INDIAN HILL

my sky is stirring tonight      electric, etched, pulsing        bristling pacing, mysterious, dark twinkling ancient, vast, infinite blowing tonight my sky blankets every inch of sweeping expanse, sealing every crack with cold forgiveness                                that I need my sky lights up in the dark propels moon and stars round the earth   pinpoint beacons            track in               tiny precision tonight-- this sky is mine

On a failed night outside in the fog a friend says I'm going into real estate or maybe sales, yeah sales, he says... Silver hair curled in a froth  Cars, books, door to door The waitress asks, Ale or stout? and I say ale My keyboard is empty words don't come all the time-- there are many-- but they don't go together all that well that is, when I try and the waitress brings beer and scoops up bills and says Do you want change?

Big Bear City is slow-moving today, locals riding bikes and humming with a rhythm that is familiar to mountain resorts during summer months. It’s a combination of business owners and craftsmen covering their daily chores and ski resorts performing maintenance on lift chairs high on the slopes. A rider in street clothes, lank gray hair and flannel shirt, slides his cycle into the rack in front of Vons, hangs in front of the store for a few moments, as if wondering if there’s enough money to buy what he wants,  settling instead maybe for what he needs. The sun is bright at 7000 feet and feels hot on my forehead and arms, thin air letting the sting of ultraviolet rays tingle on my skin. The lake is deep blue-green, boats bob in the breeze. At the back end of the town the lake reaches shore near the airport and a few twin-engine planes position for takeoff, their props a blur of motion as they crawl across the tarmac to the head of the runway. The highway splits at the corner ba...

I feel good just thinking about eating here. Outdoors under an awning at the Farmer's Market in Los Angeles, the French Quarter Muffuletta and creole potato salad put me in such a good mood I walk around the block to the Fairfax lighter on my feet, if a couple of pounds heavier. No matter...just the idea of eating Creole in LA makes me happy, happy , happy. Be my guest!  Click to the link and you're there..online anyway. THE GUMBO POT

   I saw my dad on the Red Line subway train.  He looked like I remember him, only a little younger, hipper, with a bit of an attitude I’d never seen.  Not an attitude of superiority─more like a look of knowledge, of wisdom, of things learned from experiences he probably wouldn’t want to do over again.    Maybe he was traveling uptown to North Hollywood where he’d be at home with the poets and actors and people who would share his love of words and books.    He shows up sometimes, mostly a feeling that maybe he’s close by, or maybe he knows the chords and melodies I like and he waits inside there for a moment to add a note or pluck a string, to ring up a memory or a vision of some grand place to suggest.  I think of him waving and smiling at me from that perch inside a Miles Davis trumpet solo, sitting on one of those half notes, or weaving in and out of the piano solo in Variations On A Theme.  He adds a shimmer, or a muted note, jus...

Short, round, wide flat nose in the middle of his puffy shiny face, Thin whiskers pointing in every direction, This man... Scrubbing his hands in the restroom with a lot of water, yanking paper towels from the dispenser. . .more paper towel s and he wiped his hands with them. More towels, furiously rubbing-- He ripped four or five more paper towels...opened the door and left the restroom. Outside he was squeezing the paper towels in his left hand talking to a friend and laughing. Later he was looking at sex videos next to the Drama section--nothing I haven't done  Thumbing through racks of sex videos-- While I was torn between. . . Double Indemnity with Barbara Stanwyck . . . Crazy Heart with Jeff Bridges  Where did the wax-like puffy man ditch his paper towels? I think.   His sterilized hands. I bought Crazy Heart , wondered where the man was going, If he bought any videos. And where he dumped the paper towels.

Warm hawks float up to hunt Working for a living...    Skree Skree ...from pole to tension lines...    diving-- there    darting-- now    Scraping meals off the earth, their due    Roving creatures victims of prey on their     planet Our world