Redwoods

Nice to be around.

Long Shadows

of variously grey shades
bring a cubist eye to your face
surround the dark
lighting it up
in the alpenglow of some Colorado
slanting gold-green sunset

A Black Swan sentiment,
a melted gold heart, hard
deeper than a cobalt midday ocean sky

violent fire eyes
beating, shooting, carrying
everyday's red to your throat
forehead flying

body, disconnected, tuned to
a bone-man's dance
of kaleidescopic Chagall color
a weird parallel-universe day

thoughts, birds, flying in the treetops
caught, impenetrable
upside-down, rightside-up
a Dylan-hush, mutter, stutter
in the smoke of the twilight, on a milk-white steed
Michaelangelo, indeed, could have carved out your features

a million tiny holes
a thousand lifetimes
a hundred smells
cardamom, coriander
10 loves
five deaths
three stories
one life

a million and one ways

Bolinas, CA

Sitting in the sun at a cafe that's spilled outside, looking at the stragglers, misfits of town, the impression of red wine and pot emerges strongly; maybe because that's what a majority of the population was doing right then on a Tuesday afternoon at 2 p.m., and what I imagined doing: moving to Bolinas, doing some type of manual labor, playing Charley Patton blues on a guitar and drinking red wine and smoking pot on a Tuesday afternoon at 2 p.m., then running to the beach with my surfboard to catch the pre-evening break that's just rolling in, riding the earth's wavelengths at the opening to the hollow, long, penetrating deadman's cove where deaths appear, "woman in pink skirt found dead in a canoe," and then lay on the beachsand still radiating sunwarmth and let the wind bury me grain by grain to be with all those million-year sea shells, hollow rocks, haphazard ocean sounds murmuring something less than sleep, something more than, than, than ...

Envy of the Nation

Moved to the ghetto that is West Oakland last week.
Walking the neighborhood, getting its bearing, see prostitutes on a whole other level enter the street ready to work, displaying a genuine excitement about it even. Friday night, walking by one of the many tenement-apartment buildings hear the guttural howl of a woman/child/animal over and over, deep, torturous. And walk on by. Three raccoons crawl out of a gutter and amble single-file diagonally across the street, regard my corner-self briefly, change direction slightly, and climb one by one the fence I'm leaning against, pulling their hulking bodies arm over arm up and over, lumbering, waddling to a tree nearby where they commence their characteristic, inexplicable raccoon tree-fighting, howling.

Bright sunny, glorious Sunday morning ... a guy with long dreadlocks, sweeping a wasteland of a courtyard says hi as I walk down the middle of the street. As I'm just passed him, he says, "We're the envy of the nation." And I turn, ask, confused, "What do you mean?" He smiles and points to the sky, the sun gloriously, coolly shining. "We so are. It's glorious."

Walking down the middle of the street a day earlier, one of the many worn-out shopping-cart-pushing ghosts creaking down the sidewalk toward me. I usually avoid eye contact, but looked at him a second. And he hollered out, good-humoredly, "Looks like you got a good bench," as he benched pressed his arms in front of him. He repeated it, "Looks like you got a good bench," as he saw my incomprehending, disbelieving expression. I immediately smiled (at the humor of him overwhelmed enough by my image to say it, not by it itself); draped across my chest, over a fitting v-neck t-shirt was the broad leather band of a satchel. I'm still in shape from years as a work-outer and must have looked ripped. No doubt!