Beat on Silver

(intended for spoken word purposes)

Tiny and me
We gettin off the airplane
Long walk, tarmac
Pickin up our stuff again
Small cops, big heads
Guns cocked, all prepped
We move, we walk
Push our shit straight ahead
“Look out kid,”
the singing preacher said
with a borrowed drawl he picked up
when he was still a Zimmerman

Big hut, white doors
He polishing the wood floor
Hair all beehive
he hardly had it did in time
Tiny scoots right off home
Me and Bee smokin on
Lick along, rolling
Then he cookin up, forest things
“Get that mush
down my neck!”
Well, he says it so polite that
I barely stop to check it’s right

Tall men, they fast asleep
Beehive lookin moss green
Face clean, bow-tie neat
My airplane sailed so smoothly in
We cookin up things tonight
Well, we cookin up dreams
We makin all the plans
and then we dictate what they mean
“Let’s go off,
some darker place,”
Bee and me, eyes closed
No covers on them windows

Flying out of Bangkok

Flying out of Bangkok; the plane slowly gathering speed across the runway. And there are lights across the tarmack, tiny rows of red and blue, and green a little farther up. In the distance, there is the glittering yellow flicker of a city awakening, stretching its great dirty arms and yawning broadly, looking up to greet the pitch black grin of eight o'clock at night. I am leaving Bangkok now, Floyd is playing in my ears (Wish you were here), the song of so many lonely morning coffees and broken moments of forced nostalgia. There are surely hundreds of us here on this souped-up white machine, beginning trips and ending them, running away and running home. There are thousands of us in planes right now, pinned up pricks of light along the sky. We are going places - or we think we are. We are meeting people. Everywhere we go we are all moving the same: touching faces, touching hands, touching more.

Morning tides

To know the morning tide
is to sit silently
and feel partial detachment
get every vitriolic pigment of your body
and let it fall against the floor.

Ten stubs

The heavy droop of limp fingers
with nothing much to say -
like the cruel heads of dead flowers
with half-wilted stems -
like a burnt out fluorescent sign
winding down above the cross.
Ten stubs - pallid and weary,
like something broken
like disease.

She really doubted that any other institution was as satisfying and worthwhile place to spend time as that of the public library.

Glass-walled and dripping in quotations. The scent of the library, of thickly bound knowledge, was the smell of everything she wanted to become.

Intimacy

Sydney has never been very deft
in its handling of the seasonal shifts

always too moist
with clumsy, slow-moving hands.

sticky
wet

a very bad transition.

This time though, the air smells different
the creeping December invites delicate things,

the grazing of legs
as we climb your back fence -

the thrill of pool chair fumblings
in the morning's damp dark -

the surrendered, half-open mouth
disabled on the very first plunge

sticky
wet

slow moving hands.