With Apologies For Canon* Fire

I crossed the Bay to the West amidst a flurry of gales and considered the minds of my current company--those of the crippling, familial, the falsely angst-driven, the humbling strangers,

the like.

I emerged on the dock with less than I began and a sickening feeling of the quickly approaching madness--the days
when Whitman will no longer ride ferries across the East--delivered instead by a carefully measured culture dosage of
amino-acids and pundit-purported importance injected into the neck and embraced soon after.

Leaves abridged with a commemorative thumb drive. Tip your waitress and grab a cougaran.

O, you children GET OUT. Cough up your love and dissect it. Place it under your white screens and toss up your love.

The reverberations of your guitar strings are emitted by your star-gazing, splintered fingernails. You grow them long for passerbys. You grow them long for peace of mind.
Your genes wind and twist and sway. You write them down in your bound blue books and secure them with tape and a scribbled inscription. Magnifying glasses capture the sun and burn them past recognition.
Out of which desire do you work? The marquee runs low on letters.
Grab the cardboard of the lowly and paint it black. Spit on it till it sticks.
Your mind-numbing delusions. You fools.
The days of men move past the days of exhibition.

I bottle my breath and ship it east. Burlap sacks filled with glass bottles and gold tops. Gone are the days when such devices held jam.
Like your mother used to make--
sweet and debilitating is the compassion spread on a slightly burnt piece of bread.
Workers remove the tops and the Lion escapes?
Don't pervert this. Don't you dare.
That ferry has long since sunk. Its hull has been obliterated--Resurrected on high (45" vinyl) and used as skeet targets.
I'd stitch my jacket tomorrow to form this ship if it meant I hadn't died in vain. I'd caress this woman's fabric, kiss her cheek, and set sail if I could play the note that raised the ship and sustained its course. I'd sing the siren's song without this guttural bellow.

Looks like my face is getting a bit older now amidst this sea-salt and wine. I will judge my decisions and those of my father. Tonight I'll swim where I sweep--the sweet halls of days of by.



Los Angeles 2010