Dango

firefly night

the view has never been better from the porch
my love, come and sit a while
as the fireflies do their crazy dance around the lawn
to a drone of crickets and cicada, and
an inside humming of the old fan doing its ancient
revolving, stirring up sweet humid air trick

get me a frosty mug, would you, put a few ice cubes
in it and let me savor a sharp coca cola kick,
tiny bubbles down parched throat, sit beside me
swaying, our legs barely touching they would
stick together like twins if they came any closer
and never come apart.

Five Minutes in the House Alone

Going off to the pool
She recalls the first time she wore the swimsuit
it was a terribly hot summer afternoon
and she ran to her room afterwards, sobbing
the boys had made a cruel joke about it in the pool
it was the first and last time she wore it, her hands
touch the edges of the fading picture

A trip to Grand Canyon, laughing the whole way
from Bakersfield, making it in the hot dry summer
and setting up the tent with
a hundred other one-off campers
their neighbors peeling price stickers
from their newly bought sleeping bags and pads,
making faces as the shutter clicked
over the open chasm front and center

Quicker now, birthdays, graduations in succession
days at the beach and faces lost in the crowd,
time flying past until pictures came fewer
and finally no faces at all around
Anne Mullinax, quiet, retired
turns and wheels back to the kitchen
and puts the water to boil
for the second cup this hour
hears the crash of the junk mail through the door slot
and the tick of the the clock, quiet and dependable
pours a little water out into the pot with the
houseplant that curves safe and still
as the cats stretch in the sun on the wooded floor
and one meows softly and scatches to be let out.

(this was written for the `phonebook challenge` in which you pick a random name from the phonebook and write about him or her. Yet I couldn`t help writing about a real person and place.)

orange rays behind the drive-in screen

Movie posters taped to the confectionary stand
James Dean in Nehru jacket
hands in jeans nonchalant
reckless rebel, suicide angel

Lawrence of Arabia
white robed grandeur
Saharan desert tea-time bedouin

Audrey Hepburn in repose at breakfast
filing her french nails, bringing a little class
to the sock-it-to-me 50`s drive-in
full of kids weened on Jetsons,
and Lucy bouffant hairdo zaniness
now fiddling with zippers, lips, and nipples

the attendant says `out` to one couple
almost steaming up the car,
not steaming it up enough
`this ain`t no topless bar!`
go find a motel and take your
double love pump action there,
John Wayne on the screen guns a firing

and I`m drinking pop, chewing tooty fruity
with a bunch of pals, farting up the car
orange fingers of dawn
creeping over the movie screen imagining
Love American Style,
amid cut-up impressions
of Mr. Ed, Gomer Pyle

(This poem is for a poetry competition, according to whose rules you must use the following words: bouffant, Lawrence of Arabia, Love American Style, tooty fruity, Ed, topless, suicide, rebel, sock it to me, orange and Nehru Jacket + orange in the title.)

Wildcatters Prayer

I want it all without having to pay with
sweat extracted from love`s grinding mill
Want the company of young ladies in their dozens
breasts and hips of varying sizes,
hair of acorn, chestnut, moss and dew,
eyes of fire, coal and emerald
dresses long and flowing,
or better, tight ass jeans

Oh lord let me have all these things which I can only
dream of on this scorched piece-of-shit earth,
divining rod quivering, my brow quivering
so far from the senoritas and Brownsville cantinas
let this one gush great fountains of rich black crude

I think of my mother, she in her wiry germanic way
broken, I think of Father who left a long time ago,
Ill take this sun lord and throw it at you, my shadow
larger than anything on this plain,
Where not even the ghosts of cowboys linger
fishing they are in the lakes and streams of Colorado
splashing in the cool clear water they dreamt of
as they passed this shit brown place.

Fall Colors

The Yankees and Red Sox, I`ll admit it
a classic matchup, the radio ablaze with
the crowd at Fenway Park, the earthy
vernacular poetry of John Miller, pumping
the game with his insistent baritone pulse
the images in my mind much stronger
than anything a television can provide,
this is my link to the real America,
the america I love of pilgrims and twilight
ball games, of dirt and grit imagined

the tension of the runner at first base,
late innings, no outs
Red Sox one run behind
fans standing and shouting hoarse
incantations to break the curse,
pitcher looking, throwing down to first
runner back, three and two the count
the wind, the pitch

Giant bellweather roar erupting
affection mixed with blind belief,
that settles in for an extra innings saga
of tension, desire, no hint of relief.

gillian welch and dave rawlings

His guitar snakes with melancholy
echoes of coffee shop psychedelia
mining a rich vein of appalachia tinged desire
Her voice mournful and wearily looking down
the long-sloped barrel of america`s yesteryear
where Tired was a thing you felt at the end of
a long day in the field, not fleeting
but dead weary give-up tiredness,
when the long drawn out notes seemed to pull
the very rhythm of the working day
and through their kinship
give comfort and somehow the will
to pull those old bones together just one more time.

The Masked Avengers Last Time Ride

Riding the plains, watching valleys filling
with strange cubist futures,
the old git with the chomp in his mouth
and rarely a kind word for strangers
stares idly in the noontime sun
calloused hands twitching

through wide avenues of detritus
scent of fast food oil
and beans cheese jalepeno,
past tired-eyed massage joints
(he`s been to a few)
up windy laurel roads through
over priced glens, intel head heaven

He sits for a while on the side and
looks over a view still clear on a day
like today, and nods as the
Taurus with the red and blue lights slows
and almost stops, scouring the hills
for bums on their way to some
fabled hemp seed heaven
thirty years late and a little too worn.

He remembers that time he was up
here, back when his father had the ranch
and this kid comes walking through
the woods, plucking a resin toned banjo
That was back on... well before things
fell apart... Jerry, the kids name
all space eyed and sunshine
before he`d learned what that look meant

Well, they`d talked a bit, he had
more than a passing fancy for the banjo
though the fiddle was more his style
and then he`d gone back and done some chores,
taking his sweet time, the neighbors were
having a barbeque, Don and Barb and
their lovely daughter Emeline.

Another car, swerving to a stop ahead,
backing up, foreign make, volvo
surfed-up natural blondes
not bad-- Do you know how to
get to 9 from here? Yeah, just
go straight ahead 5 miles in a
sort of windy way and turn right
or left, your choice. Thank you
voices chiming brightly and fading
in the early summer wind.

stretching and cracking his knuckles
and heading up, up through forest
that hadn`t changed much at all
except there was more of it now
the cows were gone, houses now
sprouting hidden in the woods
like mushrooms, holding strange secrets
as mountain houses generally do.

Finally up to the ranch, where he
remembered swinging on the wood fence
Hardy Boys style, white shirt, blue jeans sucking
down pop after pop, pushing eachother
off and waiting those long waits
for girls to pass by, all of them
familiar and easy on the eye.
Girls back then, they were easy on the eye.

The gates, rusted, the horses long gone
and the smell of mildew hangs on
the cracked old troughs. Still he
gives them a good kick and it`s
back in the saddle on the ol` Rio Diddle
of the faint Calihexico way.
Back in the saddle to stay.