About Me

Los Angeles, CA, United States
Hello Friend! Welcome to my poetry blog.

Friday, July 17, 2009

Getting Fat

Another? Here's the first one.
I take back my shaggy hair -
Oh! it blankets my forehead.
It feels like an old bathmat,
festering in grandma's basement.
I take it back.

Take back your years.
And I take grandma back too -
her pie crust dough
and pancake batter.
And the toys -
so pink and rainbowlicious
that they couldn't stink up
even the attic,
that they had to go to grandma's
green-as-moss, damp-as-fungus
basement.

Trade me: take back your black
ink chasm. Your night abyss.
I am shining light here!
I am a New Yawkah here!
I inherited your inheritance,
and cashed your chips.

OK take the money.
Money is all we're worth.
Buy pot pourri, and hand towels.
I'll stick to the script.

You were my little playfriend.
Could you laugh with me still?
Don't grow so old.
Don't fit the bill.

The stair slats in front of me
are the same ones you had painted.
Mine are rotting underneath
the whitewash, mine are the field stones
in the old house's foundation.
Let it out, Sugar. Let it out...


You Make Me Want to Take on My Years

It's no big deal,
you good, good girl,
you artist in infancy,
the best kind the only.

When we move in,
our home will be one
because you create
like you can't help it.

I trip over my precious words,
as gangbangers shoot the lampposts
and you are wanting everything white,
and greeting stray cats
like old friends.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Back at it

I run down to Matador
looking for the trailhead.
I'm dreaming of cliffs,
the rocks jutting up
from the Pacific -
like they did in Capri. Paradise.

But it is a facsimile again.
And back in the barrio, the localbirds
copycat car alarms,
and the neighborhood Tom mews pleading
for love. For love. The least of us
pleading for love.

I am waiting for the inevitable racoon
now, or possum to break the night.
How they survive in this parking lot
I'll never know, and the coyotes are
beyond the beyond.

Should I tie it up?
I haven't written in a while.
The trailhead is not at the beach
(tho this be California). The trailhead
is here in Echo Park,
and on this page,
about to move again.