cdlxxxvi

I have no idea where you keep your gloves
and I really don’t think I have the capacity
to remember the names of most of the blooms I love.
Winter is winter.

“Oh it is inescapable kiss.”

To quote or not to quote when
words really don’t matter anyway. Is that the question?

It’s hilarious how I romanticize. I’m on a rock in Yosemite
and I wanted to write something down
but I forgot it already. Maybe next time....

cdlxxxv

Dear My Obsession,

I have a new position.
Six years ago I got
half of this, so everything’s
justified. I just wanted you to know.

Also, don’t forget what level you are on.
Although I don’t mind the stars. I got heart
insurance, too.

I will go to Yosemite for the annual office retreat.
There’s a new guy. I think he’s from Chicago.

Would you like me to
shut this up? I know you don’t like coffee

nor The Hotel Wentley Poems
but you must give me some allowances.
We will go to Santa Cruz
via Palo Alto

and never wind up anywhere.
Do this. Trust me.

That’s that,
Older Still

cdlxxxiv

Later in terror

What a heart is
I cannot scribble.

A presence; the
awareness of.

Feeling nothing
but THIS.

I can’t remember
what I was thinking

but I know
I was warm and

full. Not hot
or cold. Nor empty

but of the breath
we watch

swirling unto the
stars. Another kiss

that makes me stupid;
that’s where logic

loses its luggage.

cdlxxxiii

Their names escape me.

Good morning from the promenade level
of the walkway between Embarcadero 3 and 4.
Sun’s up.

Coffee in Oregon
cup, green and clayey. Some fog is rolling.
Something being pounded into the earth
nearby.

It’s the first day of summer. An umbrella
next to the cupboard. Water pills.

Not much to do, but I’m sure I’ll be
a bruiser. Could mull over poems,
my whole story.

Couldn’t sleep last night between 1 and 4-something.
After a nightmare where all I remember was
an apartment full of insane people
and I lived there.

And everyone carried a gun. I had a shotgun for a while.

I’m reading the new edition. Thinking about
butterscotch. You’ll know what I mean.

This drilling is giving me a headache.
I danced too much. We walked around.
I kept having to hold somebody up.

Those pictures on level 7. I would make even more of them.

It is cold and clear.
I guess only I know what that means.

cdlxxviii(b)

we’ve moved our getting closer to myself
so that from the Bayshore it was more options
and on Saturday he was pretending
to be our dearest pile of bones

I’ve been especially on in the kitchen
which is where we’re interviewing
here’s the grand piano we got down

then into a visual debt which I will try to make a
pretty decision about and also
I should breathe a little in ownership
or at least its attendant authorship

the arrival time on this telephone where
I seize the apple core of it if I can get one
we’re doing so good now compared to ever

cdlxxxi

This is not peripatetic.
                             —Los Angeles

WE HAVE AN (palm tree)!
I HAVE A (ocean)!
$1,395 per month.  I’ve been awake
since 5:30.  Or just decided to
coffee, so here.  Oh I’m still calling
this walk is the face of rain walk. Its clean
family history my excitement
like my boyfriend’s (at his age)

three weeks into a vacation of fog.
Embarcadero Center and nothing
in my paycheck because we (APARTMENT)
are in limbo (JOB)  (!) . . .

cdlxxx

I have overdue library books,
brownies in a box, individually wrapped,
flavors like “Peanut Butter,” “Caramel,”
“Espresso Nib,” and “Coconut,” a
snowball stressball (I didn’t lie),
a green dragon, a pee-colored
waterbottle, a postcard with a Hockney
portrait, a postcard with a Rauschenberg
combine, 103 degrees at the Carl Hotel,
Blue Moon (employment agency),
interview at 101 California, sirens
in the distance, flared tempers,
a Terra Vista rental deposit, but no
apartment yet, exhaust, Swingline
stapler, Blackberry, two portraits by
Otto, another postcard (Arthur Dove),
a San Francisco streetmap, two
calendars (different years),
two journals (over six years apart),
fog...

cdlxxix

It’s a snowball and a stressball, all in one!
I’ve been having pain shoot up my left arm
these past few days.  Homeless for over
two weeks.  Little did I know, it turns out.

Just my luck.  Another sharp pain, this 

time in my bottom front teeth, the very 

tips. 9 o’clock comes and then what? 

He’s writing in his red diary, moving 

his lips to every word as he writes.

cdlxxviii

As I get older I know more [Flash] [Flash] [Flash].
I’m at the Reverie Café on Cole Street with the letter A.
Last night we went margarita-hopping.

City Lights. Bottlebrush.

cdlxxvii

Here and now atop Russian Hill
with the singing birds. But these birds sing
differently....

[June’s inevitable blowjob. (cf. ProtectYourBanana.com)]

Not like the hollering birds at the diner
on the way back from L.A. Nor like the quiet blue ones
in Big Sur, those pilferers of aspartame.

So begins the San Francisco period.

cdlxxvi

Inflicting this disjunctive neonarrative
is not a bandwagon I hop on without a pogo stick.
Flip on the proto-hippo, shut off the monitor.

Dolores and June’s inevitable jobsearch.
This apartment is exhausting. In it we have the most

stress-relieving panic attacks or something.
Fourteen years ago I put on my glasses
and wait for him at Chow. [Picture this trip]

Now I accept your meeting planner. I give mine
to the Spirit and the Spirit accepts it, and in return
I get a cup of minestrone.

I walk down 20th or whatever. An ice cube with a picture of us inside of it.
Finally, we’re in the Garden of Eden.

cdlxxv

These are the ideal bullet points. These twelve bullet points. Sign here.
Peaces on Earth.

Hockney has arrived. He lights up the bay with Hockney colors.
Walking pale Los Angeles as through the corridors of a bathhouse,
as monotonous as anything else. We have arrived in San Francisco.

The People’s Cafe, Haight Street, Day 2 with Aussie neurosis. Walnut finish.

One-third of a photogenic head peeking around a boulder, Central Park.
I would love to be able to write all of this down. Ooga Booga
in Chinatown, for example, where I spend approx. sixty dollars American.
A build-up of haze in front of the Oakland Hills.

Here at the Carl Hotel we are a bit overwhelmed. We’d love to be able to
[snapshot of BART].

Seagull in the cloud. Four black 2” 3-ring binders.
Airplane at eleven o’clock. Boats and seagulls. Here come more of the clouds.

cdlxxiv

Do you think they can talk around 7am? Starting to feel pretty good.
Hays, Kansas. Sitting at a Pancake House next to a Motel 6.
4th night or 5th morning on the road. Boats finding their way
out onto the pink and blue water. An airplane and its orange rind.

Oh and the clouds this morning were red
and looked like infinity, or a representation thereof. Out toward the Pacific.
One roiling red fluffy ∞ after another.

We’re heading to Denver.
Cutting down on coffee.
Stepping around the artpieces.
Building a giraffe.

The black lamp is cozy with the headset. Nice folks at
Kryger’s Auto Glass—Eastern Kansas is beautiful. Write a few postcards.
Denver.

Timothy at 45 degrees, one ear on the floormap. What an eyeball!
Federal Boulevard and I-70. What at first seemed a heaviness
now something soothing. Not light. Serene though.
Off to do a little laundry.

I’m kinda drained. No clean underwear tomorrow.
Tom Cruise in Kansas, brushing his teeth. My teeth [snapshot of
perfect-bound book]. Altitude sickness. Dentist advert on a Post-It.

cdlxxiii

Motel 6 in Columbia, Missouri—
waiting for U-Haul to call and let us know where to take the truck
to get its window fixed. The passenger side door window having fallen

down into the door and shattered.

Last night we spent in a Motel 6 right before the Illinois line in Indiana.
Oh, Terre Haute.
Sepia was restless yesterday morning. She was crying a bit
and wanted to roam around. Twenty degree angle downward pose.

Another dragon. Very humid and ninety degrees here. Literature

in front of a Pasta House. Louis Vuitton. Plagiarism on the sidewalk
in Illinois. I think he’s just kind of insecure.

Fellowes rubber wrist-rest sidles up to Timothy and the Kleenex.
We want something cold. I put all the birthdays into the calendar.
Most people are in their 30s and 40s. Several black binders
and an MIT marble coaster. A heavy patch of rain at Walmart.
Supermagnets.

cdlxxii

The tape dispenser from Indianapolis
at a Cracker Barrel. Shoots the green dragon
in the foot through the heavy rain after Columbus.
Sprinkling now. We talked about bringing in
a snowcone machine. How early can we come
set it up?

Then he got out of the elevator. [Snapshot of elevator]

“Thank you very much. Nice to meet you.”
These words under heavy clouds — the clouds getting
heavy because it’s supposed to rain. We drive through the rain
and breathe.

[Snapshot in front of the new Gehry building] Road construction.
Walking through rain and gravel on the side of the road
where the candy cooked. Used to cook. No more valentines today
with the early clouds getting big and heavy.

[Snapshot of the green dragon] The tape dispenser from
Napa courts the favor of the pee-colored water bottle.
Timothy has two teeth. He likes snowcones (aka Sno-cones). [Snapshot]

Predict the exact time of the first raindrop on Treasure Island.
Plug it in here. Put the new supermagnets on the refrigerator.

cdlxxi

We’re off to San Francisco.
Sepia is on my shoulder.
She was just watching a bird eat a dragonfly.

Now we’re in New York
in a field behind the first rest stop.
We just bought two “free” lemonades from Boy Scouts.

cdlxx

Several months pass. I am
surrounded by straps of paper,
armed with a cellphone
and a new camera. An Elph.
I got my hair chopped off
one last time at Sal’s
this afternoon. Also,
my new pee-colored
waterbottle.
The sky is blue,
the haze is pink,
the bay is pink and blue....Now
I am walking around Russian Hill.
Everything is the same.
Except it is cold.

cdlxix

The curtains are billowing
androgynously. He is very peaceful.
Somebody says “book an hour.”
Another person (he is full of names)
is wearing a gray sweatshirt
and a pair of bluejeans he’s had on forever.
I know exactly where he’s taking me:
my old apartment with lacy curtains.
A wheezy chime from the direction
of the belltower. Capricious time.
Everybody loves that.
There is nothing that special
about a hamburger panic attack
except that I won’t be eating any more hamburgers.

cdlxviii

I had a salad for lunch. The aunties are moving to Alabama.
I get extra sugar from Carmen. She says it’s a magnolia.
I invented a new word: nonmonogaphobia.
Plus there’s now a better rate of return on given-away phone numbers.

We’re both breathing. He likes Fritos and he fills up a notebook like I do the white one.
The uptight air is salt air. People die but telephones don’t.
Last month was chicken in cucumber.

I slept in a trailer two nights in a row, a silver one.
“Like the prow of a ship,” she said. It was cold. I slept hard.
Water dripped. I had to close the door. The door got stuck. It was also dark.
There was a squirrel or a bird on top of the trailer sometime after the sun came up.

I was dancing. Paid time off.
I forgot how to do this. No I didn’t.
We met in a wine bar. In the future.

cdlxvii

I’ve chosen to sit in the library
very late in the afternoon
having not taken a lunch break.
I gave my notice today too.
Hydrochlorothiazide.
Okay I’ve taken a break.

cdlxvi

I cannot — am I mad? — I cannot make myself do
anything I should.  I want to shut down.
Indefinitely.

What’s a kiss solidify?

People’s voices out the window, indeterminable words.
Undecipherable.

Also, I don’t have any gray hairs.