Self-Conscious Smoker ISO Medical Doctor

Vast plain of dark jade, flaked and ground:
the undulating bay.
Whales quit this place.
Sounds made by seals
drowned out: clatter of flatware.

As insular as Manhattan,
these iron-jawed amazons who lunch.
How I love them, and hope
their sexy, sketchy boyfriends
don't tell on us.

Conscience as a burlesque girl,
her stage name something cruel,
like Charity, or worse.  Curse
her lazy routine,
the misandrist, tit-grabbing scene.

Old men in the audience zip
their flies.  Enough of her lies, her lip.

The Manzanita

Rippling at his feet, running due West,
it ends at sky's edge: a road of molten gold.

Violet-gowned Dusk drags her hem
over coals glowing wordless.  Old

vellum and blackberry ink.  Horse trail stink.
Piss in the sand.  Rocks are the gods

El Vaquero now propitiates.  To wind, linked
by chapped lips -- dry kisses deserts broad

and crawling with fresh pagan souls for Christ.
They climb mounds and trees like fire ants.

Their women are too free.  The Padre might
pray, invoke the rod, or forbid dance.

Little red-skinned apple, sweet girl, twists
her wood-hard wrist.  White bells sway in mist.

Kaji Meiko

Broken open, the song
draws sparrows to ground.

Her voice waltzes among
whispers: grass gossips 'round

fine, white ankles.  Temple
gate, a frame, sets off

laughing eyebrows.  Dimpled
smile -- the music stops.

Seventeen

Butter-yellow stucco
glows gold.  Sunlight shatters

over the western wall.
There the eucalyptus,

eighty feet tall, drops seeds
fragrant as rainforests

in Australia.  Shocked, she
conceived of life as a

sexually transmitted
disease ending in death.

Carve a heart:  the cement
is still wet.  Initials

inscribed therein remind
us of a school long closed.

Twenty-six

Every happy hour, she pulls a sour
face.  She's stoned, procrastinates.
Dad wants grandbabies.  When

will you slow down, fondle
the brown-edged scentless roses
you found in our box of wedding things?

What happened to that boy, the shy one
who worked in accounting?  Still in
that converted Victorian parlor,

all of your dresses on the floor?
Dental insurance and you don't
hate us anymore, I think.

Maybe you should drink
to the lucky ones who've come home
draped in flags, bagged and tagged?

Thirty-five

Prohibitive as the concrete meridian
where the onramp meets

the buckled, sagging freeway.
The thought of sex is as distant

as the Honda Civic, tan, up ahead;
it weaves from lane to lane.

You should have a little house in Amador
by now -- such as the one to which

your friends invite you sometimes:
microbrews in the hot tub,

off-color jokes under sugar pines.
Stars wheel above, but you

have kind of fallen out of love
with astrology.  A little girl

stares from a passing truck.
A baby, not an upbraiding.

A New Nature

Lined blood-red, fanged
Relentless

Angling inward --
ever in

The questing maw
Hot, clean breath

More horrible
than the smell

of dead things.  Freeze,
flee or front:

nothing taught us
on new moons

at cave thresholds
prepared us

for predators
who feed us

Edda Doggerel

A Copenhagen night, drunk.
Reeling under sodium lights.
Tame shadows stain the hand -brushed lawn.

When the feral white sun
first strikes the chilly, brooding walls
of Vestre Prison, at dawn

We will set sail for an abbey
out West.  We'll raid the monastic
boys, the ones in glasses.

We'll have dope and cash in our vests,
lure them with booze and sex, then
leave them alone to regret having met:

Two Vikings on a Quest.

North

Petals wet and dark
frame distant thunder

Shiver with stark awe.
Waving:  shaded ferns

Theirs is the terror
of the childless, spurned

by a sun hidden
in ice-cold wells, where

weeping amnesia,
leaves open blank mouths.

Hoarse

Gray morning
diamond-starred
shadows warn

Corners edged
with dead brick
loom ahead

Pluto's hulk
overhangs
mourners led

by ravens.
Lullaby
black, sodden

petitions
to Hell file
singly by

No pity,
merely shifts
in the air.

51/50

Did I rock the box,
most racuous coffin in Colma?

Kicking it haute,
or were the planks

Haste slapped to
trendy and green?

Assistance is awkward
whether persisting or in

Le petit morte, squeezed
with a blink,

A hair-trigger smirk,
a wallet no one wanted fat.

Beat it, cat!  The death coach
is here to snatch

Victory from defeat --
Hail Mary!

Afterglow

Eyes narrowed
satisfaction
feline

Or reptilian --
an asp.  Florid
carmine

Tongue tip to upper
lip.  Leg curled,
folded

in and over, post-coital.
The glow, roseate, wanes,
lingers.

Auspicious

Fat baby naked on a slab.
Blue-veined marble

From Rome's fabled suburbs --
from there, or the Lincoln linoleum store.

Lil fits the bill, stubs
fag after fag out in the bronzed

shoes.  Stillborn siblings
barefoot in the hedge.

Whispers constantly plucked
off the barbs edging a holly leaf.

Friends known only to you,
a king, a warrior, and a Jew.

Hercules

Actinic spark
blue from under
the vast glass pane

Microscope slide
seen obliquely.
Mirror I might

Spy him, a Greek
by way of France --
physicist, my

Lover one night.
Twice a year, scenes
from that salt-skinned

Tryst, nuclear
force, my lips, his --
neutrino laugh.

Unfurled

Scroll marked on light hide
one thousand feet wide
spreads south
from the cliff base (a lover's fall
just past my toes.)

The scroll is time's map
always rewriting itself
as far as the borders and roads
finally clot up to a line,
a dried blood-brown line

Bed for a heavy-breasted sky
overarching with jet planes and stars:
tattoos plastered on the left side,
a limber Egyptian goddess,
her face bent down to treetops.

Exhale green salt, living gales,
and vast, metallic thoughts
into outstretched gray-white arms.
Those arms beckon the setting sun
to stop for a moment, to sing.

Give or Take

Cordite smoke, gun oil
inchoate howl,
intramuscular

throbbing outward
from bruised
femur -- radiate.

Touch is blessed and damned.
Asked point blank
if I'd like another

I must remind myself
it is a question
of Western etiquette.

The Buried Return

Strange shapes
solidify at sight's end.

Pain is a promise,
the starlit desert song

of despair.  There is a plan,
choreographed cruel blue

behind that vast red
rage, empty and unanchored.

My pride before me, a tin shield.
The mind shredding vacuum

dismantles me
unanesthetized.

Distrans

Sweltering, we melt
in a huge box
lousy with clockwork.

Interminable cacaphony
of cogs and wheels --
futile machine.

Slightly above the din of it,
distant voices dance
closer and closer to birth.

Office

Homicide: a cardboard box
brims with yellow crime scene notes.

The box is marked with a Sharpie
and mumbles when alone.

Perp scrubbed the blood
away in '82, the subsequent

shrine of flowers, teddy bears
and snapshots now unremembered.

Golden shield on the desk nearby,
Black Label in the bottom drawer.

The skyline seen out this window
is a shadowed casket of souls like jewels.

Tenderloin to Mission

Stern pavement, the hard
flat slap, footstep of a Converse high top.

Smattering of voices,
ghetto plainsong.  Old men

sit on milk crates and play
chess.  They gossip, a feminine edge.

A pigeon scurries to the curb,
pecks at crumbs

spread by a 'do rag-sporting mama-san.
She trucks her bottles and cans

through this town scoured of ghosts,
where history holds its breath in unseen rooms

or sometimes waves from rooftops
to an unfortunate few.

Rags and Boxes

The sky these days seems small,
a coffin lid from the inside --

washed blue muslin lining.  This town,
a scrimshaw drawn on ivory

the hue of stale dishwater.  Men,
beautiful men, once thronged these streets.

I had been one of them.  Sudden,
the way today occurred, when

I realized I know what's under
every stone -- stones whose creases echo

the lines framing my eyes.  Lily Marlene
on my headphones.  An old dog sighs.