Category: Stories and Poems

Reading Bukowski in the Laundromat,
I flash that it’s been 20 years since the
night I worried Love is a Dog From Hell
in an obscenely bright emergency

waiting room. We had all been up for days
and I still remember the long looks from
the late shift orderlies. “No, no, I am
fine,” I lied. “Like Jagger says, ‘I’m just waiting

on a friend.’” Above a row of dryers,
some aesthete has painted a mural of
a lone gryphon offering a unicorn
one blood red rose. I’ll be damned if I know

how that relates to the reality
of dirty towels and underwear. And I
wonder about that half-lion’s motives.
Exactly what would those things eat, anyway?

Maybe that night wasn’t an accident
after all. One’s recall can play cruel tricks
at this remove. I remember reading
Bukowski, waiting, and growing older.

Life goes on, and eventually everyone
must kill something in order to survive.
Maybe that’s why you just don’t see unicorns
hanging around in Laundromats anymore.

Doggerel pervades
As data on the screen
Streak like abstract raindrops
A flat approximation
Of the raging storm outside

Amused by our own reflection
We chirrup our organs
And mouth blackboard profanities
Deliberately designed to distract
The passive population

It’s time to conjure the critic!
A single dissonant note
Conspires against the meme
Overrides faulty logics
This is the price of personhood

Published in Anand Vedawala’s Three, Vol. 9

In the absence of the spirit
A dusty crucifix hangs
And throws its shadow unnoticed
Across the shifting images
On the wall

In the absence of the sacred
Profanities amass
And we, the fallen, bow down
In numbed subscription
At the altar

As pale enlightenment plays
Upon our faces of cracked plaster
While our hearts atrophy
And blacken
Like rotten nutmeat

In the absence of the will
Redemption has been preempted
Please stand by
Do not adjust your set
We will return after these messages

Idle hands…

Photo/Ray Larsen

We wait and watch as course changes are wrought
The past is past and now begins to fade
This is what we called down and what we sought
Upon the new man’s head we have all laid
Hopes and dreams of the way we want to be
Having wrested control from captains poor
Drunk in the wheelhouse and headed to sea
We now take the till and steer back toward shore

A banner of hope from the mast now flies
O Captain! May we now embrace our fate?
A beacon of truth melts the fog of lies
We pray that sight has not come far too late
This our moment true; this our proving time
This our standing part; this our anchor line

Photo/Ray Larsen

Tell me old conjurer
Where in your spherical
Studies and vague philosophies
Is explained the complex movement
Of a woman?

What math applies
To the mysteries of a silken thigh?
Each a taut universe to be pondered

Do any of your dusty volumes open
As willingly
As the lowliest weed flower?

Do they reveal as much of the true
way
The world was made?

The future is not cut
Dried and pressed between pages
But rather steams
With jungle heat and teems
With lush forest possibilities

That is what sets us apart
Each on separate ends
Of eternity—I defy you
To teach me

Differently

Photo/Ray Larsen

Strange quiet
the hustled mad City traffics
are replaced
ramble-shackle clankings of old American
trucks on muddy tracks
ghost bangings of lumber
trains in the silver
silent background and growing things rising
so fast you can almost hear them
greening
stretching so hard they’re likely to split wide
open and spill humid inner secrets

To grow is pain but necessary
above all else

To grow that fast must be religious and Christ
the lawn needs mowing again

Photo/Ray Larsen

Published in Toyon, Humboldt State University, Vol. 40

I awoke at my contracted hour.
I’m a union man, after all. Checking
the weather and my resolve, I threw a
spanner into the gears of the day still
lurching to life; and went back to my bed.

I realize that it takes more than that
to kill the machine, but today let it
grind away without me. I’ll take to the
watershed with a new translation of
Virgil and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.

Let me sit upon a tectonically
exposed bit of bedrock as guiltless as
a blue-belly lizard in the warm sun,
and hear the whispering of the trees. And
hear the whispering of the trees. They whisper:

“Truant.” I’ll have to sit there and take it.
Carrying no lion pelt, no holy
images, I’ll wash my hands in running
streams regardless. I’ll breathe in, breathe out, and
receive the trees’ gentle admonishment.

Photo/Ray Larsen

Published in the White Pelican Review, Vol. 10, No. 1

An overturned water glass catches white
Smoke from the prick of a pin driven through
The thick cardboard of an album cover
Any old Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin,
Or BÖC will do—Hurry! Hurry!
It’s burning and you don’t want to waste it

Hours spent stalking the used bins for gold
The pervading smell of mold and incense
Belies the dreams of rock glory hidden
Within torn paper sleeves printed with ads
For music you’ve never heard of—a trail
Of dead clues leading back to the ’50s

It’s the little things that can’t be captured
By ones and zeros—by on and not on
Nature prefers an encompassing arc
The Devil is in the details and he floats
Between the absolutes—Listen! Listen!
He’s talking and you don’t want to miss it

Photo/Judi Sagami-Smith

Where were you when the lines went down?

Errant energies linger
Like perfume gone rogue
In the eddies of the places you have passed
And me with my feet
In a bucket of saltwater

Is there anything more conductive?

I’ve taken your dead poetry
And built myself a dim fire
to enlighten this room
And to keep myself from being shocked
By anything I might have forgotten

Ashes make a poorer ground

Photo/Ray Larsen