Poetry

I told myself five hundred would be enough

to begin to make a plan.

From a plastic Adirondack on the back deck
of a cabin sealed once but abandoned
to a splinter-shaggy-cinder-silver-gray,
I’d watched day diminish as vision does 
when force on eye nerve bloats (vignetting) 
and I’d come through regimented grass...

Bulbous ropes of kelp the tide stranded.
Sandstone sea-break cliffs; eucalyptus groves.
A hammock strung between redwoods.

on a movie set and you see the doctor

     His noiseless blooming in the callous earth. I followed
a dry-bone branch, spiderweb-cracked, off the Running Turkey. 

the lake becomes a ghost. i decide
to lie down in its place. for comfort,
i polish its bed smooth, quilt a pallet 

Even here. Even now the heavy industry
of the everyday, making to be unmade,
where a word is the world between us.

the lake becomes a ghost. i decide 
to lie down in its place. for comfort, 
i polish its bed smooth, quilt a pallet 

In this day and age only a fool goes looking for the lost city. Drunks and suckers, or worse.

Like the pirates and revolutionaries of legend, heads spiked
atop the great bridge spanning the great city, I am now a head
without a body. Maybe the body ran away while I was sleeping,
slamming headless into walls and doors. Maybe my body...