Rum and Cigar Smoke

Much love to Rhodessa Jones.
I felt I'd rolled up
in an orange jumpsuit
out of an upturned laundry hamper
and into my faceless enemy
(who must exist
because I can hear him.)
Take a bow, Mr. Way
before the storyteller,
her bust in a glass box,
an army of tale-weavers
set on her brow.
Personal summer, power surge
a throaty sistah growl
"I've come for your chickens!
I've come for your hogs!"
she hollered and danced
with her shadow women
and for a night
exorcised my demons.

What The Voices Gave Me #1

"You may yet become somebody."
Picture Ginsberg or Ferlenghetti
reading at City Lights.
You'll marry an heir,
sport an harem of guys.
In an opulent mansion
in Pacific Heights,
men will fan your face
feed you the greenest, sweetest grapes.
You'll be a white male Martha Wash
You'll wear embroidered velour capes --
not die unknown and unloved
a solitary, mud-encrusted glove
crumpled in the gutter.

Butane Tears

Lucifer admits his sin
and hams it up, playing God
with a thunderous, overcast sky backdrop,
bellowing with a wink and a nod.
I still wonder why I am here --
track marks my price of admission?
A little thing, all admit.
But the perils of Pauline
are a tedious routine
and I no longer wish to skip
from lumber mill to quicksand pit.
He heckles me from the sidelines,
his harpies chiming in beside him,
but at least none of my neighbors
scowl at me and spit.

Dashiell Hammett Lane

I saw through the eyes of a beast
and his rider seemed cruel to me.

The beast tripped to his knee
on a broken sidewalk. His hand shone

dark red, blood on the palm.
I awoke to voices in a nursery.

Alamo Square At Pierce

The pothole makes a lake bed
oval in the gray pavement.
It's filled with brown, dried
bits of pine needles
and islands of bark and eucalyptus seeds.

Mist thickens to the West,
a dishwater-logged cotton batting
draped over the canopy
(dark green, the hunter's hue.)
The white sun sings yellow

and blows sand off the hilltop.
Four poplars in a row to my left
susurrate, but keep their secrets from me.

Nefarious Characters at 5:00 AM

"Whatchu doin?" he asks,
punctuating his boldness
with a cigarette drag.
Is it effrontery?
It is a free country --
he may ask, I may not answer.
Is he casing me, an assessment,
or does he like what he sees?
He is dark and pitted
his gravelly voice
sure of possession.
"Snipe hunting," I reply
and move on.
So does he,
tossing me to the fog
of morning, a discarded
wrapping or scrap
he for a moment thought a dollar.
That takes care of that.

Global Positron Emission Scan

Envision it this way: our consensual psychic hubbub
as a flare-like constellation of neurons firing -- each cell,
a human mind; every second spread across days.

The crackle of wildfire, a glowing haze on Gaia's neocortex,
she herself a paramecium dwarfed by a desert
of astronomical proportions devoid of life. "We are billions

Of kilometers away," they say, but they
are fellow humans, and we know their fondness
for hyperbole -- it mirrors our own. Some still

Insist a man pick a side, but God put you on one,
and made you smart enough to know, shadow
or light, we are not in a fight; but all of us

Together form a fluctuating whole. Planet-wide musings
and moods find finger-holds among a myriad parallel
universes -- tendrils, strange dendrites, locking and unlocking

Around instances of time. Arcane plans find root in bizarre cruelties.
"I really want you to take a bullet," demand some from childhoods
sweet, fat and happy -- themselves unscarred. But I digress...

Faith is not misplaced: He corrects the errors our free will incurs
and has put in place his contingencies -- I bear
the burdens I can and you bear yours.

And at times we share: voices carry and dreams intersect
among continua elucidated by Planck, the Mandelbrot richness
of meta lives comprehensible in relation to Newtonian absolute space.

I will bring up the rear and my dearly won terabytes will form
an incandescent white spray of quantum code --
an informational geyser falling back into many

Reservoirs of thought. When you receive of it your parts
otherwhere and elsewhen, chances are I will by then be dead.
Forgive me my failures, and let my smiles be as embers from a
Cro-Magnon hearth.