Original Philz

In the plaza

stark with sun

and brushed aluminum,

she talks to him with hands and wiggles.

Cops loaded with gear, that old decor of guns,

and clubs and black uniforms lounge stroll

and strut real casual like. Armed authority.

They ignore the oung black men passing

 pliffs outside the World of Stereo shop.

it's white collar Wednesday at the strip club,

bring your own business card.

Payday loans are available

at United Nations plaza,

just across the street

from Tako Nako Java Xpress.

i'm listening to a song

played with hammers on steel

and banjos in a language i don't know

so why does it touch me like

the three penny opera songs do?

The scowling face of the BART train

accelerates from the light of the station

into the dark of the tunnel,

a mask becomes a pinpoint.

The barista at Philz on 24th Street is disgusted,

tells her colleague that she saw her boyfriend

with another woman in a on myspace.com

and still he lied until she said:

Dude, you were wearing the same outfit

you’re wearing right now.

I read in the paper this morning

that half a million unexploded cluster bomblets

are scattered all over Lebanon. The same kind

that are strewn all over Afghanistan?

The ones that look like toys or packaged meals?

Assorted Elvis Presley figurines strut

their Ed Sullivan or Las Vegas stuff

atop the ancient refrigerated cases in this cafe.

Paintings of rock stars on black velvet

and a sign in the window says:

learn to use art 4 justice.

i'm smitten by a painting of victorian mermaid

gazing over her shoulder while she pulls a comb

through her hair, a salmon tail wrapped round her ass.

I’m sinking into an ancient couch watching flies

go in and out the door,

Hieroglyphic overspray adorns the sidewalk

and you can eat tortilla-wrapped tongue and brains

at the little lighthouse taqueria on the corner where

a potato-bodied woman in a miniskirt and heels

ignores a muttering whiskered man who curses

and slams a newsrack stuffed with bannered words,

memorials to the numbered day of victimhood

and justification, -motherfuckers, they just......

A pair boots dangles overhead from a powerline

and a billboard asks: who is an outsider?

Spearmint twist

There was a time upon which

we once trusted God’s grace

and Abraham Lincoln’s face.

Stamped on the front side

of pennies hundreds of billions

of times, in bright copper

alloyed with zinc until

three grams of copper

was worth more than a cent.

Now they are a thin copper

plating over 97.5 percent zinc.

Like the gilded toilets and sinks

that adorn the president’s

residence in Florida and

Manhattan. He loves the glitter

believes that it hides

the dank sewage pumped

from the sump to the gutter

of his diseased mind.

One can find gold-plated

commemorative coins

with a raised clenched fist

and the slogan fight fight fight

on the reverse side of the coin.

Available on Etsy for $21.99

plus shipping. Discounted soon

to six dollars and sixty-six cents.

I’ve still got a jar full of pennies

on my desk, some are real copper

the brightest but lightest ones

are ersatz. Perhaps some day

they could be melted and reformed

into something useful.

Like the swords into plowshares

and spears into pruning hooks

as the prophet Isaiah foretold.

On the path

The sleepy mountain

awakes, sheds her veil

as the sun shreds

her midnight chemise

and the verdant chaparral

cloaking her shoulders

fills with the morning

twitters and trills

of courting birdsongs.

There are rivals to send

on the wing to other perches,

other sheltering bushes.

Foxes, bobcats, and hawks

to avoid, nests to construct,

the season’s urgency to begin.

My toe catches the root

of a madrone pitching me

towards the naked rocks

of the trail, but I grab

the skin-smooth red branch

of its sister and thank her.

The birds ignore me. Yes!

Great-tailed grackles

 Do great-tailed grackles

have a Spanish accent?

The hundreds perched

in the ficus trees along

the Alameda de Santa Lucia

Near the bus station

In Antigua, Guatemala

Shout, Si, si, ¿Nos oyes?

But when we fly up

to Marfa, Texas in April,

we sing like Willie Nelson, with

a cowboy twang and crackle.

All moments are lost, all moments are found

First there was the Word

and the word was Bang!

And what was dark

and absent became light.

An infinite nothingness

Instantly becoming an

Infinite everythingness.

As it ever was and ever

shall be. As far as we know.

Every particle is simultaneously

a wave. An ephemeral instant

that switches from one to the other

as soon as you look at it.

Or when God rolls over when

the cat jumps up on the bed.

It is said that the human brain

is the most complex structure

in the known universe,

eighty-six billion neurons

with more than a hundred trillion

points of connection.

But before all that, before poetry,

music, or rocket science. Before

Genghis Khan or Shakespeare

or I love Lucy stuffing bon bons

into her mouth when she can’t

keep up with the conveyor belt,

was the first mass extinction,

the Great Oxygenation Event,

when too much oxygen killed off

most of the life on this planet.

An ice encased globe with no

surface water. Snowball Earth.

Then came the Cambrian Explosion,

when complex multi-cellular life evolved

and then the advent of the so-called

Big Five Mass Extinctions:

Late Ordovician, Late Devonian,

Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic

and the one we talk about most,

the Cretaceous-Paleocene,

when the Chixulub impactor

smacked into the Yucatan

and killed off the dinosaurs.

(Except for the ones

ancestral to birds).

Moments captured in stone

and chromosomes. We still have

the same basic anatomical plan

for bones as fish and salamanders.

Now, in what some call the Anthropocene,

the Age of Humans, we've made moments

that will live forever in the electromagnetic

energy flowing out into the cosmos.

All the curses and prayers,

Rocky and Bullwinkle. Howdy Doody,

Ghandi and Elvis. Rush Limbaugh,

Obama, Kennedy, Cronkite.

Commercials for toilet paper

and lizards selling auto insurance.

Beatles and Beethoven. Ricky telling

Lucy, you got some ’splaing to do.