my fortune according to hoyle

the girl on the horse reads my future with a deck of bicycle cards
the wind through the pines and
across the rocks drifts into white noise, becomes electronic feedback
in an empty place
between stations
the lake is shallow, a mirror in the fading summer sun
surface broken by a few monolithic boulders, stones fallen from Her crown
She casts no reflection and i fear to see my own
her domain,dominion, and thrall

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fuck off emo child (we cut ourselves with songs)

memphis came back around when i least expected her
a voice from the past, a temporal echo
a thing imbued over time with a significance it always held
but i never truly understood
when we were younger, when we didn't know any better
we used to ride around together, the two of us in that red chevy
singing with a lack of abandon that only the young can muster
like glad and sorry, there is little space between then and now
only these few truths, certain relative levels of truth
outweighing the absolute in the drunken dawn
leading us back slowly by fractal resonations to particular places
much like the arms of memphis
in a different city with eyes lined deeply and scored by weariness and time
but her voice is the same it was before, in the backseat of that 77
and the words are more surgical than ever
we all get what we need in time
or at least what we deserve
and some of us get just what we wish for
to be as jaded and star crossed as our little shakespearean daydream headplays had wanted us to be
she reminds me
on the telephone unanswered, on the radio nearly forgotten, and hidden among the pirated digital copies of youth's out of print yesterdays

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A brief history of trench warfare

Our last night in that trench, we got drunk on the wine we took from the dead italians. We laughed as hard as we could in the face of death, inevitable and delayed, knowing in the morning the kraut line would push lethally past us.

I told the boys all I loved them and joey told me he loved me too. I told joey that I didn't love him like that and no one laughed, because we all know joey did love me like that.

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a thing that i had forgotten but odd coincidence reminded me

a voice in my head told me:
burn down the health food stores and coffee shops in my town,
and 72 cheeseburgers would await me in paradise

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the saint of newport corners

the last american prophet falls to his knees enthralled by rapturous visions
on a trendy corner of a summer parched small town
in front of a middle eastern restaurant much to the confusion of the al fresco diners
who stare down onto wrought iron table tops into half eaten plates of falafel and schwarma
smirking and murmuring to their companions
he points at the sun, a dancing ball in the sky, circling and spinning
his eyes remain firmly locked upon it
no one looks up
and in the blue toyota he left parked across the side street his sole disciple reaches over to the driver's seat and turns on the blinking yellow hazards
then returns to his silent observation
a girl with jingling ankle bells hung over dirty barefeet walking a brown mutt with a length of red rope as tattered as her patchwork skirt pauses to stare at him briefly
head cocked like her mongrel
she follows his gaze
then quickly away, her eyes stinging from staring into the sun
and delivers officially the verdict of the crowd then tinkles off down the street
the mystic cries in a voice filled with awe and joy
but no one else looks up
and the last american prophet is led away without the need for cuffs
'a docile zealot touched by a grace the hummus eaters and mustached pigs will never know'
thinks the blue shirted disciple
perambulating the hallowed ground

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between salt and sky

the road is tucked into cliffs massive and broad and ringed in high places with white mineral deposits
still there is more space than objects in our field of vision
scores more cloud ranges in the air than those upon the ground
and even more blue rivers running between them
akali flats and the spreading mirror of the lake,the fading vestiges of what once was nearly a sea
now just the bleached salt shore licking at the surface of Summer Lake

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arbor avenue (circa 1977)

the fountain is still there
under the concrete slab you poured
over the broken telephone and rusted headboard, old carpet and couch and a unicycle wheel
over all of the other refuse you used as fill for the deep circular well
that never in my memory held water
you packed the void with stones and dirt
and spent the entire next day spreading the mortar you mixed from scratch
the oldest hands i had ever seen, crease twisted and brittle yellow nails
smoothing over the surface of the pool
i cannot remember your face, the years obscure it as the grass and weeds erode the work you did in your final summer
and when i am gone the last person to have known you will be gone
and there will be nothing left of you and little left of me
nor will there be any one left who knows of the fountain that was once there

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233

all night
there have been, green lights flashing in the sky, across the windows
a flutter in the background brings to mind the wings of a bat
and a strange black cat paces a neighbor's lit stoop
drunken voices drift up the hill
3 am and the mountain breeze still has not blown the desert heat away


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the amatuer cryptozoologist

Wanna know how convincing that costume was? I pissed my pants. I'm serious as hell, i saw him standing there and he looked right into my eyes and his eyes looked so, well goddamned human. I actually pissed in my jeans.

Sure, i had a few cans at Ander's place and smoked a joint on the way home that night. But i'm always like that. But i drove from his place back to my ranch a lot. Dark or not, and it was dark as sin that night. Once you get past Government camp there is nothing much just forest. Maybe i was a bit jumpy, high and listening to that damn am radio show where people call in about ghosts and UFOs and shit like that.

So, i saw a Bigfoot. Sasquatch, whatever the hell you want to call it. He leaned there, hunched like a monkey at the side of the road. And i pissed my pants, nearly slid off of the road and then hammered it the hell out of there.

After a couple of miles, i thought better, turned around and headed back I stopped half a a mile back and gathered my nerve and my shit then set out on foot. I was most worried he would smell my pissy pants and the weed on my jacket so i tried to get downwind. And there he was, standing at the side of the road still, a few smaller shadows around him. Females i thought. There's a whole goddamn nest of them down here! OK i was pretty drunk and very high, but still not out of my mind or i never would have hit that shot in the dark from that distance, right in the back of his primate head. The females shrieked and I rushed to claim my trophy, my proof to the world, my key to fame and fortune.

After the accident, the cops told me he was some sort of special effects designer and he and his friends put a lot of time into their hobby, getting drunker than me and camping on the edge of the highway, filming themselves scaring the piss out of working men just trying to make it home at night .But in my headlights, rolling by in the dark, hardly any moon that night, that fucking costume looked real as hell to me.

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imagerush (the futility of my maturity)

the trail is lost in the snow
promise has fled the nest she built
once upon a when
things were easy to say
(because we had fewer words?)
perhaps that is it, one needs less words, just enough to suffice in saying the few things that can honestly be said and leaving the unnameable unnamed
do we truly know more than the children we once were?
more likely we just have more intricate reasonings, explanations for our circumstances
these endowments that occupy so much more of our time than our freedoms do
have we lost more than we have found along the way?
which really matters not as we have no way of changing those things in the past
but perhaps it matters to know what it is that has died is so that we may mourn it
and there is no linear notion to these lines, they are but a trail followed loosely through the snow
and i have used too many words for something simple
trying to name the unnameable

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yesterday is plastic and glass (nowhere is there sepia)

our family history is alive and well
in a roadside antique shop
off of oregon highway 97
as if all of the things of our past having separated and long gone their separate ways
escaped from memory
flow through the world, writing their own silent object biographies
then, no longer able to endure the diaspora,they regather,
all of these ex patriot recollections of my youngest years,
(and your oldest)
i stumble blindly upon them on a dry blazing grey beard stubble tuesday
and my head swoons and stomach drops with things like deja vu and dreams and false interpretations of the world
memories that drown me, push me under the water of long acres
and other since dead places

outside the air does not console me
a shadow like familiarity of the unknown is a disconcerting dream in the broad desert daylight

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if the mistaken notion of her were the mistaken notion of a woman



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