Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin.
Coyote scruff in canyons off Mulholland Drive. Fragrance of sage and rosemary, now it's spring. At night the mockingbirds ring their warnings of cats coming across the neighborhoods. Like castanets in the palms of a dancer, the palm trees clack. The HOLLYWOOD sign has a white skin of fog across it where erotic canyons hump, moisten, slide, dry up, swell, and shift. They appear impatient—to make such powerful contact with pleasure that they will toss back the entire cover of earth. She walks for days around brown trails, threading sometimes under the low branches of bay and acacia. Bitter flowers will catch her eye: pink and thin honeysuckle, or mock orange. They coat the branches like lace in the back of a mystical store. Other deviant men and women live at the base of these canyons, closer to the city however. Her mouth is often dry, her chest tight, but she is filled to the brim with excess idolatry. It was like a flat mouse—the whole of Los Angeles she could hold in the circle formed by her thumb and forefinger. Tires were planted to stop the flow of mud at her feet. But she could see all the way to Long Beach through a tunnel made in her fist. Her quest for the perfect place was only a symptom of the same infection that was out there, a mild one, but a symptom nonetheless.
Third Word from the East
In my sleep Mohammed spoke
and I woke upStrange as the Rules of Grammar
The two or three times I saw Lil Wayne
hanging out at the Praline Connection
in New Orleans he had a mouth full of bling
covered in forkfuls of greens or green beans
or white rice & red beans on a tongue
of strange lucrative grammar
The answer will be that which allows
the best possible future when the plaintiffs come
before the judge or the farmers
before the king it is not that which incurs unrest
The photograph does not belong
to the photographer it belongs to the camera
God jury-rigs to the backs of a barn owl & a bat
We get a bird’s-eye view via the camera
Hole in the Sky
His mind kept the airspace but sold the sun.
At night, he ordered his own sun, which was
Supposedly arriving soon, they said,
In entourages of azures and clouds.
A state had been charged with charging him,
Then a state was charged for charging him.
The absence of exposition hit home
And so, like a chord that needs resolving
After yeahyeahyeahyeah, he was sent home.
Now things are clear now and so less clear now:
The scent of summer in all autumn sound;
The shore and chatoyance of the sea stones;
And a hayness in the wavelength a black
Horse inhales en route back to the barn. Tune
Me in then tune me out again with your yeah
Yeahyeahyeah and your big hole in the sky.
Little Songs
I write my little song. And you call it
Guitar noodle. You write without you here.
And I call it the poem with you here in it.
We have entered each other’s atmosphere
In isolation, the way a bee knows
The deep shadows in the folds of a flower
But doesn’t know what a bouquet is, those
Rows of spectrumed tulips in Holland are
Work to it, bees in empty thought noodling
Over lavender and ocher and quince,
A thing, not something, but a true thing,
Like the difference between crisis and Chris,
The difference between time and a Timex,
The difference between a bed and a desk.
