Cave Drawings in the Dark

He thinks he's exciting and wants to frame his life
to hang on a wall for others to enjoy.

He believes a cubist perspective is necessary
to cram his adventures onto a single canvas,

but wonders if a chiaroscuro rendering
might benefit viewers struggling to understand
the many shadows of his past, drawing him to muse

that an impressionistic moment is more
than most folks can absorb, even from a distance,
whereupon, he concludes that they'll probably pass

right by the picture unless he provides one of those
cozy cottage scenes in the woods with wisps
of smoking funneling up from the chimney,

which would force their gasp at what a charmed life
he's lived, if he actually chooses to frame his story
around an unreal theme, which makes him decide

to pass on the idea, because he hopes he's more than
just a couple dabs of paint jabbed onto a reproduction
that's been authenticated with a scribbled signature.

Meshuggenah

Meshuggenah
(Clue: Yiddish)

A single stone, ground
smooth in a slow flowing stream,
searching for its edge.

Dasein

Dasein
(Being-in-the-World)

While dying men search
for a final breath, poets
grope for words to live.

Why I Don't Play Tournament Chess Anymore

At times the empty squares beg me to cover their
nakedness with a piece or expose their center. The king
looks up and frowns because he is unprotected in the
middle and wants to be castled.

The pawn at the bottom of the chain cries that he's
backward and lost. The rook argues that he needs an
open file to fill while the knights complain that they're
useless at the board's edge.

The the bishops pray to be fianchettoed into the long
diagonal and glare at the queen who weeps that she is
tired of endless forays toward an unimpressed enemy and
thinks she is about to be forked by an opposing knight.

Then they break into a chorus of catcalls, labeling
me fish, putz, patzer, and wood-pusher because I should
have spent more time studying Nimzowitsch's system
instead of dawdling over five-minute chess in the park.

And while I'm facing this cacophonous squabble of
dissent, seeing zugzwang in every position, my opponent
watches the clock run down until my red flag falls.
So, you see, it's really a coup d'etat that has forced
my abdication.

Voice Imprint

Voice Imprint

If you remember the sound of my voice,
I'll always be near. You'll see me
in your mind's eye as you walk along
the beach, the sand between your toes,
the surf rinsing your skin. You'll taste
my kiss in sips of Chianti and smell the sweat
of our play,
like the heavy scent of jasmine in bloom.

And when you lie awake at night,
alone between cool cotton sheets,
reach out to touch the empty space
I once occupied, and know that
the soft whisper you hear
is more than just a summer breeze
pushing through the branches of a dead tree.

Molting at Piedras Blancas

Molting at Piedras Blancas

Elephant seals bask on the beach,
each casually flipping sand over its
skin as the sun passes across the sky.
They've been at it for three weeks now,
sloughing off old coats to reveal
fresh, brown velvet beneath
while they crowd together like punks
on a street corner. And that's
what these adolescent males are,
belching and preening, banging their chests
to prove a manhood that hasn't yet
arrived, eyeing the solitary bulls
down the strand. Maybe next year
the heavy-set teen in the middle will
take his hanging proboscis out of the
huddle and find a quiet place to molt.
But for now, he's happy showing off
his new coat and tossing sand
in the smaller seal's eyes.

Exposures

Exposures

I have spent the afternoon in the backyard
measuring light, setting apertures,
searching shutter speeds,
in a vain attempt to catch my six-year-old
at the apex of her swing.

I wish to trace the outlines of her youth
against the backdrop of the sky
and place her amongst the clouds
in my documentary of her life journey.

But every effort is thwarted
by my clumsy pans, which I know
will result in nothing but frozen action,
or indistinct blurs across the photograph.

I am about to quit, when her giggle
makes me glance up and see
a bounce of blond curls following the curve
of her laughter, like a comet's tail,
and I sense the startled astronomer's awe
of glimpsing a celestial event
that will never be captured on film.

Crayons

Crayons

After giving my four-year-old a box
of crayons in sixty-four brilliant hues,
I ask her what colors she prefers.
She tells me she likes blue and green.
These are the colors of the sky and trees.

I point out the periwinkle, turquoise,
aquamarine, and cadet-blue as alternatives.
I lift up the forest, olive, spring, and sea greens
to compete with the green she's drawn,
but she overrules me.

Later, she shows me a blue-green stick-figure
standing in a field beside a tree
that looks like it's about to topple.
"That's you, Daddy!" she yells.

And I gaze at her hazel eyes wanting to trap
her innocent enthusiasm in my hug.
All too soon she'll be choosing drab shades
of sepia, salmon, raw umber, and maize,
without any guidance from me.

Opus

Opus

She slips an arm forward to gently glide
it into a rhythmic dance of water ripples.
First one arm, then the next, enters to dig
the route her body follows. Her feet
kick a slow, fluttered abbreviation of the beat
until she reaches an end and arcs
chin to chest to retrace the vanished path.
After a seemingly infinite composition
of repetition, she lifts off the liquid dance floor
and stands at its edge to towel off: first
her black hair slicked back into a point
at the nape of her neck, next the legs from
her slim ankles to where the firm thighs meet,
and finally her taut torso.

Each day she water-dances to silent music
only she can hear
before fading back into the rhythm section
of another person's opus.

Like a Comet

Like a Comet

He races against the traffic of time,
pushing past barricades that strive
to slow his frantic rush through
life's red lights. He runs when signs
say walk and dashes up dead-end alleys,
searching the sweet scents that aim his journey.

Once, he followed a narrow arrow
and found himself squeezed
into a line-up of bowed heads waiting
for the slick blade of death's descent
to separate them from their thoughts.
He watched their patient resignation,
then broke ranks to repair the scorch
of his singed psyche.

You will not see his gauze-covered burns.
He changes the dressings at night
when the lights are out, revealing only
a few smoking embers drifting to earth
as he arcs across the sky in an incandescent
flash, defying gravity until he burns out.

Cipher

Cipher

In an obscure corner of the gallery, a graphite portrait,
smaller than a page torn from a dime-store novel,
waits against the shadowed wall for anyone's eyes
to make it real. The artist's bio says that
after the second war in Europe, he spent seven years
in an asylum before re-entering the world.
He spent the next twenty-three stacking empty boxes
in a warehouse during the day and, at night pacing
a one-room cold-water flat behind diaphanous curtains
that shielded its single window like a thin strip of gauze
over an open wound.
Then, when the neighbors complained of a stench,
the landlord found him decomposing on the floor,
disappearing amidst a legacy of frenzied faces
penciled onto ten thousand paper scraps, each sketch
an echo of his image pleading not to be erased.

"Great Assonance. . ."

"Great Assonance. . ."

What not to say
to a drunken
Aryan Nation homophobe
who's just recited
a scatological limerick.

In The Outhouse

In The Outhouse

My old man pukes a gallon of stale beer
then wipes his mouth
with a scrap of newsprint.

Mama reads the Real Estate section
and tries to imagine living in a house
with a porcelain toilet.

Whitey jerks off
while staring
at a lingerie ad.

Sara scans a theater review
and attempts to project herself
onto a stage where drama
doesn't leave bruises.

Eddie fingers a knothole
and reads last week's comics
before using them to wipe his butt.

And I search the empty night sky
beyond the wind-ripped roof,
struggling to make some sense
of the poem I've just written.

Redecorating Your Amygdala

Redecorating Your Amygdala

I think I'll sneak inside your head
and run down the narrow corridors
of the cerebral cortex to the
trapdoor into your hippocampus

If I can find the tattered map you've
hidden there, I'm sure it will guide me
toward the cluttered room that holds
the heaped debris of your memory.

I'll dance across the trail of dendrites
to the rotting door of the dusty closet
where you threw my picture after you
yanked it off your mnemonic wall.

In a new frame, my grinning image
will look perfect properly rehung
smack in the center of your amygdala
where I know you can't ignore it.

Then I'll slip out the back like a lost
thought and stand by your front door.
I can't wait to see the look on your face
when your return home.

A Heart Wrenching Story

When Shorty came into the third grade after summer vacation
and showed us the purple scar down the middle of his chest,
like a ten inch drip of congealed grape juice, we all wanted
to touch the welt, but decided it might squirt from the pressure.

Shorty laughed and told us he'd sliced himself wide open with
a butter knife just to see if he really had a heart. He said
he'd held it in his hand for over a minute and watched it beat
before he chucked it back inside and sewed himself up.

He was tough, ole Shorty. That's why it kinda surprised us when
Mrs. Lofgren made him stay inside at recess, because of his heart.
How'd she know what he'd done? Besides, we needed him. Last
year he flew around the bases faster than any other kid in class.

A month later, when they faced us at his funeral, his parents
didn't have the heart to hear our theory that maybe
he'd shoved it in backwards.

Salt Licks

Salt Licks

When I pour the crystals over my stew
she says I use too much. She says
my arteries will harden like stone, and
I'll look back, one day, to find that
my blood is frozen in the pillar I've become.

She frowns when I relate my childhood flights
down through the cholla cactus and Joshua trees
to the goat pen, with its juniper shade, where
I ran my pink tongue over the salty-smooth
depressions mined into their crystalline cakes.

"Why would anyone want to lick salt and goat spit?"
She shudders at the thought and edges
the salt shaker out of my reach. I want to tell her
that my craving carries over from the quest
to weigh my worth against its bitter taste.

So I start to stutter, trying to describe
the palimpsest scars of a father's belt-buckle-bite,
and she weeps with my frustration. And I lean in
to kiss away the dampness on her cheek,
already savoring the salt caught in her tears.

We sit

We sit

We sit at the cafe table,
the sun warming our wit,
sipping lattes, frapuccinos,
expounding philosophic,
delighting ourselves
and maybe our listeners.

I tell mine
he is merely laminate layers,
experience that accumulated
into a world called his name,
and thus, he is cliched.

I tell him
his words are nothing
but synthesized sums
of all the authors
and philosophers he's read.

I love the intelligent timbre
of my voice
and my knowing nod
as he leans in,
listening, acquiescing,
learning this idea,
which diminishes him.

I smile
as he confides his fear of
delivering inarticulate drivel
into the ears of others.

I tell him to relax,
words will come
after the jumble of voices
inside his head
bake into his own.

Finally, I
bequeath my brilliance
with a memorized line from
Bartlett's Book of Quotations.

In Oz

In Oz

The Mexican gardener rakes leaves across
my shadow on the grass and bends down
to stuff the cuttings into a canvas sack while
I watch him work. His pregnant wife drags
the debris toward their car, but the cloth tears,

and I see leaves pouring a golden path
over my emerald lawn until she too notices
and stoops to scrape the trail back into the bag,
using the shovel of her hands, as tears silently
slide down her chestnut cheeks to her bosom.

I wonder if he'll help her, and he does,
then returns to apologize for her outbreak.
"She is worried because the baby comes in a month
and we have no money for the doctor.
But it will work out. I tell her that," he says.

I want to help and detect that their garments are worn,
so I tell him to wait while I march inside to retrieve
the old clothes my wife means to throw out. When
I return, he smiles and pulls a pair of ruby heels out
of the sack for his wife and slips his boots off

to ease into my old oxfords. They are a perfect fit.
Later, I find his footwear leaned against a tree
and shove my curious foot into one of his boots
but discover it is several sizes too big and, suddenly,
I feel like a child trying on his father's shoes.

Oranges

Oranges

The boys at work laughed when I told them
how I tasted the essence of orange on your tongue
last night as we kissed and yearned to peel back
your cover and bury my face in the citrus scent
to quench my thirst.

At lunch,
Bob Ratvy shined a quarter section of nectarine
from his mouth, sucking and slobbering as he wrapped
his hairy arms around me. Jimmy Smith called me
a fruitcake and stroked the banana he held at his crotch
until it squirted onto the floor in a mashed pulp.

After lunch, a sweet ambrosia blew off Heather's
creamy skin as she lingered by the fan, glistening
like a fresh-cut peach in July.

But I desire oranges
and can't wait to get home.

On Mercedario at 21,000'

On Mercedario at 21,000'

The birds do not sing up here where the cold
rolls drifts of confidence into frozen
moments of indecision. Here the black-
suited crows tighten their feathered belts
like silent pallbearers, waiting to lift
bits flesh up from the dead bodies before
the chill makes the meat immortal. Here they
crowd together, measuring the distance
between our energy and exhaustion
while we struggle to puncture the white horizon.

I watch their hunkered huddle, wondering
if they've been fed since the last Incan offering
ascended these slopes centuries ago.

Speed Dating

Speed Dating

"Definitely not marriage material," Angelica muttered, folding her Christian Dior sunglasses and sliding them into a pocket of her Louis Vuiton purse. Not with his crazy haystack of red hair, those freckles, and that droopy right eye that seemed to twitch every time she glanced across the table.

And the odor! She wrinkled her nose. My god, had he just stepped off the farm? The barnyard aroma preceded him by a good ten feet when he walked through the room to meet her.

Angelica noticed a tiny piece of lint on her new black, Vera Wang dress and flicked it onto the floor with a perfectly manicured nail. Sighing, she pushed her chair back, picked up her purse, and rose to leave. Why waste the time? They were probably all like this one -- losers. A quick scan of the room confirmed her suspicions.

He stood up, his hand out to shake. "But we haven't even exchanged names," he said, reaching over the table.

"Why bother?" Angelica scowled, stepping back to size him up. She glanced down at his shoes. Could it be? Her breath quickened. Were those $750 Gianni Versaces peeking out from under the ragged cuffs of his faded Levis?

Hmmm. . .

Maybe he deserved a closer look.

Complementary Apparel

Complementary Apparel

After watching "An Affair to Remember,"
I tell my wife that henceforth I'll wear nothing
but summer suits like Cary Grant, who always
gets the girl. I ask what she'll don to match
my new look. She gives me her silent stare,
then replies, The Cloak of fortitude, my dear.

Blurred Vision

Blurred Vision

The retarded kid across the street sees
me cleaning out the garage
and comes over to help.
I tell him to just watch because
I'm afraid he'll impede the progress
of discarding my memories.

So, for a couple fidgety minutes,
his fingers rake his straw hair,
and his tongue presses between
his crooked teeth in an anguished effort
to remain a spectator.

Reluctantly, I relent and, from the dust
in the rafters, hand down a picture
of my first wife,
the cobwebs on the glass creating
patterns of cracks across her face.

I tell him to toss it into the dumpster,
but he wipes the webs away
on his sleeve
and kisses the smudged glass,
then hugs the image to his narrow chest.

"Don't do that," I say, thinking
I've made a mistake,
letting a retard help, wondering how
I'll get rid of him.

But before I can descend my ladder,
he turns the picture toward me
and says,
"See how pretty she is if you
look through the dirt?"

And I stare down
from the dim light of my perch
seeing him for the first time.

Opening Bell

Folks,

The gun just fired. It's time to break from the gate, to get into the race, to metaphorically set my pen to paper and get this blog going. And it's about time!

Read me and you won't be disappointed. You might not agree with me all the time, but you will always be entertained. At times you'll see stories I've written, poems I published, and my work in progress. As time goes by, you'll discover a need to search me out whenever you cruise through the internet. I'll be there.

Let me know if you like what you read. That's my only way of knowing if you're out there, scanning my blog, searching through my words for meaning, if there is any.

Wish me luck.

I'll see you soon.