Where the Tropics Begin

  
            I met my love in a place I respected

  Where the music was timeless and the cover invisible

  And secluded enough from ephemeral thunder

  It was just down the street from Concupiscence Corner

  Where you paid one cover and maybe another

  For the fleshfires nestled in everything ribald

  Where genuine beauty was scarcely detected

  We met where the channels were unencumbered 

  I knew it for certain that time by the car

  A face in a transient cluster of stars

  Like the effortless motions she used to tend bar

  A stunning meditation in film noir

            She took me to a dive in Quotidian Square

  A hairy banana farm under the stairs

            In the sordid plunges of shadow beguiling

  And I crawled like a roach under cracks in the tiling

  When the man she had loved like a working class mother
            Emerged from a counterintuitive vapor
            But the graces that won her felicity then
            Could never have sway in her oceans again

  And she whisked me away on a roller skate of sin

  To a little red guest house where the tropics begin

            In the same open spaces where the egrets were seen
            And the creatures of balmy viridian dreams
            In the fertile penumbras of trivial things
            I was stricken with an awe that perpetually sings

  In the cotton candy winter she was still hot for teacher

  And the sugary fluff that was holding him together

  The weather permitted as the air became sweeter

  And they garnered complaints from the downstairs neighbors

  In the sweet old condos that lay by the water

  Where the possums and foxes came out from the flowers

  And she left him her eyeliner printed on the covers

  To keep as a somewhat thorny reminder

  She had moved a little further from the last time around

  To a villa where she lived with the queen of the town

  But on tentative jetties she would still let me in

  To the little red guest house where the tropics begin

  In the world of remainders I have addict behavior

  And I spend my nights wading in a facebook of strangers

  I know she’s among them but I’ve already maimed her

  And I doubt she’d accept my request if I asked her

  So I guess I’ll remain a regrettable chapter

  But I still feel stricken with a ponderous dagger  

  And tied to the relics of a cardinal winter

  And I find myself longing to go back as a friend

            To the little red guest house where the tropics begin

Eulogy for a Lion: A Love Letter to Bill Hicks

In the gauzy memory of my childhood bedroom there is the specter of a lion. The lint from two decades ago floats listlessly through the air, collecting on the screen of the wood panel television, and glinting in the ripened light from the window of my reverie, after billowing from the corduroy beanbag chair. In the mess of checkered sheets suggesting ancient geographies there is a creature who slumbers regally upon the phantom of my trundle bed, wearing the lofty beatitudes as a crown and dreaming of vast empathies in the harbors of night. And lost in the ether of remote acquisitions, he can never sense the sharpness in an interval of time; the transient butterflies have returned to their steads. And with such a multifarious drama to swarm above his crystalline head, he has forgotten his volatile physical form and the gravid sorrows of watery faces.

You couldn’t help dying any more than you could accept the draconian terms that the industry offered, the meaningless trinkets on spray-painted altars and the shame in the hearts of the mannequin martyrs; the cloying devices of sainted directors who could not love the candor of your skillful incisions. You were meant to wear medals for obscure acts of valor and be fabled in reverent listening sessions.

In the almost twenty years since you left in a sunburst you have grown to encompass an entire dimension, which is more than the legacy of your brooding persona and can never be mimicked or otherwise cheapened, where dinosaurs catechize Sunday school teachers and bury their riddles in the Garden of Eden, where the bloodthirsty elephants are all on the run and the lizard people no longer worship the sun.

Where we never had to bring another fireworks show to a peasantry armed with conventional guns, but we shocked them with lines of attritional prose for increasing the sadness of their reticent slums. So they had no choice but to offer a truce. And the waffle waitresses were studying Proust. And I wonder whose gum they were chewing that day, when the flying saucers came down to take you away.

Honestly, Bill, I don’t know whether I’m sadder at the fact that the frauds still thrive while Fascisti attack, that cubic zirconium is touted as gold, or that genuine diamonds get weary and old, and abscond with their brilliance in a flourish of gray, to the deep dark waters of Arizona Bay.

And sadly, I don’t believe for a second that you are somehow able to hear a word I say, but nothing really ends in this big blooming universe, or begins for that matter, and we meet in the middle, and at least I can take some comfort in the fact that in the grand scheme of things I know very little. I know what compels me to wear the regalia of an artist or someone with valid pretensions, to cut through the cumbersome Gordian knots and defeat the guerillas of cherished opinion, so I’m keeping your spirit right here in my workspace and I won’t give you up to divine apparitions, or the litanies sung by anonymous clerics who live in the grandeur of faraway steeples. 

Oh, Maria Maria

            Oh Maria, Maria my starship has come

            The pantry is open and we’re missing a bun

            The kitchen is empty and the oven is on

            And I’m lifting these broken bones up to the sun

            Oh Maria, Maria I worship the ground

            I melt like a chocolate and swoon at the sound

            I crumple like paper with your foot coming down

            And losing your favor I howl like the hounds

            When you sent me that letter I was melting like glaciers

            I could hardly believe that the ice age was over

            When you sent me the other I became like a vapor

            I’m sure in the pictures I’m fainter and fainter

            Oh Maria, Maria I swear to the stars

            I won’t soon relinquish these beautiful scars

            It’s true I should look toward some fresh fertile sky

            But I just don’t want to let sleeping loves lie!