Mythville

Pedestrian Blues

Three miles from Costdale
Half a mile from home
Got everything but the girl
I guess, and, of course,
that’s not enough

I’m three miles from Costdale,
half a mile from home
Got a coat, a hat & vest,
Gonna test the West,
a road that’s rough, I guess

Forty four on Indian School,
Forty six on Highway 101
All the while time’s clicking
on my heels wondering:
What would running water do?

I’m fifteen-hundred miles
from Costdale, Arizona,
but a hundred miles of gas
will do. Gonna do what lasts,
the past is past: Ninety more
miles will do

Clipper Ship

Overlooking a seawall
cracked silly open by
a storm with ninety
mile per hour winds,
the fourth one in forty days,
eighty nights

I crawled on the floor
covered with newspaper
sports, scores and more,
scrambled for my glasses,
when the pressure dropped

I gasped for air, a coal mine
canary who could breathe
the bubbles of God’s
invisible clipper ship,
colliding

Dreadlines

And when your hear
the sucking sounds
And fear the rain
between your coats
Go on out, row your boats

The pirate of porn walks
the land, regretting, since
he can’t see his spyglass
he’s peering through,
can’t see you, combing
your hair, back there

Don’t worry:
You looked fine


Mormon Book of the Dead

People in hell
want ice water

People in heaven
want a cup of Joe



Thoughts Written on a Canyon Map
During a Coffee, Bidi and Piece
of Some Kind of Prettily Made Bread
While Gazing at a Hummer-Covered Parking Lot
at a Gentrified Surbuban Republican Bistro

I charted this course
with a red string
on a map of black chalk

The roads are many,
the final choice, new
I climb up the cafe canyon
walls to get a better view,
to see over the trees
and see my way to you

Having returned like Prometheus
to my city in pretty chains of light,
the rains have stopped like Porches
braking in the sun, which burns,
big and bright, drying this coffee stop
tabletop with its eviscerating truth

Gathering force, moving toward
the majestic and mysterious,
the merely merrily whimsical
snowcapped peaks of Ouray,
just a day away, as Latin horns
are piped through soccer moms
in sweatpants and motors purr

Is this city immune to war?

This cream of violence
rises to the top
For what they eat and taste
and buy and like,
they will not stop

Mechanized sweet, sweet soap,
the umbilical sword of the clean,
is the last potable hope
of water for the healing
and giving peace a hearing

And while the danceworld cult is searing,
I advance across an asphalt clearing:
In my heart, the key is just the start,
this language of escape
is now my art


West Coast Storm Warning

The world’s end wind
is just a frantic curtain call
of polarizing sun, oceans
rising before the fall

The world’s end wind
is you, watching TV,
swearing me away
as if tea and Tiffany
were a mortal plug

I know I’m going mad
The world’s end wind
is shaking sense into the house

The world’s end wind
has blown me off the tracks
The world’s end wind
puts the cat in heat asleep

The world’s end wind
is you on a bucking final horse
breathing sweet acetyline


What Would Water Do?

The water would run to work,
but turn, gone amok at the work corner,
toward the One-O-One
to drink a red eye and puff a smoke
in the early morning Ra

The water would pick up
trash along the way
but wait for more force
to finish the job

The water would arrive
on time and unplanned,
feeling out each empty
bottomland space
since every handmade
space is disorganized
differently

The water would percolate
in the apocalyptic heat,
catch the wind
and go fly a kite

The water would commit
murderous rage and recede,
unpleased, unsatisfied,
moving on the moon