I remember MySpace used to let you bake your music right into the page; I think I’d have to pay a couple hundred a year for that here.

Blue the dominant color: in the wavelets pulsing to shore and the growling of the cars; blue above the black strip of the horizon and mixed with the last gasp of twilight.

The sound of the reel chitters its teeth. Line and hook in the bay wait for fish.

—Good luck my friend

—Godbless, you too.

He trudges off the platform, through the pavilion, to the parking lot his flip-flops smacking the planks.

The other, his elbows on the rail, lolls and smokes a cigarette above the water. The ember glows orange against the dark blue of the night.

Behind the waters mumble. They break on the shoreline. Blending with the mumbles of a group, the waters break apart.

Amber lights the dock. On the bay it wavers amber.

Dogs bark; cars park and leave; footfalls shuffle on the parking lot. Cars shine the ghost of their headlamps across the pavilion. Then they wheel backwards, peel away and drive into the blue. The red of their brakelights emit like fireflies.

The sky: a heaventree hung with humid blue stars. Aircraft flicker and the sighs of the land mix with the sky.

The half moon reigns tonight. She infuses the water with its blue element of darkness. Under the moonlight the waters ebb.

Twitching, speckled, a helicopter floats through the night between the ocean and the sky, alone in space with the waters below and the stars above.

The air tastes of flowers tonight. The musky white of laurel floats over the dock like a perfume and tangles with the reek of baywater ascending from the planks.

The odor of cigarettes mixes with the starlight, and the starlight moves with the waters, changing and spiraling one over other.

Blue, blue, blue.

 

Though written in a tone of self-deprecation, this one flowed out in a wave of ecstasy after my grandpa taught me the Yiddish word ‘farblondzhet,’ which means utter confusion, stupefaction, woods and darkness of the mind:

Farblondzhet

Dumb, young, and poor — a little farblondzhet,
The word, a disease, I can’t chase from my mind,
Obsessed, anxiety pokes my ribs,
I go so fast that I can’t see my way.

Cities that I walk around — no relief,
My mind like a hutu of jangling nerves;
My days? Aimless. A stack of shuffled mist,
That awards me penalties: fear, sloth, guilt.

Why do I persist in my reckless path
When the tempting devils hoot at labor
And speak of a flat dulling existence
Like margarine spread a lying yellow?

I know that this caul will open
On days of autumn sun;
Then the worries will all disband
Giving farblondzhet close.

Many mushrooms launch spores from basidia…which are jettisoned with enough force to throw them inches away from the mushroom. One scientist measured the force at 25,000 Gs, approximately 10,000 times the force experienced by the space shuttle astronauts escaping the gravitational pull of the earth to obtain orbit.

Petrified still. You swept away.

Why’d it drag us both along? Petrified: feel nothing, remember nothing. Heart, driftwood.

I broke an inner silence with sound. Can you hear music in the fuzz? If words could touch you across space, or move a few atoms in your breast, do you feel these? How’s it been with you?

Writing more sin. Damaging across time with a few mean strokes of a pen. What about this made up life? We slid together for a time like people in a dream. Then departed. Now you turn up like chance — bricks in a wall, the shape of a crowd, a group of notes.

Dim’s the past. Sad tonight and can tell no one. The words would slip and tumble vulgarly from my mouth, hollow and thoughtless, tumbleweeds. Spoken and guessed with phantom appreciation.

Can you have gone? Will people fold you up? My best friend flickers out. The glow of other lights shines her away; she vanishes behind the stalks of others. I go from where they sway in groups, their glow faintens. A city in the ocean.

Have I told you about my underground dreams? They are forlorn and beautiful as all burial earth. Abandoned tunnels: a staircase that goes down: and down and down forever in networks. How can I find my way up? Why am I trapped in the earth? I trapped and buried you too.

Rocks. Pulled and cast about, pushed out of the earth and rinsed, tumbled, and chipped before being bashed into atoms.

You could crack me with a touch. A comforting ghost with ghost-wishes and ghost-thoughts.

I speak not because I need to be understood but because I must fill my abstruse and abstract presence with sound. Is this who I am? an abstract dreamer detached and insulated from life by fear, emptiness and material?

I match my life to images trickled down from other lives. A lie.

Time runs out, b, it closes these words.

What can I say? Cried but words are as cold as stones.

Here is quartz.

San Francisco 2018

 

The science building towers above its neighbors: it is thirty stories high. Its face is made of dark grey bricks and windows. At night the squares of the windows glow down the building side. From the base of the building to the topmost story zigs and zags a catwalk. At the top of the catwalk is a view of the world. But a guard monitors the catwalk’s entrance and warns explorers away. When the guard goes for patrol they enter the catwalk stealthily. They clamber up quickly at first, the specks of people on the street growing smaller and smaller and the avenues of the campus rocking further and further away. Then they slow. Their footfalls sound metallic and precarious on the thin steps. Altitude and perspective changes at each landing. They see the arcs of streetlights linked like ribs through the darkness; and they see the beam of the guard’s flashlight prowling the avenue left and right. They climb higher. They step over rusted patches on the stairs and pass the watering cans and planters left on an upper landings. At the top they look out.

The night city unrolls — the amber streets of campus, the buildings along its perimeter, the headlights of cars blown over the highway, the world going to the horizon where red and white smoketowers cough smoke into the night. Hey, the catwalk sings in the wind. And satellite dishes sit upon the sky.

It is a long way down. How long would it take? Ten seconds, no more: a puddle. And dissolve. But the city remains, stretched over the world: a gray belly foisted on the sky. All of the world a city.

Now back down.

(minzu notes 2018)

献给莎盟

The cars past deathful fast, bringing up jewels of headlamps from the crook of the road. They come from, to bottom indistinct specks under the lights. Blue and orange they pass, sighs wiping off the face of the cars like ghosts. The red lights blink on the radio tower: the red fireflies in brakelights flare. Beneath the patches of street lights, amber, purple, fading ghost purple and all warm, this lonely stretch of nighttime water.

for r.m.

I wake up in the morning,
All that darkness is behind me;
I wake up in the morning,
All that darkness is behind me.

I wake up in the morning,
All that darkness is behind me;
I wake up in the morning,
All that darkness is behind me.

I wake up in the morning
New and fresh and light;
I wake up in the morning,
I am bathed in light.

For though these rhythms will shape me
I will never stop flowing;
For though dreams will shift and move
I am in the morning forever new.

//

At night when my stars crowd around me
Cold and dim and blue
I know that their light shines for us
And I will make it true.

At night when comets dance the black sky
Fast and thin and gray
I know that my words will give them light
Night after night after night.

In darkness when the world is bathed in night
And lonely and cool and blue
I can hear the hope and kiss in your voice
And I will kiss you true.

For though the days and nights will fade
My love for you stays on
Through cold dim blue empty dark space
I love you true and true.

Hello