EARLY SANTA ANA - Poem

           This night the atmospheric caveats
            come in gently like Chopin;
            they bask and fondle
            the fuzzed cheek, the goblet aimed hand.
            The dry breeze lifts hairs
            rustling them
            like warm tiny leaves.
    
            Santa Ana bathes the skin
            with its aerial saliva
            troughing through the canyons,
            canyon tongues that spit their gusts
            into the huge Angeles basin,
            a basin no longer wild with
            arching ferns and alluvial fans,
            mug-wort and lily,
            tides and spring floods.

            But the wind is still here,
            stroking or maddening
            with its heaves, sighs or curt salutes,
            speaking in sepia tones
            thrown into the sky.

First Rain - poem

                           
                          Raindrops parry through
                          the particulate air
                         splattering on roofs
                         crusted with dust and pollen
                         crashing onto smog laden leaves,  
                         to finally pelt cement and asphalt,
                         shattering the drops
                         a thousand times again.

                Alleyways creased with ancient urine
                and sticky dried bin seepage
                receive their shower with a stink,
                while endless roadways moisten, fill,
                their gaining waters
                mixing and running with lurid oils
                gyrating on their surfaces.

                On nearby hills,
                parched beds and ravines,
                rivulets begin, join arms,
                becoming streams
                to anoint the arid land once again.

                Twigs soften, stones move, bark swells
                and birds find feasts everywhere.
                Even coyote and cougar somehow know
                their prey will be rounder soon.

                Rinsing the canyons and landscapes,
                the clouds with their rain,
                the perfect tilt of the earth,
                have done their stellar work.
               

"Rock Bottom" - Original Song.mp4

Claim Maker

Claim your ignorance of it,
Claim victory over injustice,
Claim no real understanding,
Claim it was the in-laws,
Claim it was the film you saw,
But is it true?

Claim stake a mine,
Claim you're mine,
Claim your horse in a claimer's race,
Claim the computer did it,
Claim it's their fault,
Claim fraud!
But is it true?

Claim you're satisfied,
Claim negligence,
Claim it was the sun, the weather,
Claim it was the government,
But is it true?

Claim an illness, a headache, a sore back,
Claim drunkenness,
Claim hysteria,
Claim it was the enemy,
Claim it was the terrorists, or the Internet,

Claim anything but the truth.
 

Cold Stream

       

                Boulders sit
               in minute erosion,
                knowing and unknowing,
                there like the sun
                without morality
                but dictating behavior anyway,
                season after season.

                Briefly my moss intellect
                hovers about these big rocks,
                earnest with a
                green hued nobility,
                a quaint perception by my
                eye brain
                that thought it mattered
                what I thought.

                Different, but of the same world
                these river boulders.
                At best,
                we go wading out,
                to sit on a big rock,
                to think about not thinking.

Brown Dove

Brown Dove

He came every autumn
through winter with gentle calls
of remembering,
faint hope she would be there.
Arcs of wings brought down and up
would not bring his mate back
devoured last season by a taloned hawk
swooping from a gnarled
yet prodigious magnolia tree.

But he still showed and called to her,
every October
the lovely soft coo cooing,
filling my chest and ears,
the brown dove with a broken dream.

War Men - poem

The war men are busy again
devising menace, subverting peace,
formulating deathly calendars.

Among their pernicious war cries,
complex strategies,
become simple,
oil territory, drone access,
perpetrated for ever elusive
national security.

Tired clowns, medaled roosters,
these joweled flabby men,
their allegiance
to a pentagonian flag,
they assign death to youth,
chaos to cultures,
fragmentation and horror
to the beholden,
as once again they cast their
annihilation play,
then lower the lights.