sunset magazine

The journal of Western living or is it more of a Bible?
Where suntanned saints gleam bright smiles
in a promised land of chrome and tail fins;
but smarter and cooler than that, you know.

Bargain Bauhaus and ten things
you can do with pineapple or Spam
on endless august evenings
relaxing by the pool on foam cushions

sheathed in durable fabrics neatly stitched
by modern housewives who've been to college
but are still handy with a Singer sewing machine.
Those women, cool and coifed and garbed in sundresses

with just a hint of goddess Marilyn.
Those men: the dads are clad
in Hawaiian shirts, khaki slacks and shades,
with flat top hair cuts like fighter jocks.

They're brave and brash and young
ready for the Russians or Picasso
armed with martini's and Marlboros.
Business is good in Anaheim,

Tel Aviv, Tehran, and Guatemala.
Houses filled with light because
night never falls in Sunset magazine land,
perched forever on the cusp of day,

full of laughter and the clink of ice cubes,
six easy appetizers done in ten minutes, and
the gardens all have decks and blooms in every season
and a dollar still buys a lot of pussy in Saigon.

Mobil pumps a shitload of oil from desert sands,
and we still believe in voting, careers, and golden
anniversaries. The radio still sings about love,
lost or found or strayed or swooning.

Ob the decks and patios we lounge on wicker funiture
from Hong Kong or wrought iron from Tijuana.
The spoils of empire surrounded by flowers.
It's a bargain, and don't we deserve it?

out there

out there- i hear a lot of scraps and babble

what shoes are you wearing?

sketchers, uggs or or fuck me heels?

the food cart across the street

sells sausages of ground up

antelope and pheasant

and you can follow them

to any corner on twitter

and a claque old white men

who've sworn off sex

claim that every wriggling tadpole

in their wad is a person,

a gift from god that we dare not deny

do i need to set myself on fire in the street?

and post it up on youtube?

my facebook status is static

which won't cause banks to panic

they've got their levi-clad

hairdo man to worry about

and the brains of babies

are splattered on the walls

in the suburbs of damascus

and the baseball season is

right around the corner

where's the rain?

i haven't stood before a waterfall in years

and i think it's time.

i need the spray and oxygen

and the moon just hangs there

above the city and the jungle

and the forty thousand pairs

of nike shoes still slowly swirl

in the great pacific gyre.

should i be going barefoot

stop eating fish and cookies?

when they put me in the ground

or spread my ashes in the wind

you can say-

it took a lot of fish and cookies

to carry that guy through the years

and all that's left of him

are a few words and pictures

maybe i should write down some recipes,

so someday someone could pull out a

dog-eared batter-speckled index card

and decide to make a batch

of raisin oatmeal cookies

occupy

there's horseshit on the sidewalk

and a helicopter in the sky

the boys in black

must have attacked

the camp this afternoon

the turf is wan and flattened

the plaza has been steamed

the tents and canopies

the tarps and cardboard

hauled away

the bocce ball court

is safe for bowlers

once again

the skaters waiting in line

at the kristi yamaguchi

holiday ice rink

won't have to contend

with the riff raff across the street

and the shoppers at the ferry building

can rest assured

that there won't be any urban campers

taking spit baths in the sinks

of the public restrooms

christmas has been saved

orange crate world

i want to live in a world

that looks like an orange crate illustration.

a blue-sky-pillow-clouded-citrus-orchard place

before the slow flood of asphalt

fed the rain of plastic

that moistened

the seeds of dystrophy

germinating in the cellar

of this gimcrack century.

when i could see the mountains

and plunge my face into snow melt streams

-and drink my fill of sweet july

an alternate california

more like moorish spain

or san bernadino in nineteen twenty five

with the scent of orange blossoms in march

and snow gleaming on the san gabriel mountains

it's 11:30 am,

the southeast sun flooding

through the window

hits toasty terra cotta tiles

i'm a cat; and that sun is luxurious

so i roll over and stretch my paws 

and then -it's the year, 1047

and this window sill is high above a great library

in cordoba, al andalucia

but i can still smell the orange blossoms

in the courtyard below

and see the snow on the sierra morena

over the rooftops of the city

i hear the river, the wadi al kabir

hissing past the ancient roman bridge

ah, this sun on my flanks

i blink and yawn, (i'm still a cat)

and then......

-i'm my grandfather, joe chambers

playing canasta

with douglas fairbanks and mary pickford

in the clubhouse at lake arrowhead california in 1926

they're here for the mountain air,

i'm here for the power company

the piney breath of june

wafts in through the window screens

we sip our sweet iced tea

and doug and mary win this afternoon

after the game i doze off on the wide veranda

and wake up on route 66 forty years later

driving a corvette up through the canyon

heading out from san berdoo

hey buz, wake up, we're coming in to barstow

and i feel like a hamburger

the monkey and the crocodile

yesterday, i saw a girl walking down the street

with a broken shoe.

the sole was snapping

like that wily old sinner, mr. crocodile

-a devious character in an old favorite book

mr. crocodile's patient.

because everyone gets thirsty eventually

and he lies easy in the river,

waiting for supper.

for years he's subsisted

on unfortunate suckers

mr monkey with his raggedy hat

dangles from the palm tree on the riverbank

why don't you join me for dinner?

smiles mr crocodile

i doubt that would be wise

mr monkey replies

but perhaps you'd enjoy one of these

and drops a coconut right on his snout

that's very rude, mr crocodile snarls

what have i done, to deserve such a slap?

haven't i kept the river clean for all these years?

why i was here when your uncle's uncle

was still wet behind the ears

and now you hit me with coconuts

can't you see these tears?

if you would drop down to the sand

i could show you just what i mean

no tricks up my sleeve,

we could shake hands.

after all we're both gentlemen, if you please

oh mr crocodile, those don't look like tears

more like a gleam or a wink

you're planning to eat me i think

mr monkey that hurts me

i have no such designs

i'm just admiring your beautiful hat

and red-tailed coat

your insinuations are giving me

lumps in my throat

oh mr crocodile, do you really expect me

to believe such dissembling lies?

if i'm not mistaken, that's my brother inside

mr monkey, i confess it's true,

i've been compelled to neutralize

a palm wine-crazed baboon,

but surely you realize,

that i'm your brother too

come down and take a gander

satisfy your doubts and end this slander

mr monkey doffed his raggedy hat

shook his head sadly and said i think not,

-here's a little dessert.

open wide and say ah, mr croc

and lobbed a big coconut

right down his craw

i know what you're thinking right about now

what in tarnation but inflamed 'magination

gets monkeys and crocodiles

from mundane observation

of a girl walking down the street

with one broken shoe

Recruits

We ran like dogs

through seaside fogs,

-singing worn out songs

that longed for danger,

and complained about the chow.

Songs about lovers stolen

by some universal seducer

named Jodie.

We watched our tracer rounds

hit targets in the seaside dunes.

They glowed like fireflies at noon.

We were country boys

and city boys

and even some

suburban boys.

All shorn and shaved,

so who could tell

who was me and who was you?

Just meat of various cuts and flavors,

sweating and swearing

in unison and wearing

the obligatory

olive drab cotton.

The drill sergeants barked 

Do you miss your mama?

as they strutted beside

our ranks and columns. 

We froze in formation

trying not to blink

or flinch, to show them

how tough we were?

Convinced that we were ready

but they knew it was a thin

tissue of self deception, a vanity 

that would be torn away soon enough

in tropical horror or boredom

and there would be

no more singing as we ran:

Sittin’ on the mountain top

beatin on a drum.

Beat so hard that the MP’s come

MP, MP, don't arrest me,

arrest that guy

behind the tree.

He stole the whiskey,

I stole the wine.

Now all I do is double time.

Gimme your left, your left,

your left right left.

some sightings on wilshire boulevard

Martin Homebound reporting here

from the 4700 block of Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, California

we're staked out here, working on a tip from one of our celebrity watchers

oh, here comes someone now, could be a possibility,

Robin, zoom in on her, she's coming out of the offices

of the Hollywood branch of the Screen Actors Guild.

is that a starlet? i think it might be 

a scarlet crested johansen

got her robin?  go go go

o-o-o-o, we're going to go into stealth-mode here

really quiet

where is she going?

hmmmm, walking past the Fat Burn Easy Spa…….

and Johnie's New York Pizza……

oh, she's going into Marie Callender's

robin, let's get a little closer

she's just been served and it appears to be

an enormous slice of blackberry cobbler…..

is it a la mode? yes!

it's definitely ice cream. it's huge. peach if i'm not mistaken.

while she's eating, lets see if we can spot any other local fauna

robin, over there, see that?

the girl coming out from LA miracle smile dentistry,

quick she's hurrying. In there. she's going into black dog coffee.

oh dear. she seems to have disappeared.

we're going to have to follow.

it's right through this door and …

damn, she's disappeared.

oh my god!

what just happened….

the whole building has just vanished

all the buildings have vanished

the streets. everything, where's the city?

robin? are you there? are you getting this?

hold it, over there, that pond or lake or whatever,

just beyond that grove of oaks……

i don't believe it!!!

that has to be a wooly mammoth

unbelievable!!

where are we?!!

look it's stuck. it's struggling, trying to get back to shore

but it can't get it's feet loose.

no wait, one foot is loose, robin are you getting this?

ooooo, it's covered in black goop, it looks like tar!

that poor beast looks exhausted, she's sagging

oh, oh, look at  this, that pack of what,….. big cats! like lions

oh mother of god! look at the teeth on those guys

they must be a foot long….

oh oh oh my god, they're jumping on the mammoth

slashing… she's trying to shake them off

now she's down rolling in the tar, the cats are falling off

some of them are trapped under her. they're covered in tar.

now the cats are getting stuck. this is incredible!! are we rolling? great great!

this is so strange, there's a herd of pronghorn antelope, i know those….

and they're just drinking at the pond like nothings happening….

ooh, but look over there , in the tall grass, do you see them?

here they come, what the hell are those, they look like cheetahs!!

the antelope are panicking, can they get away, the cheetahs are almost on them.. there.. no he missed. .. the antelope are getting away, that was close…

ok, robin swing back to the tar pit. the mammoth has given up, she's done for.

hey, what's that noise? are those wolves?

they're coming right at us!! run run head for those trees!

get up the tree, here give me your hand

are you ok? that was close!

go away guys! we're not coming down. i think those are dire wolves.

yeah like the old grateful dead song, but i don't think they are interested in playing cards!!

when I woke, the dire wolf

six hundred pounds of sin

was grinnin at my window

all i said was come on in

don't murder me,

i beg of you don't murder me

please

don't murder me

this ain't no song or card game, look at those things!!

we'll just have to wait here til they go away

 i think it's safe to climb down now,

are you ready robin? cool.

hey look, there's a couple of people over there,

a man and a woman, she yelling something at him

and oh no, he just bashed her over the head with that club

and shoved her into the tar,

we gotta go try to help her

run, c'mon faster, he sees us

hey you, stop hitting her!

whoosh

what the ?????

We're back in LA!!! 

at the La Brea Tarpits Museum

I don't know what just happened

what is this exhibit?

Robin get a shot of this

the sign says woman's skull

circa 10,000 years before the common era

the skull is fractured, consistent with a blow

from a heavy blunt instrument

this ancient woman was a murder victim

robin, we were there! we've got it on video

this is hot!! i'm calling entertainment tonight 

and the national enquirer, CNN,

this is going to be big, huge!!

robin, what's wrong? what do you mean

the video is blank? let me see that

what did you do to the video??

ah crap. yeah i know it's not your fault

no one is ever going to believe this

c'mon let's go back ove r to Marie Callendars

I'll buy you a piece of pie

al qaida spiked my milk and nescafe with hallucination pills

we live we die  we shout

we have no hallucination pills

just flags and shouts

and statues to destroy

alert alert alert

mothers daughters sons

the father's face ripped off the wall

burns in the street

adorn yourself with razor wire

necklaces and crowns

spill light into the dungeons

these fine palaces of shame

who needs a gun?

we've got cell phones and cafes

if my ceiling was not plaster

would thatch or stars be such a disaster?

if these walls bore no gilding

just the ordinary guilt

of disappointed

parents-children-lovers

are we fanatics if we dream

of ordinary things,

the chance to fail

or settle for something

less than a shining

vacuum packed perfection?

we'll share your doom

or your salvation soon enough

and you will share our misery

or our triumph, you can count on that

dinosaur on a leash

i stumbled on this photo from a century ago:
paris or new york it seems, somewhere stylish anyway:

a lady in black taffeta with one of those wide-brimmed hats
strolls along a leafy boulevard with a crocodile on a leash

i’d like to walk a dinosaur down market street
-a small one, like a turkey, perhaps an eodromaius

or a bambiraptor, isn't that a lovely name?

i’d feed her bits of hot dogs and warm pretzels
-no sauerkraut or mustard please

and the girls would coo how cute
and the boys would want to know if she fights or bites

and i’d be like salvador dali and his famous anteater
emerging from the paris metro

maybe i should grow a dali mustache

whiskers waxed to points,

my face adorned with curb feelers:

a catfish man sauntering down the street

tipping my hat to slack-jawed gawkers

with a wink at the ladies and the flip of a chunk

of hot dog into the air

where the bambiraptor leaps

to catch the snack in her slender jaws

and as the people gasp

i twirl my slim mustachio
and make a sweeping bow

marina boulevard

skull heads jog the asphalt path

beside marina boulevard,

i saw death breathing hard,

sheathed in goretex togs

but why -

this day in particular,

was it something in the stormlight,

a fluke of atmosphere or mind?

a premonition of the blood moon

due at midnight if the clouds allow it

the gift

i wasn't always this way

sitting here in my la-z-boy

pass me that remote, will you?
thanks, we don't need to compete
with that stupid television

the crap they put on now
it's just bizarre, shows about people
with mental conditions like hoarding

yeah i watch them now and then
it's kind of like when you see
a smash up on the freeway
you can't take your eyes off it
not at first anyway

so, what was i...
oh yeah, i wasn't always this way

i mean, living in this house
and barely going out at all

i was in the spotlights
-believe it or not.

see that picture over there,
on the mantel?
the one beside the little statue?

that's me.
doing my one man show.
hardly recognize me now, can ya?

see, that was when i had become
the master of the random
you want me to explain?

it's like this:
when you make something,
i mean almost anything
a painting, a house, a car
a poem, it tends to have
a certain pattern, a symmetry

or maybe not exactly symmetry
but the structure, the contrivance
the hand of the creator
so to speak, is apparent

we recognize that a person
created it rather than nature
it's the difference between say
a really earnest attempt

to make an artificial christmas tree
and a fir tree growing in the woods
but that's what i could do

make stuff that looked like nature
i could arrange rocks in a pattern that was beautiful
but had a randomness and asymmetry
that still contained the sacred and mysterious

i had this gig doing panels for a big
apartment project down by the embarcadero
setting river pebbles in concrete
and it was really going great,

but i had a little habit of starting
off my day with a couple boilermakers
down at this dive on the docks
(this was before they sanitized
and yuppified the waterfront)

anyway, even though i was doing
all this great work, the contractor
kind of got a stick up his ass
about me showing up for work
with a pretty good buzz on

and he thought, well these panels
with all the pebbles look random and natural,
there's no discernible pattern.

anybody could do it.
so he laid me off and got some
regular sober guy to try to do the gig

and well, you know what happened, right?
no matter how he tried, the pebbles
started going into rows, and worse than that,
because he was trying to make it look natural,
they were really awkward half-assed

-they looked like shit.

so finally, they laid him off and hired me back
and i finished up the job

i realized then that i could apply this
to other things, that it was just the way
my brain works, a kind of cognitive dissonance
that still had some pattern to it
like chaos theory, know what i mean?

like the way driftwood piles up
at the high tideline on the beach
or clouds are shaped and arranged across the sky,
the color that the sun paints them with at sunrise

so i began to cast my net to gather up
other kinds of stuff, with a camera or
a tape recorder, and of course my eyes and ears
and i would put them together
in photographs or poems

i think that's what jackson pollack
was trying to do, in his way
letting the action guide his hand
to strip away the confines of deliberation
the imprisonment of mind,

but at the same time, there is a consciousness
at play, it's kind of like like you fool the frontal cortex
and let the deeper parts of your mind direct
your hand or your words or whatever and bring out
something that has meaning and beauty
even in apparent dissonance
without being just a jumble or gibberish

do you really think a monkey could do that?

it's hard! i mean, i think that's what joyce
was trying to do with finnegan's wake
but you need a annotated guide to really
get what he was saying, so does that
mean his attempt failed? maybe.
i'm glad he tried.

like i think that i have. but i can't seem to tap
that magic anymore. my instincts have slipped away
now the world itself is too bewildering,
algorithms do this all auto-magically
if i search the web for 'rats in a piano'
a million hits come up: even a video of rats playing on a piano
pied pipers, the superstitions of negros in new orleans,
piano insurance against vermin damage,
exterminators............

there's a television show about that now you know?
billy the exterminator. followed by shows
dedicated to morbid obesity,
or how to protect myself from
national security agencies tracking
credit card microchips by lining
my wallet with aluminum foil

what could i possibly say that equals
that bouillabaisse? speaking of which,
it's time for the show about the crab fishermen braving arctic storms,
would you pass me the remote, if you don't mind?
i think i'll just ease this la-z-boy back to full recline