Island Pill

You are surely lost.      The waiting room
                                                          is  teeming
                            with pigeons.

Your birthday cake
takes off
and   eats
    some horse.

Here, take this pill.
               It knows Vladimir. It knows
                             communists of all nations. It says
kids everywhere love life. And intend
to love life       beyond music               beyond breath.

If the Russian comes by
at midnight in the rain, just say, hey, Vlad.
Poets are assholes, tender
lambs of electricity. They have
mouths of mind open to the tone-deaf wind and
a sweet smack of “Ah, thanx, I needed that.”

(Their hearts shine pure with the moon
and swim to Satin Island true as midnight sky pollution. )

Oh to have birds cooing
bells ringing tofu frying and unusually
high energy levels!

To feel that stealthy familiar of a new poem coming up mechanical on the clank machine!

It carries you through a wall.
It knows just what you mean.

Santa Monica

She didn’t say anything
I hadn’t heard. I had a gram
of her in my mouth.

The dawn is emotions so she and I went
purely physical, spinning on one toe
in damp sand, the stars slipping yellow & knifing
out a place in us.

It was
our place &
there we slept,
Earth.

She said the thoughts
on my face saw me
and that I winced too often.
Her advice gave me
         the mountains and a flight path.

(It’s a dirty dawn
the pink spark
             of Santa Monica,

a light of sweet yawns, slow,
         a dog cloud

                another life to know.)

As Solid

Joe
moans low
under clouds
in a town with only one payroll.
                            Did you know
                            Columbus
knew this town
was round?

Joe knows it’s flat.
      It’s filled
with potholes and
two sons of no
ones. It’s scrubbed. Everyone is loose-
livered.

Joe knows there’s no place to go,
so he digs in. Forgets up. He holds

steady, keeps his soul resident, solid,
as solid
as closed space is open.