Something Lost

Facing the alley below
this chair in
City Lights
I feel my ghost.

She is the ghost of something
I lost in this city long ago.
She follows me on buses;
into the park.
She avoids the fog
and when I board the plane
she is gone.



City Lights Books, San Francisco. My natural habitat.

And

"Speak of an angel and an angel appears," he says outside of the bar, my bar, the dive bar. And I am only passing. And I think about the angel from the day before, how he stopped and asked for a quarter, then turned and said to the two of us,"You are better than average," and how, "It is better to burn out," like his cigarette,"than to fade away," like his cigarette, and how he left us embracing and how that wasn't enough.

Just before the man outside the bar says, "Speak of an angel and an angel appears," I try to miss the lines in the pavement. It is superstitious. I think of the synchronicity of the day, other people's problems placed against my own ashy problems, burned out in an ashtray, and I wonder when these things will be resurrected to confront me.

My short breath, induced by alcohol. I couldn't have done anything differently and so I didn't.

Time is Money

And she threw a plate at him,
and the next one threw a beer
bottle through a clap of thunder,
but I just chucked a handful of
change on the pavement,
mostly nickles and dimes,
no pennies.

Powell's

These books are
built to live in like a shoe;
narrowing possibilities
expanding possibilities
carving language into you,
dissolving pictures,
forming pictures to put
in mental boxes and
place on shelves.

The group of older women tote shopping baskets full of various sized books. Their arms hang unevenly: the right one almost drags the basket down another unknown aisle, the left points and searches. Some of the women lightly kick their baskets, allowing them to slide on the shiny pavement floor. They scan the shelves for a title they recognize, a cover that intrigues them.

A boy sits cross-legged, blocking most of an aisle, leafing through a stack of Asimov novels.

In the Powell's coffee shop I read Frank O'Hara and look at everyone. The boy across from me is searching for a good translation of "The Golden Ass." I pick up John Berrymen and read a poem about suicide.

Pests/Ghosts

First, it was the moths. In the humidity of summer, my room filled with living moths and then with dead ones; the window sill lined with furry winged bodies. Eventually, when the days grew cold, I swept a pile of their dried bodies into my paper garbage bag and was done with them. But the cold brought no solace. Rats gnawed through my walls and forced there way into my room. Twice now, the rats have been killed with a strange poison, and while they have not returned again, the warming air has brought many flies.

My World View

I am glad that the street I live on is flat. If I am sitting on the roof and a biker passes below me, he glides along leisurely and with a smile. If I lived on the side of a hill and was seated on my porch, the bikers passing would be in the midst of a struggle. Perhaps, if the hill was big enough, no bikers would pass me at all.

The Tree of Knowledge

He was a person defined
by what he wasn't
defined by who he wasn't
defined by himself,
huddled by an oak tree,
arms suddenly stretched
so that someone might know him.

The Trap

As the Rats chewed their way
into
my whiskey dreams
they said
You are not a human
but a weak rabbit
feeding on incandescence.

Morning

In the dark morning I rode the loaner bike to work with no helmet and no front light. The bike has a skull on the back of the seat that lights up when you knock it. It is too short for me and one of the pedals is loose. Now the sun is rising and the ominous feeling this ride gave me is beginning to dissipate...

The City

Your reflection in
black granite,
walking.

Green

After taking this picture John said, "They look like a bunch of craps. Fucking lilys"

My thoughts were somewhat different.

Signs of spring are coming seemingly early. I keep thinking of the first stanza of The Wasteland, "April is the cruellest month, breeding/lilacs out of the dead land,mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with the spring rain.Winter kept us warm, covering/Earth in forgetful snow, feeding/A little life with dried tubers..."

Walking home from work I came upon the most delicate white flowers, their tiny clean heads hung down, ashamed at their early bloom. But I am grateful for the return of spring, it makes poetry much easier.

IMMORTALITY!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula

The Old Creek

I walked the wrong way and
ended up in the dry creek bed.
I have never seen a creek in the bed.
It is an old grave,
I am lost inside it.

Untitled

And the ocean grove was over-run
with auburn beards and cans of Oly.
And by my side the spirit of a poet,
outlining the trees with verbs and poignancy,
a romantic song rolling on the tongue of the sea.

Father

“It's the Foster way” he said.
“To control every situation.”
And the whole time he spoke I could not help
but look at his all-white beard,
and the way I did not know where his chin was
or what his chin looked like
or what his face looked like.