Labor past sunburnt ‘drangeas and city weeds in gentle resistance to the overgrown hilltop park at dusk, dead grass returning to its colors. Cloud-full, I remove my avatar: three drinking skeletons bleached in the heat, dealing cards on a wobbly teal wave. Old friends who share their laurel crowns in dried gardenia eyes. The hobbled artist paints aces and eights on the cantina’s smoking red doors about to swing open like a hipbone pressed by a thumb. Inside, the skull-tipped violinist places the final chord back into the only tune in her cage while practicing her neck-roll which keeps the head fastened but so the sunhat falls, crown-down and able to receive an extra ante before the last ace is dealt, the winning skeleton sparkles from the set beyond the trees so tall and full and it’s time again to reapply my simple pennant, cross this cross-blue magic, labor back down the hill to you. The living, grass, returning to their colors…
vying for a lift off the broiling planet
a bad vibration society
puked by wave dwellers
Fly me to the scars
the boon, harvest moon-wheat
small gains for rippled chippos
across the reddened orb
Sparks versus Mercury
Sun versus Sky
versus… what, exactly?
sweetening, the lilac drift
ignores the boutique homeless
hawking spare change:
“Damn shame
they don’t plug blinkers
onto such a fancy ride”
One foot of tangles hacked from the root by disinterested stylist
Five keys one fob on the ring for doors on earth to shut and open
One book on the Bolinas poets to read three stops to Central
One auto-correct to manually correct: not the baloney poets
Four dried quartz roses on the horseshoe wall at home
Two-minute shower standup bit about horses on drugs
One morning spin
Eighty-eight degrees forty one percent humidity under one sun one numinous sky
One mother, one father, one stepmother, one stepfather, two step-siblings, two step-brothers-in-law, one step-sister-in-law, one half-sister, two aunts, five nephews, two nieces, three nephew-and-niece dogs, two step-aunts, one step-uncle, two cousins and two cousins-by-marriage, four first-cousins-once-removed, numerous step-cousins-first-removed, countless ancestors wandering the stars to consider
One Isabella Rossellini Blue Velvet postcard received from Jim Dunn recommending Invisible Sun
(One Invisible Sun)
One new jerrymandered ocean discovered off the Antarctic coast makes fifth grade geometry test answers everywhere obsolete
One office to return to; many jobs, too many roles
One zoom camera to turn off
Three goons to text in any moment of emergence
Two Little Wolf cans to recycle
Zero gravity
Last night you were Big Spoon, whispering automatic lingo in my ear’s unconditional night, and I, Little Spoon, shiny Orpheus, somnambulant transcriber reflecting your light. Rhythmic and love-skinny, your words: more than the dream page, a path through wilderness, Arabic scales, or wherever lions live. I woke from that dream, but the notebook page on the bedside table was blank. I rewrote what I could from memory, quickly; to err is not an every-word cadence, a proximity of distance, the thought-of me as your muse, you asleep on the other side. I got it down, and fell back to sleep. Later, I woke from that dream to find that I had dreamed that when I woke from the dream to write the poem you had whispered in the dream before the dream. Now what to do, try to remember the transcript of transcription from that dream-within-the-dream, or start anew? Here I find myself in a refractive cure, a silver curve in the cloud below the cloud at dawn, just writing it, easy, like loving, like living, like sleeping beside you. A measure of turmeric, for clarity. For memory, next time I’ll try lion’s mane.
the house addresses us in ash
coffee glue collected spices
Collected Spicer you kept on permanent
loan compost-kept time talking deer
stuffed duck black beret novelty glasses wool
scarf my dad brought from Harrod’s blonder
looks better on you curls scruff and a scally
kept us up together made & into making it
perpetually energetically willing it made
for you the heart she does her will squirrels
drunk again on rotten crabby appleton blessings
for health for being, having & having been made
queen the monarch spirals through you on the level
every other day