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!

Valli in the Clouds

If I lose my momentum in the washed out weekdays

It's because I'm the victim of a mawkish disease

Reliving the heavily dramatized anguish

When the sour notes came out unbearably loud

And thinking about my Valli in the clouds

I'm slowly dissolving in burgundy laughter

When it gushed out freely like songs from a choir

And banished all requiems to faraway cloisters

But was crushed by the heavy hand of a scholar

And now that the voices are no longer endowed,

I'm thinking about my Valli in the clouds

I'm not giving in to this overwrought dolor

Or the growing allure of these destitute sheets

I face each day in preposterous armor

And flourish my sword with balletic feet

But no matter how much I make myself proud,

I can't get around my Valli in the clouds.
   

Tommy's Poem

tommy the tech leaves for work in a hurry

looking prep school gothic and not too happy

a zookeeper making his way to the zoo

to stop wild animals from flinging their poo

he comes back to the house and does laundry in a flurry

then it’s time to isolate and whip up some stir fry

or curry, something incredibly spicy

and some days he goes to a bungalow of dreams

then inevitably back to the rehab again

he lives halfway between solace and sin

i wonder what mysteries lay hidden in the seams

i remember one morning in negative nine

when he trained his guitar strings to wistfully laugh

he sang me a story as he nurtured their spines

and the string on my heart almost broke in half

and tommy’s recovery is as tight as his pants

and free as his wisdom, and true as his doubt

he rarely pontificates when taking a stance

and tommy’s heart breaks when a brother goes out

but that doesn’t make him some crucified martyr

the tough kind of love is usually smarter

and tommy is brilliant when it comes to surrender

and one of this brotherhood's most valiant defenders

The Bloodbath

            When the seeds of sibilance find earth in your stomach,

            And stocks in fallow economies plummet;

            A party of militants put their weight on your chest,

            And the fleet-footed seraphim have all acquiesced;

            If the poison leaks in through a vulnerable vein,

            And finds its way into that beautiful brain,

            I’ll bleed the Mississippi red,

            So you can jump in and soak your head.

            If it’s time to get clean I’m a river of green,

            Expelling the sorrows of your lackluster dream,

            Letting them out into the great unseen;

            Eroding the terror of your paralyzed screams

            And the ruination of your true-hearted schemes

            So that somebody somewhere could find some relief

            In the comical nature of your self-imposed grief

            And deltas could form among desolate streets

            In the visceral spaces where nobodies meet.

The Best Salesman On Earth

         He knew they wouldn’t want to be publicly embarrassed
         After he sold them a tower in Paris
         They desperately needed to have waterworks installed
         And he casually sold them Niagara Falls
         With the infinite grace of one destined from birth
         To be the best salesman on earth

         He appeared in commercials knowing just how they yearned
         To wage war on obesity and crucify heartburn
         And needed their curiosities piqued
         While reality television was voting off the weak
         That their hunger for something exhilarating and free
         Could be sated with cold beer and pizza delivery
         Thanks to the best salesman on earth,
         They could just stay home and take on girth

         He scurried away to his palatial retreat
         And the servants who waited to anoint his feet
         And while regular people were taking for granted
         He was slowly but surely acquiring this planet
         That’s how much his hide was worth,

         As the best salesman on earth.

Long Day, Hot Shower

Today I was muted by the infinitely surd.

Today I sat motionless and couldn’t say a word.

Today was another gray, planetary herd.

Today I’d rather be a migratory bird.

Today I slaved at the construction site.

Today I created another good fight.

Today I accepted the dying of the light.

Today I don’t know wrong from right.

Today I came home with cauterized wounds,

Only to be deafened by a deluge of sound.

Hot water hit me and lifted this doom.

Déjà vu, a pattern of distorted womb dreams,

Freed my soul,

And enabled me to grow wings.

Big Trampoline

            I miss our sundays at the park by the lake

            With the motherly banyans in more than one place

            The indigenous palms that could bend and not break

            And the ones that had trunks like papiermâché

            It would come unglued when they started to flake

            And the baby manatees that swam there by mistake 

            Swimming right up to the sad little shoreline of clay

            Considering their options and then swimming away

            Afraid of the tangled ladies laying in wait

            They were just some old mangroves, and nothing to hate

            I miss these beauties like the leaves and their sway

            And the people who lived there like humorless gods

            I don’t miss them or their shimmering façades

            The towering fortresses that kept us at odds

            Purveyors of solitude, a circle of frauds

           

            They decided that the trees were obstructing their view

            So through much litigation and reddening hues

            They changed how the word “preservation” was used

            The bulldozers came and made everything new

            I hate new things when the motives aren’t true

            So the next time we have our sundays together

            We should go back to the park where the beauties were gathered

            And return something old to the glistening water

            And honor the ghosts of arboreal mothers

            We’ll fly in the face of the powers unseen

            And then we’ll make love on their big trampoline

The Gelding

I can recollect laying down crescents of iron

To collect my bounty of a filly in heat

Equestrian mercenary put out to pleasure

I made my salary of hindquarter meat

But my calling in life was to spill into battle

So I trusted the process and trudged through the days

They turned me into a warhorse with surgery

They took my studhood completely away

And I left those hot pursuits happily behind,

For the perfect pastures of an unbridled mind.

And now I can canter with scarcely a care

To god’s own mongolia or I don’t know where

To breathe in the bodiless elysian air

And hopefully fall in with a healthier mare

Nirvana

            i’d like to be a clear soul arriving at nirvana

            immune to a million forms of outmoded dogma

            or maybe it would end like an icelandic saga

            i could die in battle and transcend to valhalla

            in the real world i don’t go anywhere special

            i drive to my workplace enveloped in metal

            when it’s all said and done i return to my dwelling

            the events of my workday are seldom worth telling

            sometimes i get this outlandish sensation

            when i’m drunk at a nightclub with no reservations

            that i could turn into vapor and ascend to the rafters

            and live in the colored mists, forever and ever

            when i fall in love it’s a typical disaster,

            a cocktail of feelings and i’m easily plastered

            the woman involved gets panicked and smothered

            and i become even sadder when i no longer have her

            but as soon as we locked eyes the saddening ended,

            the stillbirths upon which my sickness depended

            could finally sleep the way nature intended

            and give me a taste of this natural rapture

When Glassy Rocks Covered The Land

            I once got lost in a country of wimples,

            When my heart was the captive of a woman of the cloth,

            The saintly mother of anointed whispers,

            Who couldn’t deny me the heavenly covers.

            I saw her phantom in the breath of a candle,

            And couldn’t resist her immaculate druthers.

  

            We lived in the valleys of sinuous motion,

            In fuzzy meadows and sweetwater streams,

            In raspy moans and volcanic explosions,

            In tiny rivulets and plunging ravines.

            We could’ve spent a millenium thrusting,

            Entrusting the rest to an unborn queen.

            And when there were fires they were higher than temples,

            And worse than the righteous tears of a child.

            They murdered the forests and scorched every shadow,

            And they burned in our bodies right down to the marrow.

            The least just war on record to date,

            Was nothing compared to what love could create.

            Where once lay the blankets of our lush vegetation,

            There is now just a crater of treasonous waste,

            And the remnants of what spread them all over creation,

            A matterhorn fallen from vacuous space.

            When two ones wanting was too much to stand,

            And was still more when glassy rocks covered the land.