an hour. Half an hour two people sat in the same bar writing and drinking, but the one writer wrote something that became known and in it becoming known that woman at that bar, the model upon which the writer based his fantasy, came to know it, too. So, she tried to track down the writer who wasn’t really married to a publisher, obviously, as that was fiction. He was just a writer living in Seattle struggling to get by as people really weren’t buying his book. But the woman found him through the small press which was not in New York as his book might have led her to believe, but in a dingy office on Capitol Hill. So they met and they talked and then they dated and they went back to that bar on a Tuesday afternoon during Christmas-time and they kissed and it seemed as if they were going to live happily ever after.

Except the man at the bar just noticed as the real woman picked up her stack of papers that she’s reading a case file and she’s a lawyer and all that he’s accomplished is filling up a page with useless twaddle as he waited for it to be 4:00 so he could pay the three dollar happy hour price for his beer which just might have made the entire exercise worthwhile.

What schoolteacher would drink vodka sodas? Really, that whole story was unbelievable from the get-go.

Free as a bird

Another day and these days are nowhere near each other, random locations for random words.

A sparrow, bread crumb in beak, flew away as I approached, but it only flew forward a few feet, so as I kept walking he had to fly away again, same thing again, four times in all, before the bird flew off the path and out of my way. Stupid fucking bird.
I was walking to work, my effort to put bread in my beak. I keep going down the same path and getting run off it time and time again. When will I leave the path?

The Year Mom Went into Rehab on Christmas Eve

I flew into Bob Hope International
and stood in the loading zone
under the sun with my bags
for an hour.
I called again.
No one was home.
I took a cab.
The house was empty.
In the living room
a fat Scotch pine
tilted awkwardly in the corner
ornaments still in boxes stacked before it.
I went back outside, sat on the front steps
and lit a cigarette.
Neighbors passed by
on bikes
jogging
walking dogs
conspicuously not looking at me.
I lit another cigarette.
My dad rolled up
to a plaintive squeak
as his front tire rubbed against the curb.
He walked towards me across the dry patch of lawn
Where’s Mom?
She’s, uh, gone.
She left?
No. I took her somewhere.
Oh.
It was bad timing
Sometimes it was really bad timing
Are you hungry?
We walked into the kitchen.
A half-frozen turkey sat stabbed in the sink.
A wine glass lay broken on the linoleum.
Potato peelings stuck like band-aids to the walls and countertops.
Let’s go out.
At the Denny’s on Sepulveda
I ordered the Grand Slam Breakfast
(because they serve it at any time)
and said “Merry Christmas.”

Is that the same guy?

Drinking beer and flipping through the channels
I saw him on the Food Network
He had written a book about being rich and on drugs
in the Eighties
He got famous
and was now on teevee
tasting and judging the work of famous chefs
I always wanted to write a book and get famous
but if I did you wouldn’t catch me on a cooking show
not sober, at least.

Loud

“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,”
he roars
oblivious to all around him
his careless verbal violence
frightens passersby
they cross streets
avert gazes
scurry
I see him everywhere
hair askew
disheveled
buying his privacy with anger

Walking through Pioneer Square

Goofy toothless smile
matching mad careless cackle
only had a dollar to live on til next Monday
he sent it on an airplane
made of jet black snow
he’d rather quit with nothing
than go on dying slow

Looking over the railing of the boat this morning I saw

Someone lost a scarf
perched soggy and forlorn
clutching the ferry’s edge
silk bright orange and green
like the abused gaiety
of a dress worn home
the morning
after

I got nothing

No. Nothing.
no poetry
no poetry
no poetry
I’m not able
to write poetry
today.

News I heard about a woman I used to work with

Her baby died
She had just returned to work
from maternity leave
first day back
daycare called and told her
Your baby isn’t eating
You should come
When she arrived
already in a panic
she saw the ambulance
Her baby was dead
They did not know why.

ants in my pants

I poured my soul into it, you know, for the art.
What a crock.
It’s all a crock.
The job, jobs, any job,
working
All that matters is eating and beer.
Societies existed,
states thrived
art flourished
despite the fact people fell sick and died.
We’re ants,
we’re all a bunch of crawling, scrambling ants
in an impossibly complex nest.
The stupid things we must do to live
are mind-bogglingly complicated
and useless.
Calculating adjusted gross income
Choosing car insurance
Excel spreadsheets.
Yaba-daba-doo, coo-coo-ca-choo
Hello Magoo, how the fuck are you?
Blind as a bat? I’m still working for that rat
at the quarry
and then there’s Joe Dimaggio
Where the hell has he gone?
That’s another story.

Bortrets

Googly boogly schmoogly smoogles and all the toogles inbetween.
Buying bortrets and comportments blissful wishful brightly green
Securing scurvles sight unseen
Hottentotts fat robots mapless as a laser beam
Pinched and plump the tinmen scream
Toothy smiles gleam for miles
The white-est whiteness ever seen
Blady shady lenses guard against grim vicious sheen
Stopping smoogles and tiny toogles
From fickle fates obscene

Two Kinds

“There are two kinds of people in the world; those that shower before work and those that shower after.”
“I also heard there are two kinds of people in the world; those that divide the world into two kinds of people and those that don’t.”
“So, which kind are you?”

Walking

“I’m not in a hurry, I just like to walk fast.”
“Perhaps you should walk with someone else,” she said.