[puddles amplify holiday lights]

puddles amplify holiday lights

shooting stars, ricocheting

across the parking lot

bouncing through gray turning black

I’m slogging through

a wet Christmas

Tuesday night so warm

I peel off a light jacket

three days before Christmas

I’m told the days are getting longer

Anderson texts from the desert

a celebration of the return

of the light

soon, Daytona and lent

Easter and pitchers and catchers report

madness, thunder, derby and beyond

reaching for warmth

before retreating from the heat

the year tumbles forward, lopsided

a raining new year

a Christmas to smother the soul

late.  I take a little detour
windows down, top open,
roll up on The Captain's Locker,
pay too much for booze after two a.m.

I miss the turn the first time;
it's been awhile.
I'm surprised at all the cars,
then remember I was always surprised
  by all the cars,
  a parking lot jammed and stretched back
  winding along Hillside, a little up and down
for its twist.

I have a bottle beside me on the seat.
A small one.  We're older now.
I caught your porch out of the corner
    of my eye
I had to turn around butt first
in the last drive and cruise it again.
You weren't out there.  Of course you weren't.
You don't smoke anymore.

    the room
    dark
    boxlike
    outside
    peach arclight
    dirty windows face the street
    volume in the dark
    diffuse in light
    volume
    delineated shades of gray
    code received
    indicators
    discreet
    codes

there are lies, then there are
goddamn lies.  internal logic
faints in the face of imperative.
what is your box, what is your
code.  what do you hope to expose
“in the cold hard light of day”,
so to speak.  what defines your
box, will you ride it into the
sunset.

what is this you.

worn out Nissan,
up at the counter
clean groomed
man in Goodwill clothes
5 dollars gas
says "it ain't much
but it's enough
t’ get me home"

you apologize for being poor

then the guy
shaking mad 'cause the flag
was disrespected
"I'm shakin' mad" he says
"shoulda known not to get too far from home
without my medication"

stink of asphalt & petroleum
merciless summer
down here close to the ground

From a series of poems from the long hot summer of 2010, tentatively called Strangers Talk Only About the Weather 

Solace of Other

colors are transmissions

    you said

transmissions from somewhere else

you always crave transmissions 

from somewhere else

shortwave radio broadcasts

rife with the chi of center earth

public access television

from deep in a rainforest

snippets of exotic musics 

  raining down

  dust from the stars . . . 

you sit tucked into a corner

your face pressed against a small window

wanting another street

    magical, luminescent

other –

you would leave your room, go

  down into that gray street,

have someone stake you bus fare,

  if only you knew where to go

Exchange

M – C – M'

as if that's all there is

your equivalences

are pale cold death

there are other ways to live

where the sun shines, and it is warm

and this warm is not the same as that warm

and this day is not the same as that day

and shadows fade instead of reduplicate

  forever in a coal gray dawn

  of greed and fear

you count this

as if it is real

It is not.