When California Arrives It Lasts All Year

Dreadful sorry and packed for balmy air, I’ve no use for this shudder of adventure, these conspiracy-worn streets puffed with pollen and froth.

There’s nothing like nurture to seduce a frontier into collapse. In a cavern, in a canyon, violet roses hung like bats.

I bend myself over the bed this time just to see if I break, and when I don’t I belly up, sick from the rotten bill of goods

I keep selling myself, herring boxes without tops. It’s not that I didn’t exist here, ankle deep in the foaming brine.

I have tried to keep the chalkboard clean even as [...]

Niagara

It wasn’t God with us that October.

It was something bigger than we can put into solemn books and pray to

although I saw you praying as you stood over the falls,

your eyes shut for a while. I was praying too which I do when I’ve lost sight

of anything human.

Blackout

What’s left open but booze and pin-up, a generator humming that called your car to park.

We’re finished with beauty: inner beauty, sloppy beauty, my beauty. Once upon a time you fashioned a collapse

and called it us, what we would have called living had there been less cocaine.