Tsunami
Just a few years since 9-11,
it's all over the Internet, linking headlines, one after another
bodies stretched on a beach, washed back to shore,
the smell of thousands gone to heaven

as survivors sit inside a circle of grief for lost children and mothers,
fathers, holiday goers at peak-season with an ocean view,
indigenous peoples extinct below the ground cover,

while the war in the Middle East,
which has absorbed our world with its killing
continues to make a blood sacrifice
for some religious rant or right.

Nature has reclaimed her theatre.
Give succor to the living.

Okay

I'm thinking you protected me, belched loud on a rock so I wouldn't notice how you couldn't dance the way I always wanted you. Our link together is billowing silk until it cuts

through the force of years as you got dragged up on a beach, while I was washed into the sea, and how we both missed each other. I'm thinking the computer keyboard are piano keys to a song I'm playing.

Christmas Eve 2004
Along the trail,
there's a sewing machine,
its bobbin a rusted minaret for sparrows.

I think the fairies were repairing
the world last night,
at least along Leona Canyon.

Looking Backward
Some people think a house is a castle,
but yours was a citadel
where you holed yourself off from the world,

watching tv at your desk in a bedroom
that really was a living room.
Some people think a house is a castle.

Each day you cursed the world in your room
allowing dawn no asylum through shut blinds,
where you holed yourself off from the world.

Moving from your desk to a computer desk,
inside a character who was king of them all.
Some people think a house is a castle.

Busy? You were dodging memories,
wrapped in the lineament of a child
where you holed yourself off from the world.

Yours, an inviolable space, a bubble
I, or strangers could rarely permeate, a place
where you holed yourself off from the world.

Offshore Spherific
She worked in a programming sphere
where the passage of conscience
made her think life was a reality show,
any day a contestant could go packing,
as judges reached the shoreline
the whole thing could blow up in her face.

Real problem: there was so little face-to-face
in the web sphere
where a straight line
had no up and no down and no conscience,
only for those who failed to go packing,
and no one was underwriting that one-hour show.

At least not immediately. The politicians talked a good show;
they looked her right in the face,
said jobs were in the mailroom packing,
and unless she played along with their surround sphere
by going offshore with her conscience,
she could forget everything, including a byline.

Not even the networks knew about wavy lines,
they didn't have enough imagination to show
a "crisis of conscience."
Like any sane person, she did an about face;
there was so much BS in the hemisphere,
now she's judging for herself who needs to go packing.

If she got the word to go pack,
it's because her signature wavered on the dotted line
where she'd rhapsodically doodled, entranced by the material sphere,
wanting to feed her hunger, so she could show
no hunger; no question, it was her face,
a credit card never had a conscience.

But it wasn't about conscience,
was it? And it wasn't about who was going packing.
That was a threat. As plain as her face,
as the nose on a fish who's just met a fishing line
and finally understands its own element; no show,
the real thing: just being tangled in her own perfect sphere.

Motion Tabled
I cook for the ghost crowd,
roast chicken, string beans,
white wine, wishing I'd gone
to bartender's school and learned
how to mix the right drink
so maybe I wouldn't
have fallen in love with you.

I did anyway, sipped whatever
you poured inside a goblet
with its woman's body for a handle,
a gift from the czar's table,
a toast for long life
on the eve of a wedding,
something in your family.

Or did you drug me,
slip a few red grains
lodged beneath your thumbnail
into my cup,
and I, who wanted more than anything
to live within your four walls,
pretended not to see?

My bones tell me you are happy somewhere.
What am I going to do with all this food?

Symaria?
You know,
the girl who stays
near Eastmont Mall
because when her grandma,
who use to live up
the street from us
died, all the kids
scattered
but none of them
went to the County,
except the oldest
doing time
at a youth facility
in Fremont,
and Symaria,
who sees her Momma
every so so
along with
her two-year old brother,
that makes eight
boys in the family,
sucks her finger
all the time
come on, she's nine
years old like me,
just sucks
with her barrettes
click-clacking
even in hip-hop
class where you gotta be
doing something else
with your hands.
"You wanna know where is she?
--Sitting in front
of our TV set dreaming--"
saving up
all those stories,
some day Symaria's
gonna tell.