The Catalina Panoramas - Poems/Photos

Shiver to swat me like a fast fly. Got my ass but I’ll recover. Put away the old mania and its bored cognition. Wait for me to land, then go for the top. I have a plan that will steam your shirts. It takes the weak secret, makes a perfect binding for the mess. Wait, let me get hot before this comes off. Shout out to people feeling beautiful right now.

Good morning and luck. Let me reach for you in this light like where I once did. Vandalism and other expectant mothers go flocked of lower worlds while we play. And we’re not loose yet of skin or future abasements. Look whose hear claims form. Your voice a series of whispered triple sevens and mined in the dark seepage of a lung. Taking care to blanch bets.

Birthday kid. Put on your own candlelight. How much is that sorry in the window? It’s a wish to have a lovely effort. Electric samsara brings me to that place of peace. A little smile and a lean one way beside the blue. There there, their there. Pleasing and fervent and patient and fluffy. You’ll get one, though I don’t know now just how.

Anything helps. Even helplessness. Not always a blessing but scored with possible power. I don’t have an arm to think with. I’ve spared all the teeth too like change in the bowl or the bucket begging to be a better book or dogfood. Dish me out some sorry some other time. I’m here to look and tell all of it back to myself later.

So long new years wish or a blown kiss. I can taste the dirt in the thaw. Its a bus stop life and no one stops to pick up strangers any more. Much light lives in the quest for cracks. Do your boots a favor when you come on over and take them off. I wanted that house, didn’t you? The one we get our best years from. Squeezing the backyard tree until blood comes out. Maybe it’s your blood. Maybe it’s just your friends pouring beer on you to stop the fire. It's all you have.

Junk or jewels? Black falls over the wild and delicate light. Like a mane or a stepped-on blossom, I realize what it is my turn to retrieve. The cloak, the link, the soft shield in sanguine, the uninterpreted banquet. Greedy steps spill too early toward the afterlife. What now to hinge on the year? Just rest, and see. Met out for delicious capture is the artful wave of time.

Tired of your goddamn maniac kiss. Tired of fragmented juju sweeps near the butthole. I sit by the door and that’s my job. Hogging the whoopseydaisey. Leaking all over a perfectly fresh midnight. Clogging every drain with sadsack poetry. Oooh but you make me mad the way you talk and don’t give me any subtle perfections. Did you forget your passwords for the day or your money? You are like describing an eye from the side.

The heart never truly quits. Sparks from your ring out are punched holes in my combed corridor. Shadows at my window. Anomalies flowers lending me a deep laugh. Come here if you can come. Play shelter without strictness or surprise. I’ll grow more teeth and show you my rather-than. Sorry is not a warning.

I eat my sleep. So help me. Any knotted angel tests my upholstered basement mind. Can you fly into my neon quarter? Please, I need your will to demolish bad black loops. Will earthen November relinquish our gutted emeralds long enough for us to spitshine them back to a gin-soaked lustre? Tell me flayed folders hiss open sticking paper meat and remember our hearts at last.

The Tamborine Vs. The Screwdriver

Every morning, if I'm not out of bed, my husband will leave me a sweet note.

The idea is, I don't see it until he's darted off to work and I am sitting down with the morning coffee.
I anticipate this little love-confection. Later in the morning, a message will come by the phone with still more morning greetings and wishes.

We plan dates and get excited for every month that passes leading up to the next. I never thought I would get here, and it has a very grown-up feeling to it. I think too that my dear husband also did not believe he would find himself again in a place where a(nother) marriage seemed like a good idea. I might not either if I got financially burned so badly by a previous partner's poor planning or ill-favored actions.

Back to the rainy bliss of Friday. A pale coffee and a still unmade bed. Jacket off my shoulders in the dark comedy of my apartment. All my stuff and my husband's stuff is here. And the big trucks go past, reminding me of where I grew up. Also that place is no here, but only that here and there have a few things in common.

Music is always good in that it takes the place of drugs.

I have no one in particular to write to at the moment. I have only to admit that I have exhausted all possibilities so new ones may now arise. Only the young-muse-dog/god will intuit when he is fit to receive me, and I him, if you know what I mean...

Meantime, the coffee is kicking in, and the temperature is dropping and I just checked the word of the day: Jeopardy. Sounds like a good start to a nervous condition.

Daydreams will always have the better symphonies, and occasionally you can get at them a little with your pen. The pen is mightier, after all. In this case the pen takes the form of the hyper and unmistakable staccato of the Olympia DeLuxe German-made typing machine. My own printing press of gutless glory.

I will wear a new dress tonight. There is no pressure to worry about tomorrow. It will arrive with all its peasant error like a black hair growing indecently from the nipple.

I do press myself in relief against the fear of being uprooted by the sandy soils of a soft life. Too many pillows and stubbornly beautiful conveniences. And permissions to engage in so much bad grammar- like an editing demiurge, threatening to become self-aware and ruin my carefully preserved bad batch of poems.

At the moment, the tamborine and the screwdriver are equally silent. The genius caffeine is causing my armpits to release a pleasant amount of distress due to elevated heart rates and nothing yet to sustain the belly. The stalwart soap-boat of the belly. Churning numb, incautious acids. Breeding a bile-wracked party of styleless core-driven sugar-grasping jeremiad.

Whatever, anyway... we are a happy couple of lucky maps.

Last night I had a dream that certainly came out of skydiving. It was a week that flew by and now it's Friday and I am typing for something to do. Perhaps just to wake me up a little and give me a sense of accomplishment.

The day instructs us all to be slaves to the waking life. We are fortunate enough to get to decide exactly what part of that life we are slaves to.

It's going to rain all day, and I sit here half-naked and expecting my period. Always better to get it than to not. The new meditation is leaving me giddy with inaction. From ‘Oblique Strategies’: "Do nothing for as long as possible." Causing the recall that, when it is time to finally take action, this prolonged and self-enforced care to think for a drawn-out possible will mean for your action to have that much more intent than ever before.