how to dedicate the elegance of pelicans on xmas

rightly put,
it was just me,
there, standing
mid the sea mist.

the gray curl of waves breaking,
swooping pelican wing tips
but centimeteres
from the advancing form
of the waters edge.

there's an interracial wedding,
revelers ambling idly,
a few joggers, red-cheeked
from the salt slung air.

thoughts of you.
(an onslaught of rain
in driven sheets)

me, there, trying to be
not lonely, not blue.

couples arm in arm
passing obliviously by.

which is to say,
no one said,
" Hello! Merry Christmas!"

and, yes,
i initiated...
several times.

it occurs to me-

i have not held you
3 days running since we met.

you have not walked with me
through Central Park
nor had beers with me
and my brother.

the waves keep breaking.

kids are chasing a frisbee with their dog.

i try feeling fortunate,
the disfiguregment of a homeless man
seen earlier figuring centrally in this.

i am lucky. i am lucky. i am lucky.

no soap.

me, there.

and this longing,
this longing.

i grimace.

you will smile,
be beautiful before
eyes which are not mine.

i will not steal glances
when you're unawares-
adore you stealthily.

To Mobius ( That Loopy Bastard!)

"... time not our time
Older than the time of chronometers..."

" The clock indicates the moment.
What does eternity indicate?"

To paraphrase an old friend.
"Time with you is...
is time out of time.
It's not real time."

Somehow this time counted less.

I couldn't and still can't quite figure it.
Earth turning, sundown, sunup
diurnal drudgery, daylight saving,
nine to five, ad absurdum...

THAT is real time.

This other,
a string of electric instants
crackling with sarcasms,
museum outings, parks, walks,
familial and romantic updates,
theories, ideas and idealisms,
replete with books, movies, laughter,
wry observations, an evolving soundtrack,
maintaining and developing,
on the whole,
over the years,
several themes-
THIS is somehow categorized as anomaly,
inherently untrustworthy
in its shoulder shrugging,
eyebrow arching inability
to be summarily dropped
into some drear-draped
coop of a definition.

On the Left Coast,
a decade later,
(my lover distant
and distinctly pissed)
as the sea fog dribbles
over the pine-needley
cliff-top pathway
and the moon-sheen
coats the cove below
I begin to understand
the understanding I was missing
was most immediate,
most male in scope and scale
and feel the germination
of a more Pachamama,
celestial comprehension of chronometry
might just have unwittingly tripped
some weird-wired dormant switch
and begun to lullabye
the unsated, inner-savage thing
so wont to fright and moan
and clutch and cling.

Breathless

It was the dog in me.

Again.

No, no, no- I don't bite,
nor bone any ol' bitch in heat.
That's the wrong track entirely.

The pup in me, I should say.

It wasn't the face licking,
muddy-pawed, gleeful greeting,
but the knit brow and whimper
when she'd her mind
on larger fish to be fried,
was tired and my little canine brain
was too damned dense
to comprehend this.

The Lady was put off, I was put out
and that left me tramping along
beneath an incredibly clear sapphire
early evening sky with crescent/Venus combo-
missing her like the dickens.

It seemed to make sense
to enter a local pub,
drink a few beers
and watch football.

A guy was lamenting
to his father in law
about the over-porous
UCLA Bruins defense.
We exchanged a few comments,
watched and sipped patiently.
I like people.

Later on four older regulars
were huddled at the bars elbow
and the bartender,
apropos of nothing,
announced,
"If I could be anyone
it would be Hugh Hefner!"

I harrumphed inwardly.
Truly fucking lame.

A short haired brunette
in her fifties argued that she
could only imagine his life
as superficial and containing
no uncertain amounts of pathos.

I chimed in, " I agree.
It's fundamentally,
deeply shallow."

Someone introduced everyone.
A few moments after
the brunette, Mo, said,
" You know who you look like?
Jean Paul Belmondo."

I arched an eyebrow.

A guy chimed in,
" That's before your time."

" No, I think I know who she means.
New Wave French cinema
of the late 50's and early 60's...
Breathless right?"

"Yes"

"Hmm. Can I take that as a compliment?"

" It IS a compliment."

"Thanks."

Belmondo. Beautiful world.
I thought of asking whether they were
down with Jarmusch's "Down by Law."
Roberto Benigni saying,
" It is a sad and a beautiful world,"
to a down-n-out Tom Waits.
I didn't.

It IS a sad and beautiful world.

I finished my 3rd beer.

Then I left,
my tail twixt my legs.

I looked up at the moon and howled.

Tuerto ( One Eyed)

There I was
gnashing down some chana saag,
slurping on a mango lassi
in a peaceful Bombay dream
replete with sweet pickled chiles
and tamarind chutney.

Along comes a mob in full melee,
there sorry saris drenched in blood.
They quite upset my equilibrium
poking each others eyes out relentlessly.

Bringing up the rear
is none other than Ghandi himself,
drunk as a miscreant monkey
got into the liquor cabinet.

I yell out, "Mahatmaji!"

He weaves over,
his whole body a wave
of debauched giggling,
ashes his cigar in my chutney,
lets out a Falstaffian belch
and slurs,

" I knew it ! I knew I knew it!"

A lengthy pause in which he shifts
on his ricketybrownwobbly legs,

then-

" I just didn't think it would be so funny!"

EKG: Digoxin

Ignorant of flora species
the foxglove planted
along the walkway to my flat
(near the cheesy false pond and fountain)
was picked for a woman possessed
of a rare, most well preserved spirit.

Afterward,
along with the floral identification
accomplished via botanist handbook,
came the curious realization
that her athlete's heartbeat
(so slow, so sure, so strong)
worked as if governed
by the pharmaceutic harvested
from those selfsame petals,
while I would have had it
quick contract, skip a stroke...
or at least have her stomach stirred
by the subtly curling currents
left by metaphoric monarch wings.

Most homemakerly was I hanging prints,
musing on Van Gogh's famously digitoxic vision
clearly evidenced in suns, starred night skies,
lanterns, moons, candles -
light radiating about the source,
concentric circles whorling round
a pebble's plop in a still mill-pond.

The print was Cafe Terrace at Night
and I wondered if we'd ever make it there,
to sit and whet oursleves by candlelight.

for EKG

Sleep Sloop: A Lullabye

Six miles inland
from where the lunatic
Pacific surf uncoils itself
onto the San Clemente shore
the prenoon heat danced
above the assaulted asphalt
in light bending, radiant wavelets.

The lovers lay lank-limbed,
moored in a land-locked,
sweat-meshed sensual stupor
of an interwoven sleep.

The desert's lung exhaled
it's sage-laden breath
through the open window
shuffling the shutters
which rattled rythmic
'gainst the wrought headboard
subtly stirring the slumbering scene
to a gauzy wakefulness
wherein they groggily agreed-
it was very like the sound
of the wind in the rigging...
the bed, therefore then
a modest sloop, lolling
lovingly on the subtle swells
of dreamy, primordial seas.

Olfactory

Summer’s End

Not yet the end of August and
the thick death-stink
of affection putrefied
reached across the café noise
to spastify my stomach entirely.

No matter we were all
in sunny San Diego,
(more precisely, La Jolla)
America’s Finest City
(queue puke sounds),
amongst marble topped tables
(strong and stable),
the too-loud chamber music’s
clavichord competing with the
crunching of a blender fashioning
fashionable iced offerings.

The place reeked with
bilingual bitch/bickering
American English strung
with guttural gobs from
some Middle Eastern tongue.

The overheard dialogue
bogged down in the
quagmirey lingo of
contract negotiation,
love’s death knell-
once blood-brightened,
limber sinews gone rigorous,
wormwood in a plain pine box,
disintegrated, done.

Interstitial Space

Candle

Universal light-
(exeunt superficial shit)
no escaping it.

It burns through day/night.
We play with it not knowing,
if these fledgling wings

have/have not the might
for gliding magnificent
above a world rent

with fear fed wounds.
Here all's illumed, clean shadowed-
dread spirit winnowed.

Back in Barcelona

Dear John

These days I can't say
that I can tell anyone anything
with something approaching certainty.
But, if you've left yourself
wandering drunk along the Ramblas
after the Irish bar has closed,
and you've managed to wring a smile
from the barmaid who mistook
your gregariousness for flirting,
if, after a couple hours drinking
with Rory, the cockney bloke
with the prototypical
fucked up English teeth,
you stumble amazed
at all the whores
who see you from a distance
and race over to you
to hold you by the elbow
and grab your balls boldly
saying, " chupa, chupa ?"
( more statement than question)
and you are not wise enough
to run the other way
back to your hotel room
take a shower and fill yourself
with as much water as
your beer bloated belly can stand
but instead ask them where they are from,
and how long have they lived in Spain
and how old they are and,
one time,
you actually reach out
and touch her,
gently,
on the cheek
amazed
that one so young
could be selling her flesh
in a foreign land in the wee hours
before you decide that, actually,
this is a bit crazy,
and probably more dangerous
than you're willing to admit
and you'd be far better off
if you haul your ass outta there
back to your lonely room and
you start to do so but
you run into yet another whore,
this one older, Latina,
as opposed to the African majority,
who makes a beeline for you
as you approach and
actually bares her breasts,
grabs your wrist and,
more than less, cops a feel for you,
yes, it's probably better of you don't say,

" Que pasa con
esas bolsas de silicona,
son falsas!"

for whatever
hardness of heart,
or resignation
or resilience she has,
or you think she has,
or you project upon her,

she'll be none too pleased,

that much I can tell you.

Oenophilia (Sangiovese)

Every rainfall is new,

satisfiying.

Another nuanced,
glorious invocation-

Old voices

explaining something

etern(epehemer)al.

Birds Do It

"Because you're comely,
shall I to my nature kneel-
yet flowerless;
for would it not
more pleasant be
to blossoms leave
to branch and bee
whilst stealing glances
subtly below your skirt...

at the fragile, sunkissed
sweetness of your knees?"

Bemused

For My Lover-
Life Stilled: Fruit, Flowers, Fauna

“And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been”- TS Eliot, East Coker

Prologue:

Smart and classy French piano jazz
floats around/above a dreamy evening
of cold Pinot Grigio and kumquats.

Morning:

Three lemons bathe in
a shifting parallelogram of sun
spilt through a sky light
onto a walnut kitchen table.
I photograph them and later
present them to my lover
who deftly quarters them
for our bedside drinking water.

Mountain bound breakfast stop.
She bends a low limb down
and exposes me, up close,
to the lush aroma and plush flesh
of year round magnolia blooms.

Afternoon:

On the ascent I am taught
to identify and savor the
subtleties of the delicate
unfurling shoots of certain ferns,
referred to as têtes de violon
in her native tongue.

Near the peak a single spar
of denuded pine thrusts itself,
among its more needled neighbors,
into the sun’s delicious slant-
a stark, live, surviving thing.


Breakfast:

I set the table while my lover sleeps:
French press coffee, cantaloupe,
plain yogurt, strong cheeses, toast
and a pair of thick ceramic bowls-
one containing fresh picked raspberries,
the other that same fruit’s flowers
floating in Spring-cool snowmelt creekwater.

Puja

circular geometries 

Sprung

Etude: Slaughterhouse Scales

He dreamt himself beneath a coco.

It accused him hotly:

“ You just want my coconuts!”

He replied:

“ The sun is hot.
I’ve traveled long.
I am perfectly content
just to lay in the quiet coolness
of your shade a while.”

*******************

Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement.

********************

Unstuck from the linear,
customary devouring chronometries
the pattern approaches the
perfection of certain circular geometries
whose innermost equations are
shot through with devastating light-

there the mercurial current throbs,
a sanguine, ethereal confluence-

the beguiling, brilliant dalliance of
some unnamed, essential quickening.

**********************

The eucalyptus was moving,
hovering and humming (almost)
above a pelt of grass (which also moved)
in a windless, star-slit night
of incomplete stillness-
a subtle motion perceptible
to the blood but not the eye.

He tells her-
“ It’s spring now, fruit takes the branch.
When time comes I will not attempt
to keep the blossoms from falling.”

Subject Matter

Triptych With Granddaughters

It all started with that damned self-portrait.
A square meter canvas,
the entire palette
slapped urgently on-
me through my eyes
as well as meagre talent
and an unholy dose
of honesty allowed.

Not pretty, but not bad either.

I've both ears and the jarring,
(if seen too nearly)
mildly manic juxtapositions
of chartreuse, mandrill-ass red,
blue-black and fuchsia do acquire,
at a middle distance, with patience,
over time, a sort of equilibrium,
the dissonance contributing
to an admittedly difficult but
not wholly unrewarding composition.

It's a good semblance too.

I was thrilled she
even looked twice,
stood across the room
(a bit too far for me)
in earnest, cross-armed,
purse-lipped assessment.

For a week of Sundays she returned,
asked me some questions,
was altogether pleasant,
witty/chatty/funny/comely and,
if ring-fingers don't lie, unwed.

And, sure, I allowed myself
a few nanometers along
the infra-red edges of hope.

Then the microscope,
and the vastness yet between us
multiplied exponentially.
Glued to the oculars,
the startling aquamarine
of her lively eyes
not otherwise occupied,
my homely humanity
(nose pores, sundry scars and
rogue, gray eyebrow hairs)
grew, perhaps, grotesque
and unsettling to her.

Immediacy had much to do with it.
The word myopic comes to mind.
But I shy from its cool-blue
gunmetal tang and deem it
unfit for the kinder kind
of composition I here intend.

She came, she looked, she split-

that is all.

So, with details culled from her
nimble, pre-flight conversation,
I painted her a poem,
a fantastic triptych
in grandmotherly hues.

Left panel:

the backyard of a modest clapboard house,
unmown grass, deciduous trees,
a robust mom hanging clothes on the line,
children running, eatin' rabbits
(destined for the stew pot)
among them, their pens behind.

Middle panel:

a tan girl of six or eight,
tallish, long-limbed,
dancing at a wedding,
her skirt rising and rising
as she's wheeled and whirled,
the joyful dizziness mounting,
her mouth a dark and happy oval
replete with toothy glint,
the squeal suggested.

Right panel:

gramma and grampa
(of radiant, kind-brown eye)
seated and sweatered on
a bench beneath a limonero,
her head drowsy on his ample shoulder
in the white-gold, Mediterranean morning,
nietas idling in the foreground,
their hand-sewn dolls nestled neatly
in their skirt folds, the story,
how gramma and grampa met,
just told for the upteenth time.

Apple Trees

Some Grown Ups

Fallen into the fruitless habit
of voicing, almost only,
joyless impossibilities.
Psycho-spiritually defined by
unimaginative, nauseating negations.

Mindless of the Lilliputian parade
of miraculous quotidiana,
small accomplishments
waltzing always to the
second hand’s palsied progress.

So much scuttles by them
unbidden, unsung, marching
with miniscule majesty
toward the horizon-
vanishing blithely
while they stay behind embittered,
reloading their arms,
unsmiling,
shooting fish in a barrel.

4cast

Falling Up: Precipitation

Below ground
(on Brooklyn’s 3 train)
a supple-hearted man
keeps his smile to himself.

Around him
a host of small, mean mouths
clench tight to win imagined battles-
as if they mattered.

Above ground all’s expansive,
mild-mid-November, Indian summer,
a parade of cheap umbrellas
down 7th Avenue-

a drizzle-dream city
fit for an grinning fool
whistling and greeting
strangers as the miles
evaporate beneath his
loping gait toward Central Park.

Rain

Puddle Wonderful (post coital)

Like coming up for air,
as in those first
snug seconds,
when one comes to at dawn-
awash in the wake
of some clear dream.

A pain soothed,
a valve opened,
a note struck true
and round.

Wobble legged meanderings
through rain laden Central Park-
the air all tang and leaf rot.

The visceral revulsion to
plodding patterns of
public pablum is,
for a time, eased.

The world, a surface,
a seeming silvered pool
gone ringing into slivery
splinter musics in the
mirrored mind's shard garden.

Peep Show

Home:Theatre
for Ray Bradbury and Joseph Cornell

The Set:
A white, one bedroom house
with black chain-link fence,
postage stamp yards
fore and aft.
A green peace flag
on the tiled patio.
Interior and exterior
tended to by Mexican
maid and gardener.

Protagonists:
Single dad,
his adolescent daughter,
two computers.

Supporting Cast:
A slow parade of Dad's
friends and acquaintances,
an oft ringing phone,
the language of protest,
his biennial girlfriends,
the Mom's absence,
a neurotic, largely ignored dog.

Opening shot:
Rainy weekend afternoon,
Dad's most recent ex approaches,
pauses at the front door,
looks through,
sees the two figures
at their computers.

Zoom to the man's hand,
the thick whorl of hair
at the lifted, thinnish wrist,
as he absently strokes
a salt and pepper goatee.

Cut to the daughters back,
her head bobbing,
earphones snugged
in her unadorned ears.

Cut back to the ex,
she raises her arm
as if to knock,
she notes the abandoned
Paraguayan harp,
the upright piano;
several wood flutes,
maracas, a tambourine,
huddled together in a wicker basket.

Voice over:
"Musical instruments
as cultural props,
tchotchkes,
dusted biweekly by the maid;
having naught to do with
the making of music."

Zoom out:
She places her hand
deliberately
in her pocket,
rests her head
against the window
for two counts,
exhales and exits.

----------------

A picture traced
in San Diegan dust;
a vapor angel
on a cool, wet
March-morning window.

The Homophone Hokey Pokey

Open Mic/Mike

microphone: an aural tool,
distant relative to the conch
and megaphone,
capable of catalyzing
tympan rending feedback.

promoter of phobia
in some cases;
in others a cause for
phallocentric mimicries.

primarily a way to bring
the voice of one
to the ear of another;
thus, a promoter of intimacies.

a steely florescence,
the stamen/pistil both,
a flower abuzz, aquiver,
its life's blood
a sub-atomic river,
a fount of unrealized honey
all await for voice.

michael: like god, el,
etymologically speaking.
ostensible warrior for The Source
going toe-to-toe with satan.
(who looks like certain popes
in certain battle-graphic paintings.)

let's put his sword aside,
pry this archangel open,
flay him in a most modern,
forensic manner.
i'm talking scapels
and rib-spreaders...

an intimate innard exploration
toward some anything unlike
old testament vengefulness;
a perhaps thing

of strength-
but petal/vulva soft
and full-bloomed beneath
the battle-riven breastplate.

At Which My Lover Laughs

Sun/Day/Dream

Winter howled down hard
upon the dreamscape.

A choreography
of horizontal snow,
banshee wind,
gear-gathering bustle
and the premise
of a life endangered,
emergent evacuation.

A mother
left behind by request
found hard upon return
by grievous son
who lifts the piled quilts,
sees the white-haired
old woman dead,
her small hands
raised most childlike
to her slightly smiling,
frozen face-
a moving mimicry
of cozy dozing.

He sobs at this
and writes the poem,
red-inked, immediate
upon her pillow.

Weak words congealed
along the edge of
a cold, closed circle.

Suenos Dulces

Dreamdeath

in a saffron sari
and a lime-green leotard,
came death;
her great, dark eyes
agleam with terrible passion.

we made
an unearthly tumult
of love.

she laughed easily,
snored and slept
fitfully at my side;
snatches of her disturbed
dream conversation
clawed me regularly.

time and light bent there
in that wet, warm web;
my penchant for exactitude
in recollection
gone impotent.

all in all
a sensate swoon
that endured...
nine months?
ninety-some-odd moons?
a few decades?

the burial blow:
her well turned back
turned to me eternally.

Vulgarity

Sic Transit Gloria Vulgus

I screech up to the stopped bus sweaty,
(8 miles behind me
and one minute to spare)
lever down the bus' bike rack,
grab the water bottle,
wipe my forehead,
load the bike,
take off the helmet and
hop on the bus
grinning a mile wide.

I flash my monthly pass,
survey the folks,
find a seat that affords
a vantage point of my bike
and settle in for the
45 minute ride to
8 hours work
with human blood.

My recent DUI
has necessitated the
use of mass transit.

But, this is a return.

Pop sold his car when I
was in 1st or 2nd grade.
We biked and bused and walked
to work, school and market.

The first couple years
after college I commuted.

The crude smells come back to me,
men and women just off work,
waitresses, construction workers, maids,
an unstable appearing woman
with a companion dog
weeps loudly on her cell-phone-
people look away,
or reassure her weakly.

My world's gone urban again,
Spanish phrases float and fall,
a profusion of black people,
Walkmen are plugged in,
books are opened,
glances are avoided,
the homeless arrange and rearrange
a stinking assortment of plastic bags.

The world warped ostent
of air brushed boobs,
glossy lips and
super- svelte
cigarette smokers
populates the bus stop ads.

It's Narcissism-
this dopey love
of the reflected,
depth lost on the
shifty surfaces of things,
a debased want of original light.

A perhaps gift-
this glimpse into my origins
via State ordered
punitive inconvenience.

Writing poetry on the bus
feels conspicious,
always made me self-conscious,
a flight, of sorts,
from the immediate.

So, generally, I don't.

After all, there's something to it.

That is, the reflexive recoil
away from a world refined
until cut-off from the
primal urge and wrestle
of its dank roots
in the ripe, dark earth.

The way opera is made fun of
in bars with Schlitz on tap.

Words approach from within,
congeal and seperate themselves,
making unsteady progress
toward a conclusive unknown.

Always this hierarchy,
The delicate built upon
the durability of the lower-

nameless strong backs
shouldering the load,

sound, syllable, sentence-

rungs up and down.

The integration of the simple
into an over-arching,
consuming complexity.

Molecules (made of atoms)
ordered to and fro
by most monarchical DNA.

Someone else
empties the Kings chamberpot,
lances his boils, shoes his horse,
smiths his sword,
carves and crafts his throne,
prepares and serves his meals.

And so familiarity with the origin
has, over time, come to be
considered indelicate.
If one is
in direct contact with life,
one is dirtied, sullied, rendered
unfit as company for those
who've achieved that
most desired,most revered state:
the ability to live
life without effort.

Reality, apparently too real,
we evade the actual.

The bus pulls up to my stop,
I review the situation:
medical technologist,
stigmatized status
as a DUI arrestee,
20 mile midnite bike ride home,
the trebled commute time,
probation, risk pool insurance...

ad absurdum.

I realize that I have come
to contact again with distances.

I know what a mile is.

My legs and lungs know.

I curse because
I come from there;
where people still work
in contact with life,
with the earth, with blood and bodies;
where the sweetness of limbs
is worn lightly brushed
by the ocean's tang;
where advertising is
a known charlatan.

I sing because
I come from there;
where people drown
their sorrows in drink,
shout and fight and
still laugh about it after.

That last, so necessary:
the after-laughter.

I think,
"Mine's the grace that lights
the guttersnipe's grin"
as I dismount and undo my bike.

I smile, say " Fuck it,"
and go to work with life's-blood.

Carlos Conrad Jan 2005

The Eyes Have It

Isthmus Time/ Puke on The Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse

Encoded Discourse Decoded

this poem

loosed from commitment
a storm tossed hull
rocks without captain.
ruddered, undirected.

a missive embottled
in a non-bottle,

(or the word for bottle
in a new language
which no one
but the author
speaks)

still says

S.O.S.

washed up
on a spit of land
surrounded
by polluted analyses

"postindustrial authorship"?

Industry.
The Latin word industria,
meaning “diligent activity
directed to some purpose,”
our word (first recorded in 1475)
originally meant “skill.”

Post-industry,
post-diligence,
not requiring skill.

"...thick, pliant strands of XML
are girding the wilderness
(and even tying in word processor documents)

-insert ironic gasp of delite-

to enable a new order of knowledge."

Wild- Occurring, growing,
or living in a natural state;
not domesticated, cultivated, or tamed.

We speak, therefore,
of a contained,
electronic wilderness?

A lumpen, digitized cookie dough
for which an electronic frame
(cookie cutter) will, amoeba like,
phagocytize the material
and render up... poetry?

We move farther
from the thing itself.
Bad enough words only signify,
the machinations of the brain
are able only to replicate
subtle relationships
found in nature.

Fuck machines!

Fuck machines?

Fuck machines.

Have you seen the latest porn?
Engines with artificial phalli
designed to thrust, piston-like,
to penetrate live, human, women.

"It's delightful, it's de-lovely..."