No. 11
Just as I was about to answer, I was side-swiped. Deliberately. It was the kind of move I'd seen linebackers make on TV at football games.

"It's you again." It was the ticket taker in the lobby who'd stopped me before on my way in.

"Why'd you do that?"

"You want to talk about it?"

"Yeah." I bulked up my chest with a few quick breaths.

"Hey, man. I don't know about you, but I'm working this morning." He dismissed me and Lulu to the area outside the theater.

"You know that guy?" she asked.

"Not really," I said. "Maybe he needs to do stuff like that to keep his job interesting."

"I wouldn't want to be a ticket-taker," she agreed, and ransacked her purse. She pulled out a tube of chapstick, and ran it over a nasty red bump on her arm. I must've looked puzzled because she said, "It's got lot of vitamin E oil."

"So where do you want to go?" I sized up my partner in the daylight.

"Coffee?" she ventured.

"Sure." We walked down the street where I knew the whereabouts of a cafe that had decent coffee and sold day-old croissants for half the price. Heated up in a microwave, you couldn't tell the difference. In fact, I thought it was pretty decent of the owners to be up front about the freshness of their merchandise. These days, it was hard to know when someone was running a line or a stale roll your way. Except I'd prided myself in knowing the difference.

"You live around here?"

"Yeah," I said, and refrained from any further details. I couldn't be too sure about Lulu. I mean she seemed like an okay girl, but how was I supposed to know she wasn't some plant with runners that would somehow choke me? Let's face it. I've always had problems with personal relationships particularly with women. I can admire them from a distance. But it's the up close and personal that gets me every time. On the other hand, I make a point of taking help where I find it. It's not like I didn't want a social life. Everyone was so busy doing stuff all the time that didn't have any connection to my life. Really, I'm just a family kind of guy who's afraid of commitment.

"So d'you always carry a video camera around with you?" I asked Lulu once we were seated at the table, each set up with our own cup of coffee and croissant.

"I'm thinking of going back to school. Film school," she said. "There's no more money in tech."

She had a point there, but I'd had my fill of studying and writing papers, and couldn't imagine anything less I wanted to do than to go back to school. Right now, it was tech or nothing.

"I'm thinking working with you around this mass movement thing, I can shoot good footage. I need to get a scholarship and the competition is tough."

I took a gulp of coffee and looked at the glass coffee mugs lined up in a row above the espresso machine, and the light reflected on the wall.

"So tell me about this mass movement thing."

"It has something to do with Prowlie."

"Prowlie?"

"Someone you wouldn't know."

She tore end end of her croissant and washed it down with coffee. "You know I think that was pretty gutsy what you did today."

"You did?"

"Sure, most guys I know would never take that kind of risk."

I reassured her, "I've never done anything like that before."

"Just what I thought. I figured you needed a partner in crime."

"I'm not about anything illegal."

"Hey man, it's just a figure of speech." She folded her arms on the table. "So what's the plan?"

I took a deep breath. "I don't really have one."

Still Life
Skin along my arms is starting to curdle
into waves that cannot be hidden
by exercise class or body lotion.

Maybe I'll melt into moisture
between my two pressed thighs,
or offer a kiss of peppermint,

green and fragile, to a new love.
My books stand upright. Their spines face me
in shelves, some are scattered on a table.

Data Hublet
It was one of those relaxing Saturday mornings where I had a chance to look at my loveable geek sitting behind something other than his souped-up laptop computer. Actually, he was slumped behind the kitchen table and was sipping tea, not his usual double-strength French roast.

"What's wrong?" I asked the geek.

He placed the porcelain cup that I'd bought at a local garage sale on the bridge table. Despite all stereotypes, not all geeks make a lot of money,at least not this one.

"What do you mean?" he crinkled his one brow at me that the boys on "Gay Eye for the Straight Guy" would've just loved to wax.

I stepped up to the plate. "Well, I said, two things," having learned to enumerate things clearly enough so that my geek could go right to the source with a minimum of distraction. "Number one, you're sitting here instead of your office. And number two," I said, stirring the half-and-half into my own coffee cup, you're drinking tea. Tea!"

Behind his hazel eyes, I recognized slight hurt. "Today I've decided I like tea. Besides, I'm designing a data hub," he said softly. "And I need something different."

And was I chopped liver? Last night he'd had a glass a wine with me, but had disappeared for the rest of the evening to "think about things." I should've known better than to even ask, but then again, I'm a glutton for punishment. "A data what?"

"It has to do with business objects."

I hated when he did that, rolling something out there to tease me, and then leaving it alone again. He knew I'd bite. "Okay. I'm listening."

"A data hub guarantees a master identity for a given business object, such as a customer, or a product."

There was nowhere to run or hide. "Say again."

"Say you're in the supermarket and you have a bunch of stuff in your shopping cart." I'd heard enough about shopping carts to last a lifetime. "I mean a real shopping cart," he interjected, recognizing my blank stare. "Say that each item in your shopping cart has a memory about the exact place it had come from on each aisle, and from any section of the shelf."

I nodded appropriately. "Well," he brightened, "your shopping cart would be a data hub with the ability to unify and reconcile common data across a collection of information systems."

I could see that something had clicked for him. Today it wasn't me. But there was always tomorrow. He put down his tea cup, and went to his desk.

At the Summit of Mt. Madonna
Green and purple throated, a hummingbird grazes my arm
en route to Penstemons where it lunges into red,
every thrust a bounce.

Soon hummingbird will parry Gilias open, first me

who laid on a wooden deck, slats against my back,
moved my hand once to shield my eyes,
but then to the garden

with thoughts of my son's refusal
to find comfort anywhere.
Suddenly, the bird hang-glides

three inches from my nose while I watch its wings vibrate
sizing me up, deciding if I'm another Penstemon,

and I forget about tracing meaning from events
on the back of my eyes.

Now the bird whips my new red hair at high-speed.
I dyed it last night. I could be a flower,
open my mouth to speak, but stop.

The hummingbird flies to the Gilias.

Remembering Memorial Day
what it felt to be who I always was
myself by the beach watching
ocean curl itself into rollers
surrounded by trees, a powder puff
on earth's shingle surface scratching
the air's back;
hormonal love gone,
a Fallopian call for children
gourded into glass and stone
of kitchen linoleum,
what is love now, who am I,
what do I need?

No. 10 Will Come Again
Everyone left the theater, still chanting on their way out, "Remember Abu Ghraib."

The riot guys surrounded me on stage with daggers in their eyes. "Hey, Mike, you creep." I didn't know that was my middle name. "You better pay up."

"Yeah, we're all expecting those freebies you promised on our search engines."

I wanted to tell them that Google could sell them a product to do it better, but didn't think this was the best time.

"Don't forget, bub," said the Nike GI Joe. "You owe us," he said, putting down his toy Uzi. "Man, how I want to get out of these clothes."

They all left, leaving me on the stage with my chin still balanced on the parquet floor.

"How could you?" asked the woman with the video recorder.

Clearly, the cinema's janitorial contract didn't include sweeping the stage. I dusted myself off. "What do you mean?"

"Excuse me?" She was easy to look at, one of those gym nut types with trim biceps and rounded calves, a sleeve of tatoos ran down one tanned arm and ended with a rose. She kept waving those biceps , making her hair move in a smooth brown curtain. "You pull off this hoax and you ask me what?"

"No hoax. I was being dramatic."

"Great. You're more out of your mind than I thought. My name's Lulu," she said, and extended a hand full of painted red fingernails.

"Mike," I said.

She was packing her video recorder into a leather satchel. "So explain. What were you doing?"

"I was trying to build a mass movement."

"A mass what?"

"I figured everyone was busy all the time doing nothing because we didn't know what to do about anything. So I wanted to find something we could do together."

"Like what?"

"Convince Osama bin Laden to call for world peace because if he steps up to the plate, then the rest of the big leaguers will have to play ball with him."

She shook her head. "You call that a strategy?"

"You got something better?" We were almost out the front entrance. "But now I've ruined everything. I've got all those people mad at me for being a fake. I can just forget everything."

"But don't you see?" she said. "You got everyone to start chanting around the theater. It worked."

I hadn't considered that. "You're right!" I said. "Will you help me to build a mass movement?"

She swung the satchel over her shoulder. "Sure," she said. "I don't have any contracts right now."

"The economy's been in the toilet," I said as we walked out together.

She asked, "You in high-tech also?"

No. 9 By Design
Which is where I wanted to be, to go home wherever that was. Any place as long as it was far away from my comic book life.

The Nike guy lifted his heel from the back of my head. "Stop that stuff," I heard him say. "C'mon, you don't have to do that." I heard scuffling, but all I could think of was that my arms hurt twisted behind my back, something I hadn't bargained for.

Prowlie and I had met on Glass Beach near Fort Bragg, a place that had begun after World War II as a city dump, but had changed in my lifetime as the best place this side of the Mississippi River to hunt for beach glass, all kinds of it, blue, green, softly mottled shades of white. It was during the time when I went to community college and was on spring break. We were both at Glass Beach going through the dump and did some trades. He said he had a customer for the purple glass I'd found.

"Hold this glass up to the sun," he said extending the purple shard my way, "and tell me what you see." We ended up spending the rest of the afternoon together and I slept in his rust-bucket trailer.

"Sarge, let's leave," one of the riot gear guys said, dropping a gun to his side. "I don't want to be arrested."

"Wus," hissed the Nike sarge, and stepped on my head harder.

"You're enjoying this way to much," I said to him.

I saw someone else come up to the stage and whisper something in the sarge's ear. In the meantime, the chorus of "Remember Abu Ghraib," was getting louder. People were pouring out into the aisles and walking around the back and the front of the cinema. Even though this was only the morning, other people were walking from off the street to find out what was going on.

In a few minutes, the cinema manager was on the scene. He said to me, "Hey, we didn't talk about my losing money. I thought you were going to work on my Web site." Then he ordered everyone in a voice that was louder than any Dolby system, "Get your sorry asses out of here. All of you."

No. 8 Stays at the Gate
As I lay there with my nose flattened on the wooden floor, all I could think about was Prowlie, my childhood friend who taught me how to cash in beer bottles for their resale value, and how to fool a fish into tasting the disguised metal of a hook.

Prowlie, a lean bean-pole of a man whose head was balanced upon a lancet of spine, got his name because he always hung out in one of the many parking lots that fronted Highway 1. He was a working man, and made his living by hustling tourists who got in and out of their cars, offering recommendations for the best hamburger joint along the coast, the best place to see wildflowers on the other side of the rainy season, where to go to get a transmission fixed without paying an arm and a leg, and where to buy anything else you wanted. Of course, Prowlie had a complicated system of referrals and kick-backs, which were all invisible to his customers and to their whining kids. But at the end of the day, Prowlie never felt he was taking advantage of anybody; no, he was a one-man Chamber of Commerce.

He dressed the part, too, convinced me to let go of a broad-brimmed hat because he said it made him look, "dignified," and always wore a belt in his pants; knew enough about keeping his hands and feet clean and chewing a toothpick to keep his teeth healthy. Tourists wouldn't allow just anybody to sidle up to their SUVs. It took a special kind of person.

His customers gave him something back, too. They told them their stories. How they hated their jobs, or hated their wives and husbands, how they wished they'd moved up to the coast to be near nature but never had the nerve, or how they were driving to a funeral or to visit the redwoods for the very first time.

Prowlie loved the redwoods. He said his mother bore him in a grove outside of Crescent City. "I'm just like the salmon," he told me. "I want to keep going back."

No. 7 is no Trip to 7-11
They pulled my arms behind my back and one of the was forcing me to the floor, all this in front of about 300 witnesses. "Geez," I thought these guys are stupid." One of them looked a lot like the guy popping milk duds in the front row except his Nikes were really clean. I knew because his white laces were almost running a plumbline inside my nostrils.

"You can't do this," I said, choking on my saliva. "Did you ever hear of freedom of assembly?" By this time I was lying spread-eagled with my head downstage.

Nike guy guffawed. "Wise guy, huh. Did you hear what he said?" I think he was addressing the audience. "Ever hear of Homeland Security?"

"Hey, Bub. This is a seminar on outsourcing messages," said the milk duds guy in the front row, who stood up and stacked his double-chins into a single column.

"Huh?" said the Nike guy, digging his paws into my arm.

"This is a technical seminar," said milk duds. "I've got witnesses," and he pointed to the audience. "We all came here this morning to learn something. Now I know what."

A woman swept a recorder above her head. "You're in a shit load of trouble. And I've got the video to prove it." Then she shouted, "Remember Abu Ghraib."

Suddenly, everyone starting chanting with her, "Remember Abu Ghraib, Remember Abu Ghraib," and the guy pinning me to the floor was starting to turn the same color as his Nikes. The rest of the riot squad was left standing in the aisles.

No. 6 is Quick
Venus was in retrograde, but I wanted to give this group of Busyites who could've just as easily gone to their jobs and slept until noon instead of coming here, their money's worth.

"What we need to do will change tide tables. What we have to do will make each one of us grow two feet. We need to find Osama bin Laden and talk about peace. Because unless we start talking, it's a big mumble. And there's nothing like a terrorist with clout in Washington. Then our days and nights will grow more rhythmic, and we won't wait for the next thing to divert our brains. We'll be able to feel each other."

But before I could put my lips together for the next word, the cinema doors were pushed open by several dozen officers dressed in riot gear. They rushed to the stage. "Arrest that motherfucker! Arrest that terrorist!" I realized they were pointing at me.

No. 5 is no Jive
"Who do you think you are?," asked a large Afro-American man whose jacket had a single button that rested at the widest point of his stomach.

"I'm doing the show."

"But where's your ticket?"

"I don't need a ticket." He waved me inside with an annoyed snort.

So there I was on the stage in my jeans and t-shirt watching people find a seat. It was amazing to witness the numbers of my colleagues who wanted to postpone the inevitability of going to work on a Monday morning. The first third of the theater was filling up. The Egyptian mummies and hieroglyphics decorating the side of the theater were shining in gold-paint glory. I watched more people sit down and park a laptop computer where a giant slurpie should've been. Some wore their best grungies, others were actually suited up and tucking business cards inside their pockets. Let the networking begin.

Then I panicked. "What the fuck was outsourcing messages about and why hadn't I thought about this sooner?" I asked myself. So I did what I was best at -- bullshitting.

"Hi, everyone," I said. My name is Mike Powers," and I'm the one who invited you to this seminar. Sorry we have no coffee and bear claws, but I couldn't convince the management to give up their concession in the back. But if you want a Coke and a box of popcorn, they can help you out." A polite wave of smiles flickered through the crowd like a flashlight. "This morning we're going to be talking about outsourcing messages," I said.

"Are they going to be taking more jobs away from us?" asked a man in the front row who was folded inside several double chins, and was popping milk duds into his mouth at an amazing rate.

"It's worse than that," I said. "Unless we find a way to speak to each other, we can kiss any kind of system we got going good-bye. They'll be no networks, no streets, no nothing. What I'm talking about is the disappearance of music and dancing as we know it today. No parties. Weekends will become indistinguishable from the rest of the week. Existence will become pure survival without fun."

The man with the milk duds was popping the last one into his mouth. He reached for his slurpie. It was deep purple.

No. 4 Hits the Floor
If I know how to do anything it's about establishing separate proprietary connections with partners. But partner is the operative word here. I had to figure out a way for the many to hook up with the few, the many in this case being, all my friends who were suffering from the same busy syndrome that was sending our social lives down the toilet, and the elusive Osama. Basically, everyone had to get on the same page so we could turn one over.

I decided to have a rally, a first megaphone point with one setting, which was always on loud. The local movie theater seemed like a good place. During the day, especially in the morning, the only thing it was filled with was stale popcorn. Plus, the owner was a progressive kind of guy who used the theater's marquee to exhort the public to impeach George Bush. I figured he wouldn't mind renting one of the smaller theaters to me at a cut-rate price, maybe even do a trade, just in case he needed some IT work on the theater's Web site.

I sent out email to all my friends and people who somehow were inhabiting my Outlook address book, about a seminar for IT professionals that had to do with outsourcing messages. Was I being misleading? Well, not necessarily. I was only handing over one jig-saw piece of the puzzle. But mostly, I wanted to make it possible for my friends to get an hour off from their jobs, just in case they weren't working from home like me and able to shift for themselves. I was giving them a way to sell this thing to their managers. "C'mon, a free seminar. It'll only be an hour." Everyone knows that most programmers eat by 11am. I called the meeting for 10:00am.

No. 3 is Me
So there I was sitting at my desk sipping a Coke, watching the bubbles erupt into caramel-spice fissures. If I were a chemist, maybe I'd have analyzed the contents, instead of thinking about my baking soda science experiments in third grade with a bunch of green vomitous goop that had oozed from the center of a clay volcano. But since I'm a XML programmer and not a chemist, my mind quickly drifted from the contents of soda to something completely different. It was the Spiderman decal on the outside of my plastic cup. And it was moving. Actually, it wasn't moving. But the light from the 3 o'clock sun had passed through the cup and reflected what looked like a few letters on my cubicle wall. I know you're thinking this poor guy has been staring at the computer screen for too long. But it was really there, some unknown alphabet I'd seen in my reading but couldn't place. I'd copied the letters down on graph paper and scanned them into the computer, then went into Google hoping to find a match. With a bit more research, I had my answer. In Aramaic, the letters spelled, "You, too, brute." Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. It was more clear to me than anything I'd ever done before. The tone and slant of the letters were all there. I had to find Osama bin Laden and convince him that he was the only one who could bring peace to the world. The alternative was too scary.

But if the CIA, U.S. Special Operatives, the Pentagon, drug dealers, and hired guns from throughout the world could not find Osama bin Laden, how the fuck was I, armed with a collection of Beastie Boy t-shirts and a week's supply of Chicken Top Ramen, going to convince him to come out of hiding?

I just had to. Bin Laden was the only one at this point in time, who could put up two fingers and say, "Peace Out," and really mean it with a vengeance.

No. 2 No Ones are Alike
But just so you don't think I'm a hedonistic creep, I absolutely understand my social life isn't the only thing around. I have some kind of consciousness, even though I only recently arrived in the city after my parents died. I paid off my own college loans, indentured to the workforce before I was old enough to buy a bus pass. I ate my share of donuts and pizza in community college trying to feed myself, which has contributed to this Michelin tire that I'm trying to work off on the jogging track. It all filters down. So what are we going to do? Wait for a new cultural phenomenon like when hip-hop was real and fresh to pull us out of the doldrums? So I came to a decision. I felt good about it. I had this sense of certainty in my gut. It was the same sense I had when my writing teacher in community college told me I'd never amount to anything unless I figured out how to put together a sentence. I'd break into a cold sweat anytime I was in the same room with a keyboard, unless it was to program. I sweated it out, but I managed to put one sentence in front of the other. So I knew. It was the right thing to do. I was going to build a mass movement.

But my outstanding question was how, how was I going to build a mass movement? Now there was a guy I grew up with in Eureka; Prowlie, we used called him because he was always prowling around trying to hustle the tourists along Highway 101 who were on their way to see the redwoods, who use to talk to me all the time. Actually, he didn't say much, but one thing he did say stuck with me.

"Kid, you need to look at the world through your own glass and watch the light spread."

Now, of course, that didn't tell me anything about how to build a mass movement, but at least it was a place to start.

Busy

No 1 Front Street

If I hear it again, I’m gonna scream. “Can’t.” “Got to go.” “Sorry, I’m busy.”

“Busy, busy, busy,” what the fuck is everyone so busy doing? I wondered to myself after calling up friends to see who’d like to zoom by and head off to the downtown microbrewery, pick up a jazz quintet that was getting good reviews in the local newspaper. And plus, the place poured enough beer to last for an entire set. A good deal, if you'd asked me.

“Nah, man, I’d really like to come by, but I’m busy.”

“Sure, I’ll catch you later,” I said.

“Call me up another time, uh, maybe the end of the week? I’m really busy.”

“Talk to you later,” I said.

I was getting pissed off. What was everyone doing, and why wasn’t I doing it with them? I understand the ordinary meaning of busy. Meaning, I’ve got to reload a program on my computer, got to work late, have great tickets for tonight, or want to watch the game on TV. But this was a different kind of busy. A busy that made me edgy because it had no name. All my friends were in a state of being busy, meaning they really didn’t know why they were busy, only that they just were.

“So what are you doing tonight?” I asked. “Maybe I can join you?”

“Nothing special.”

“Then how can you be busy?”

“Don’t ask so many questions, man. I just am.”

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have made a big deal about it. I’m as capable as the next guy of spending time by myself. There’s always the television, or I could do some shopping because the last time I looked in the refrigerator, which was last night, I saw a package of cheese and a jar of spaghetti sauce, and I knew I didn’t want to have that again for dinner. Plus, if I got really ambitious, I might decide to drop by the cleaners and pick up my shirts, or play a few rounds of live billiards on the computer. But I’m a caring kind of guy and something was happening to my friends. They all sounded nervous and preoccupied. Busy.

“What do you mean, busy?”

“Geez, some guys are persistent.”

“I only asked,” I said.

“I don’t know, man. I have a lot on my mind. Have you watched the news lately? I don’t know how to handle it.”

“So why don’t we go out and have a good time?”

“Can’t.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re busy.” That didn’t go over big. I heard a click.

Well, I didn’t know much more than I did before. But that won’t stop me. Here's my theory about busy. There's so much going on, it's starting to implode. The hostage situation, car-bombs, fathers screwing their kids and blowing them up with guns, nuclear show-downs, kids with no schools to go to school to. Man, this shit is affecting my social life.

Birth
Birth expands into the world
bathed in cries

blows a trumpet
to announce the divine

escalates
a human being

across the bandwidth
of the universe.


Birth unwinds
the pattern of a name

finds love
as creation is pain

only wants
to run with it

trembling
on a slender dew point.


Birth is a song
for each life

takes a kiss
and parts the sea

into
shoreline

delivered with a bow
when its done.

Daughter of Wind and Water 

Name Refrain
My heart contains an extra chamber
where I hide my name from the tide,
the only thing left to me
from the old days. Mine
until I swim the channel.

Named after a grandmother I never knew,
a sound translated from Hungarian into English,
picked by Edgar Allen Poe
whose Raven my mother recited at bed-time,
a solid thing that cast no shadow.

She didn't allow me a nickname.
I stayed who I was,
a girl who spoke to stray dogs on the run.
I see with the brown flecks
of my mother's green eyes,

I'm my father's voice in the shower,
my father who ripped across the Atlantic at such speed,
he diverted the current,
and my mother's attention
from bridling sea-horses with seaweed.

My parents wait for me to swim
past the weekend and beyond the bridge
where seagulls fly above water
looking for a drifting name,
any easy target for them to pick off.

Death Valley, April 2005 

Prayer to Death Valley
1.
The desert blooms gold in the spring
where I've come to make a pilgrimage
after years of living in cities.

All I hear is expanse.

Blooms yellow gold with purple mats
spreading across the desert floor
like a beautiful contagion.

I stand below sea level
on a skating pond of salt
looking out on two tectonic plates
and so want to catch it,

the way a flower struts its stuff
on a shelf of rock.

Change me.
Make me new.

2.
All I hear is expanse.

Long ago,
near Hunts Point Avenue in the Bronx,
I strolled with my doll, Judy,
along a slate pavement.

I remember how she smelled
when I first opened her box,
like a bird with the scent
of cut grass on its wing.

She had an alluvial fan of brown hair.

I loved her so much.
When her sawdust brains poured
into my hand,
my mother bought
new dolls to take her place
with clothes, and some could talk.

Imposters.

I vowed silence
until I found out
what had gone wrong,
flew back
to the only place where trees grew
in my borough, Pelham Bay Park.


3.
All I hear is expanse.

I've seen people
walk through a revolving door
to find air conditioning
on a long afternoon
exhausted by heat,
looking for water.

The dead cannot be replaced,
only remembered.

It's creation we know nothing about.


4.
Valley, uplift this daughter.
Fold together my pain.
Change me.
Make me new.

Show me the terrible place where love comes from.

School Figures
A student of harpoons
with holes drilled inside lungs,
and how to pack caverns
with compost from each day,

until there's no more
batting to stuff down there,
or she's unable to keep
cotton-mouthing his name,

when emptiness forms
a pond of tension
for some recognizable thing
to skitter across, or not.

On the Job
I've tested positive for boredom,
rushed to the balcony twice, no three times,
hung my head over the pilasters
and hoped for someone Romeoesque
to call me with his swan song
into discus hurling the whole thing:
pension, security, health insurance.

I've tested positive for Baudelaire
running giddy-up in my bloodstream,
invoking his curse for the ego power chumps:
"Manges la merde." Eat shit.

But what can I do? Centrifuge more results?
If I don't figure out something soon,
I'll be addicted to boredom.

Trees in Two Voices
Several trees crowd on a bank.

Does it matter what kind of trees they are?

Yes. Oak, Bay. A few others.
Here come birds to land in their green corona.

Can a bird choose between branches?

Yes. A department store of trees.
Right size, smell. Some trees grow more proud.

Do you mean more tall?

Yes. They steal sunlight.
Smaller trees scavenge beneath them.

Does this make the small trees cry?

No. They siphon water.
Growth is in the roots.

Can you hear what the stream says?

Rush-a-la, rush-a-la.
It's the sound of time washing.

What's Going On?
Vietnam was televised,
but not the Revolution,
chants echoed across Sproul Plaza,
monks, nuns
doused themselves with gasoline
as an appetizer for a lit match,
Hmong storycloths traveled down river,
while different pieces of soldiers
chatted with each other on gurnies.

I am there on this last day
before cases are dismantled
holding an audio cassette,
but listening to something else,
as adults explain,
"The V they are making is the peace sign."

I am there in these last days of winter,
and see a man point to a display,
"I use to deliver that same newspaper,"
watch children nod with understanding,
as someone touches their finger
to history, how much it hurts.

--written after seeing "What's Going On? California and the Vietnam Era" at the Oakland Museum, August 28, 2004 - February 27, 2005

Anger
for Anita Barnes
1.
Anger raises its own shield so thick
nothing can penetrate it
cry no shout no hand

when invisible shields are up
phasers ready to strike
no getting through

a thousand cobras
in outer space
for too long cold

even for them.
Snakes come home
from whatever ouroboros,

why I wouldn't fly
the first seven years we were married
I heard hissing.


2.
Why was I so angry
a young girl
who had everything

living in the Bronx
commuting to high-school
two hours away

weekends
at a posh
hospital address?

I never wanted to go to kindergarten.
A teacher with a hair-net
who locked me inside closets.

She wanted me
to line up by size,
her mind so boring.

In third grade, my mother
rolled out dough
to make me

into something
she could understand,
my father

with his eyes
of brown leather
bathed in acetone

so soft
enough to see me
rose-colored.

When they both died,
the pie was opened,
I was alone with my anger.


3.
Then there was you,
my husband of 20 years,
with a curtain of anger

you raised
above your daily performance,
Red Velvet Gone Bad,

is what I called it,
with demon authors
who drank you under the table.

At first,
I couldn't get enough,
I was fascinated

watching your aura borealis
spread out in lights
until I became

a character in the play.
You saved a part for me.
I was the villain.

Then the two of us
could get angry.
Every day blades

went up in a salute.
After awhile,
I tip-toed around,

threw words
back at you.
But you were too agile, loud,

had spent years in improv.
What could I do to save myself?
Duck.

4.
You said you loved me.
I can still smell the nicotine between my fingers
from when we used to sit down with each other

at the table and talk
about life and love
and what we were going to eat for dinner,

a tin of smoked oysters,
together with
a glass of red wine.

Why couldn't you see what was happening?
For years we occupied separate bedrooms,
started our day together

in mid-afternoon.
Now you've left me
with our two children

and the sound of my own anger,
which is like water
hissing from a punctured hose

someone's forgotten in the front-yard
after she's been out-of-town
longer than expected.

Brit Shalom: Convenant of Peace
Long ago I looked
at sky and saw
it was all morning glories,

blue flowers
stretching from
the top of my head

and climbing along
an invisible thread
the way Jack's

beanstalk
grazed the window
of a giant's palace.

Now, I'm no longer
a young girl
who can turn

sky
into flowers
during my morning watch,

but, even so,
I practice
beneath a dome

outlined
by winter rain
in curves of light.

I believe once
you know how to hope,
you never forget.

Psyche Talks to Cupid on a Wood Bench
Along Leona Canyon Trail,
miner’s lettuce just beginning
to surface above the leaf mulch,

I wonder, Cupid, where you've flown to
with your strong white wings,
leaving me to watch television?

Maybe you’d planned to ditch me
all along, never getting close,
appearing only as a shadow.

Why else would you never eat breakfast,
go for a walk, dig in the garden,
do things married people do together?

Maybe it was your way of protecting me
so I wouldn’t have memories
to draw inside my blanket.

It worked too well.
I still want
what I can't have.

Maybe you and my parents,
who stormed off so many years ago,
were in cahoots.

So I ask,
what would you have me do?
I hear the burble of an approaching spring.

Paris Super Saver
Last night I took a day-trip to Paris,
packed a bag and threw it over my shoulder,
walked down the checkerboard street, and caught a bus.

Right before me sitting in the back
were Rimbaud and Verlaine cutting it up on a yellow seat
studded with cigarette burns.

I wanted to say something,
but instead, I burped for cover.
They looked at each other,

waved their arms like wands,
veins river-rafting over their knuckles,

and turning from the window
where I pretended to stare, I finally said,
"Thanks, guys. I so needed to get out of there."

Invocation of the Dead
If the living cannot save the planet,
let the dead confabulate in coffee klatches and tea rooms,
remain polite for a short while
before spinning on bar stools
with the ferocity of a million drunks
spiralling out of control on a cushion
of portobello mushrooms caps
and frisbees covering their collective ass,
let them scream on a ferris wheel of light so loud
so loud someone will hear;

pray that they release their gangs of children
from the sewers of Rwanda,
Bosnia, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Sudan
or unhinge those stuck between two tectonic plates,
let them dig up AIDS orphans
still young enough to hope for parents,
coax them back for one moment
while we pay an entrance fee
of a punched red ticket,
but forget everything once we're in.

If the living cannot save this planet
let the dead chant,
the first indigenous people,
even as a voice announces,
the park will be closing in five minutes;
after a day of riding Phantom's Revenge,
we realize there's no home
for us to go back home to,
all we can do is to kick a few pizza crusts
to the side of the road.

Death Semi-Waka
Now I know that death
is being in the lot late
next to our building,
hearing my name called, "Lenore,"
hearing my name called
to come upstairs for dinner,
but longing to stay
and watch the colors, listen
for shadows silence granite.

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.

Public Discourse
Beethoven's 5th, ballgame cheers,
Doris Day's phone in the 50's,
ringing at the same time
from several street corners,
tucked in a purse, backpack, brown bag,
or held firmly between teeth,
bright Chesire Cat of a mini-kiosk
flipping into a street sign.

She calls from points unknown
to "come and get me,"
when coming and getting
don't know each other
from either direction,
the way a Lion King roars
at a stage puppet
with its head lopped off.

The Ambassador's Message
Can it be possible
I've walked away from everyone
I've loved, when I thought
they were the ones who disappeared,
watched them
roll off time's edge,
calling myself "clean,"
an innocent, laughing
like a madwoman,
bloated with truth?

A father, mother.
Lovers gone. Now you.

Was it my solitary nature,
my need to sort out
what you said first
without a quick answer,
for recruiting you
into this hostile mess
as our silences glazed into years,
when I'm the one
who should've stayed put,
bathed your feet in pomegranate juice?

Can I answer this question?
Can a hostage speak freely?

One evening at summer's end,
you locked yourself out,
left your furniture
for someone else
to dust off with a wet cloth;
I, crouched ragged
in a dirt corner, knew
I couldn't save you.

After Akhmatova
A cataract more like mist
forms on sliding doors
between a couch where I sit
surfing channels, and trees outside
rooted in a water table whose levels rise
before they recede
the way love has from me.

Don't Mind Us,
We're Just Here
to Identify Wildflowers
On the outskirts
of bitterroot
take the water route
to get funded
through a helping
of potatoes
pass the gravy
no room available
for an empire of oil?

No more openings
no more creeks
hail thunder
to the chieftain
on a bedroll
give me hummus
wild orchids
look like scrotums
pinkies on a pyre.

Play-acting
with a mask on
very scary
Halloweenie
Tiger Lily
Peter Pannish
what a nebbish
tip-toe diplomacy
global warming
in a pot-stirring air.

I'm walking
in my diapers
I'm a baby
pampered tie-dye
bachelor buttons
in my sandy
vagina scratchy
going naked
want my bottle
suckers what a bunch.

I'm trailing
on the outskirts
decked in trillium
in delirium
jeans with lycra
counting pollsters
can't be possible
temperate weather
so dry them bones.

To a Young Girl
Watch out for those run-amuck kind of boys
with frayed jeans turned
toward stone pebbled hands rising
from the bottom of kelp beds
who pull you down, down,
much taken with your song
flowing red flecked
inside molten granite;

be on the look-out should one of them
promise a recording contract for all times,
and study the way you kick up sand
along a foaming shell's edge,
so moved so much to place
both your song and stride
inside a cedar box no matter
how your pitch changes.

But speak as I will, a woman
who has loved deeply if not well,
I know none of this
can mean anything until a visitor
stands beneath an awning of love,
who trawls you inside a net
until murk conceals
any thought of your wildness.

Talking to Bob Blues
Today I went out for a stroll
behind the condos where I live,
along Leona Canyon Trail
down by the water that's a sieve.

Sugar-pie daddy, it's so long,
Sugar-pie honey, no more song.

For all my memories of you
that I wear like a crocheted wrap,
until I reach the bench where I
sit and talk of this one and that.

Sugar-pie daddy, it's so long,
Sugar-pie honey, no more song.

And why our love flowed around me
without my sensing its warm touch,
how you always stayed far away,
but said how you loved me so much.

Sugar-pie daddy, it's so long,
Sugar-pie honey, no more song.

Now you listen to my questions,
without getting pushed out of shape,
a leaf drops from a tree, twirling,
then another, again its mate.

Sugar-pie daddy, it's so long,
Sugar-pie honey, no more song.

The Baker
She kneads dough
from whatever's been

hanging around,
rolls out earth, fire, water, air

to the thickness of an eyelash
until the goop is more

or less uniform.

She's ready to bake cookies.

Today the shape of a circle
is her favorite.

She frames one out,
sprinkles a planet

with mountains,
those green trees.

Transformity
A woman bound in black rags,
a burqa falls to mold and mulch.

She's hollowed over a single spark
inside the discolored sink of her hands.

Hers alone this splinter --
to stone with rocks, or feed with her breath?

Just a moment, please.
She's thinking.

Because she swore to keep the treaty,
even after her family disappeared

to a place she can't imagine,
her heart exiled within her chest.

She must allow the spark to burn.
And yet...

Sing Song
When they hear you've died, even now,
so many people don't know what to say. I don't get it.
I thought death was a well-known thing
as compared to when my parents
stopped working. You'd think with AIDs,
the War in Iraq, and 9/11, word had gotten out.

If I were still a technical writer,
I'd put together an instruction manual for co-workers
who avert their eyes,
or tell me how they've sprained an ankle,
or wait for me to call and ask for help.
They are the rescuers.

But what can I tell my friends who stop by my desk
with their unsolicited gentleness,
explain to them how our rivers diverged,
even as I held you between my thighs,
rocked with the great mystery
of who you were?

It's the finality, the caesura
of our lives.
What's left is notation,
written on the face
of our children, the G clef
of how much we once loved each other.

Prayer for Tashlich
I cast my memories
to geese at Lake Merritt
so as they shit,
somewhere between sky and earth,
my Gemini, who had a heart like a volcano,
you will hear me.

I pray fogiveness
that I could not admit to myself
how much I loved you,
because it was opening a deep wound.

I pray forgiveness
that I could not admit to myself you were dying,
and was not there to shepherd you
through those burnt mountains.

I give thanks for the last joke
you left me with,
and hope you are singing
to a loft of children.

Love is what calls us into being.
Death calls us back.

For My Husband, Robert Galitzen
The week you died my gas tank
never dipped below the half-way mark.
I kept driving and driving anywhere
to let in the fresh air.
I had a magic gas tank.

The week before you died
I saw babies asleep with chins on their necks
in strollers, angels of dimpled thighs,
and pigeons rose in spirals against
the rectangle of buildings,

and so I was caught off balance
when I found you in your bed,
eyes rolled back in your head,
arms stretched out as if to receive
the cold kiss of death without flinching.

I had a magic tank of gas
that took my car everywhere,
but not back to you.

Iphigenia at Lunch-time
I'm exiled in a country
between two great waters
where tornados churn houses
into oversized toothpicks, in a mall
where there use to grow corn.

Lunch-time I serve french fries,
wear a uniform that lets me
nod yes or no
without needing much else, but sometimes,
I disappear into my own language,

and thinking this way,
no one would know how my questions
prey upon my mind until they become gelatin,
my father and mother still in the old country,
whose shores I may not cross.

Achilles, my husband in make-believe,
I wanted you to grab the knife
from my father's hand and stop him
from etching my throat in sacrifice.
I had hoped you'd divine

what I could not ask -- to defy a nation
gathered on the beach for history's recital.
So what became of our bravery?
You killed in battle, and I,
pouring black oil upon the altar of a memory.

Porosity of the Styrofoam Man
We bleed
into each other's cell phones.

On the bus
your life follows me,

the same man
with a package in a plastic bag.

I hear about people
you're trying to escape,

the same ones
who’re coming over for dinner.

I hear about heart attacks
and nervous breakdowns

what your friend should of done
instead of opening his big boca.

I know where you'd really like to go
if you could get a day off,

instead you went shopping
with discount coupons.

“Deals mean long lines
and no parking spots,"

you advise, "which is why
I don't drive."

(I don’t know who
you’re talking to now),

nodding for me to take the styrofoam
& remove its plastic,

maybe you tell me
to hold the date,

I don't know
which one, or if this

is about concert tickets
my styrofoam man wants to buy,

while you or he
take(s) two blue pills

how he stayed up
all last night,

like a wheel balanced
on its chrome rim shining,

and I'm feeling you,
I'm feeling you right now.

Ludlow Massacre, 1914
1.
Her name was Little Lucy, no connection to Lucille Ball,
but visitors at the Capitol Mall didn't need to know.

She worked the crowd, flashed her dimples,
wore smoke-soaked clothes, no shoes for her,

the only familiar thing, a hooded black sweat shirt
so she wouldn't look cold, although she was way past

feeling anything since iron rain had fallen
upon her family's tent in Ludlow, Colorado,

when everything she knew had soaked into the ground.
Now she was telling them how it was her birthday,

counted eight more of her at home, spoke their names,
how she lived on the wrong side of the monument,

didn't have a single present, no, not one.
She really didn't want their rings and bracelets.

It was a game she enjoyed playing,
to make people act like they cared for her.


2.
Time to testify at hearings,
walk past lobbyists with American flags
pinned on woolen lapels, take a number,

sit down, and wait until called.
Betty's boy, because that's what people
always had called him when he was living

with Lucy at Ludlow, took a seat in the second row
next to the rest of the delegation, wondered
when he was going to find a playground.

He hadn't come all this way
to climb a bunch of granite.
Betty's boy remembered laughter coming through

the deep muffle. Because if there was one thing
he could do with his life, that was
to keep playing.

3.
None of the chairman
for the President's Commission on Violence
had seen anything like them,
the way they took to the podium
as though they were in a bowling alley,
and they, the 10 Senators, pins.

"Must've taken a school bus
to get you here,"
said one of the members.

But it was clear by the way
the Senator bent into his microphone,
he saw trouble.

4.
For we are not sons and daughters of the middle class
who go to summer camps and take tap-dance lessons.

Our last day here we waited for night.
Night finally came like a wanted child.

Give us a souvenir, a piece of blue sky,
to take back with us to where the tules grow,

where Ms. Universe has corn rows,
twists, and plants stars.

You think we are children.
But you do not know who we are.

Dusk at Canyon Oaks Drive 

Massacre at Ywahoo Falls
1.
We're going to the white dome
where they've never seen us before,
dragging a sled of cardboard
with a potato, grandmother's picture
in a broken nickel frame.
We stream to the Capitol
from everywhere.

We are not sons and daughters of the middle class
who are trying to make ends meet.

Our ends
only know each other
from the same mass grave.


2.
A girl from the crowd takes hold of a guitar
and tunes hundreds of years on it,
a dry scent of nasturtium and chicory
upon her fingers, sings of children
who gather one wave after another
cresting upon the stairway
of their representatives.

We have voices,
wrapped in government-issued wool blankets
as gray as your lined faces
to tell you
we are buried
at the bottom of a cave.

Come find us
in our game of hide and seek.

Find us
where we have been forced to go,
places that have made us into adults
before we could be children,


3.
which is what one of the boys said
elbowing his way
to the Jefferson Memorial
before any of his pasty chums
could remove their hands
from their pockets,
not being use to pockets
except on such spectacular occasions.

Why, according to him,
it was his own idea
to come to the Capitol
since everyone was getting bored,
although he'd been exploring
the water table,
measuring the exchange rate
between bubbles and oxygen.

He might decide to become a fish.
There was no law against it.
At least, none he knew about,

which is why he first walked to the reflecting pool,
drawn to water,
the creepy feeling it gave him
each time he touched his face
and saw it fall apart
there at Ywahoo Falls
with War Woman Selu-Sa-tah,
Cornblossom whose silken tassels
turned Kentucky red
where 100 children
were squashed like nits.

He didn't remember details in any order.
Something about falling water.

4.
thinking he was not born
to become a storage tank for memories.
He is.

On the Way Home
Bouquets of red headlights explode in my face,
petals everywhere.

The Online Music We Make
It's the music we make using our words, how we sound to each other. The same way a choreographer can take a roomful of dancers standing before a wall of mirrors, and teach them all the same routine. But dancers move differently, and put something of their own bodies behind each step, the way they understand a movement, which allows us to know something of their personal expression.

So language too, when it's done up right, can become steps for our voices, without leading us to stumble. For listening and talking online is not equally as satisfying as watching a great performance. For not all partners are adept at language or can understand each other's music through a series of exchanged hints. At best, talking online can lead to dialog. At worst, to pointless one-liners that go no place, except bye-bye.

The Book of Alien Dating:11
Maybe it makes more sense to date aliens, place a post somewhere on an intergalactic highway; I simply don't know how any two people contact each other over the Internet when all we have are words. Well, of course, there are audibles and signals and invitations to play chess, and buzzers to call a person to order themselves in front of the computer screen. But I long for a physical person.

Hopeless Alien: Hey, you out there. I saw your posting from the drawbridge.

Writergrll: You weren't too far away...

Hopeless Alien: Nah, I'm skimming in my saucer tonight. How are you doing?

Writergrll: I'm good. Good weekend.

Hopeless Alien: Nice to hear that. I was looking for your profile the other day up on the Moonsite, but lots of intergalactic weather kicking in and all I got was bounced

Writergrll: By the bouncer?

Hopeless Alien: He's not as big as he thinks he is.

Writergrll: FCOL. I thought you disappeared off the face or something. After I posted my picture I didn't hear from you. I thought it was something I didn't say.

Hopeless Alien. Not at all.

Writergrll: This endless chatter could go on forever.

Hopeless Alien. It does all over the universe. Now tell me...am I a real alien conversing with you now or just the reflection of someone who arrived at this particular portal from some futuristic b-movie in time?

Writergrll: I'm totally overwhelmed, but I'm feeling undeveloped.

Hopeless Alien. Not by the look of things.

Writergrll: What things?

Hopeless Alien. Your breasts.

Writergrll. You mean you aliens go for breasts?

Hopeless Alien. C'mon. You must think I'm really strange.

Writergrll: Just different. But tell me. Are you a man or what?

Hopeless Alien. Not in terms of the typical species definition.

Writergrll: Oh brother.

Hopeless Alien. Not that either.

Writergrll: It's just a form of speech.

Hopeless Alien. Now you're getting warmer.

Elaine was Sick and We Couldn't Go to the Movies
A manicure with purple all-day sucker fingernails to Barnes and Noble for a copy of the 9/11 Commission Report in stacks on the front-door table (piles sounds like hemorrhoids but I'm keeping my fingers in everything these days) , to a nice steak for dinner with grilled onions and peppers, reading New Yorker magazines, Iraqi Poetry Today, and watching TV, a mixed media, a melange experience; sez Baghdad is a captive, forgotten

Free Speech Zone
A free speech zone bounded
on three sides by a house, parking spot, and a sidewalk,
not very big, but it does the trick for now
say whatever you'd like to say and say it well

On three sides by a house, parking spot, and a sidewalk
without it getting back to people you use to work with,
say whatever you'd like to say and say it well
because truth throws a trip wire and makes it rain

Without it getting back to people you use to work with
who'll try to slip a pillow case over your head,
because truth throws a trip wire and makes it rain
far outside the free speech zone where people are dying.

Who will try to slip a pillow case over your head,
and make you look like some kind of a sleeping idiot on uppers
far outside the free speech zone where people are dying?
Step closer. Closer now.

Climbing Into the Attic,Year 2040
There's a parrot with a Barbie peg-leg... 

a PowerPoint slide show that turns into a mini-opera,
but only when you play it on a laptop, 
which is why everyone wants one,
at least everyone who lives in this house.

Oh, Grandaddy. Play it on a laptop.

This is so stupid
someone has sent me an email (tralatrala) and he sounds like the kind of person I'd like to meet (right age, size, an involved father, with the community), but I haven't heard from him all weekend after that first contact I want to hear find out more about who he is even if we don't become special friends there's something about discovering another life's trajectory  (wuz it something I said)?

The Book of Online Dating: 9
What do people mean by chemistry anyhow? Is that a code word for, "Do you think you could go to bed with me?" Or does it mean something more like do get goose bumps when you see me?  Basically, are we talking about pherenomes here?
 
I guess everyone has their own definition of chemisty and the trick is in finding two people who are on that same wavelength. But how will I even know when I'm in the presence of a similar pherenome type of guy? I once thought I did, and nearly ran my car into the parking lot fence if I happened to see a certain someone walk in front of me to get his coffee from the local java hut.  
  
I was so emboldened that I even invited him out to coffee which he agreed to do at some appointed time when he was able to  "get his head above water." As far as I know, his head is still submerged, or perhaps it is simply busy doing something else. So much for chemistry. But I do know the trick is that two people must both be experiencing raging hormones at the same time, which is the beauty of online dating.   
 
For in this world, unlike the more shadowy sinister one out there, we have all boldly stated as we walk through the registration door, "I am available." 
 
However, the next part is more difficult. It requires sorting through thousands of profiles and becoming clever with search criteria and actually connecting with someone to arrive at the place where it's possible to even get a chemistry reaction, reverse engineering if you will, from the general run-of-the-mill score. So by the time we get that first hit, it's possible to really know something about someone so that everything falls into place.  Or am I just dreaming?
 
Dreaming. 
 
Quiet out there.

The Book of Online Dating: 8
We spent several hours emptying the contents of our cups.

"I don't want to talk about my personal relationship," he said.

"I didn't ask you to."    
  
"I really like living by myself." He sounded like he was trying too hard to convince himself, and went on to describe his current difficulties. 

Once we had emptied our cups and recounted our stories, we left the caffeine haze of Peet's to find our cars. He seemed like he was still sorting everything out, and wanted a friend around to help ease the pain.
 
In a few days I received an email asking me if I thought we had chemistry. Chemisty? How about something to say to each other?   
 
Next time before I agree to meet a guy, I'm going to email him a lot first. 

The Book of Online Dating: 7
"A latte," I said.

TigerTailwas more genuine than self-conscious, something which I liked. However, he did seem a bit faded from his online picture by about five to 10 years, the hair more grey than sandy, the jaw more jowl, and he definitely looked thick, but it wasn't in a heavy or a stocky way thick, it was more how a magnet collects metal filings around its middle because it hasn't lost its charge.

The Book of Online Dating: 6
"Excuse me," I replied, and took a quick step backward to the edges of the terracotta tile where I looked at a group of pictures in black frames. They were all of architectural structures, steel beams heaped in various arrangements like pick-up sticks. The place was noisy with people putting in their order for some form of coffee.

Okay, so this wasn't this guy. He'd given me a funny look. I wondered what TigerTail101 would look like. He had described his body type as "thick" and I wasn't sure how that differed from "a few extra pounds."

I waited to make my connection, on the look-out for someone I knew from a 2x3 inch picture. This is really ridiculous, I thought,  how this online dating thing is making me put aside my notion of romantic love. Maybe that's something reserved for younger people, I sighed , whereas online dating services are like a Sears catalog of potential fits, narrowed down to a search criteria.
 
"Black pumps, half-inch heel. Actually, I really like those lime green numbers. They'll go with my new dress."
 
This was matchmaking. In my Internet reading, I've heard that in some parts of the Muslim world, Taliban aside, people do their spouse-hunting online and look at profiles not only of potential marriage partners, but also of their parents.

But how can we possibly do this through words? What about that certain je ne c'est quoi -- a downward cast of the eyes, for example, that makes a person irresistible? Or the way somebody laughs that makes you open up inside with endless blue sky?

Tell me, are education, income-level, and religion fundamentals that must first be acknowledged before any real dialog can happen? And how can you even know what the fundamentals are if you are a young person living in a Westernized country where those kinds of definitions tend to be so much more fluid? What is the difference between what people think they want at a certain age, and what we later come to find out we really need?

"You writergrll?" this man asked me. He spun me around and gave me a hug. "What'll you have?"

The Book of Online Dating: 5
"No," he said.

The Book of Online Dating: 4
"Didn't I tell you that I had a thing for serial killers?" I wrote to an online fellow traveler after he suggested that we continue an email exchange to make sure that neither of us were serial killers, or live dangerously and get together at some appointed place for coffee.

After hanging out at work eight hours a day with transportation planners, and then going home to listen to my daughter's hip-hop music, I needed a break. I opted for up close and personal.

We arranged to rendezvous at Peet's in Berkeley's Fourth Street district, an easy off ramp from the freeway, plus there was available parking.

In the early sixties, Peet's had seceded from the growing Starbuck's coffee machine to develop its own center of artisan coffee and teas in Berkeley. Fourth Street is one of Peet's newer Berkeley satellite outposts with umbrella-shaded tables outside the actual store. Up and down the street were an assortment of hip retailers. I took a slow stroll looking through the windows until I spotted Peets 100 yards ahead, just as I was tucking a $20 dollar bill into my wallet.

For I had realized on the way to our meeting point that I had no money, and I thought it was bad karma to rely upon tigertail101, for that was my date's handle, to offer to buy me a cup. So first I found an ATM machine and stepped up to its stylish mustard-colored window. I knew that if my date didn't make that initial offering to buy me a cup, I'd think he was stingy. But on the other hand, I wouldn't offer to buy him a cup because that would smack of feminist baggage, which I'd already checked at the car door.

I looked to see if I could match a thumbnail with a face. I saw no likely suspects. But there was someone who'd just entered the area, which was noisy with rattling cups and the hiss of espresso machines. He was looking around, and he was cute.

"Do the words serial killer mean anything to you?" I asked.

The Book of Online Dating: 3
It was a stern letter telling me that my picture had been rejected.

It was more than I could handle. I'd been rejected by some anonymous photo police. For several months, I stayed away from the online service. In fact, I resisted the temptation to go online, and instead frequented coffee bars, attended poetry readings, and watched all the movies in my NetFlix queue. I cleaned house, began to lift the burners of my stove and visited the crud that grew beneath them with soap and water, emptied closets and drove to Goodwill with a box of offerings. I even got a pedicure and watched "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" with a newfound appreciation for spa treatments.

Finally, I snapped out of it and opened a message from my sister who had mailed me an electronic album. I was holding her new grandchild from a recent visit, and decided this was a wholesome picture. But surely, no one would think this was my grandbaby? I decided to excise Zachary with Photoshop's handy cropping tools.

What was left of me was a smiling face. I posted my picture.

The Book of Online Dating: 2
Speaking of photographs. I'd like to speak about them for the moment.

I went through my collection trying to decide which one to use that would tantalize the troops into thinking I was a hot number. But that really wasn't my goal, I asked myself, now was it? Suddenly, I was filled with doubts and almost self-loathing should I find myself anytime soon in Las Vegas.

I clicked open my stock of jpegs. This particular one of me lying on a tattoo parlor bench was going to give the wrong impression, not that I knew what the right impression was, but certainly not one of a single rose curling up the middle of my lumbar region. It revealed a lot more than I thought was appropriate, particularly with a skimpy white towel draped across my ample behind. Another more recent photo showed me in full dress attire but I was standing before the entrance to a Howard Johnson's Motel, and I didn't want to communicate a certain flighty disposition.

This was about forming new and meaningful relationships, I waffled again. I knew I wasn't going to be able to do this. Finally I located my courage at the bottom of a circular file, in addition to a rather nondescript photo of myself gazing at a disappearing point beyond the camera's frame. Actually, I was looking at my friend who was waving her hand at me and saying, "Smile, will ya!"

I could get the photo digitized, I conjectured, "That should take me at least another day. Maybe two if I'm lucky." But then in a sudden moment of abandon, I posted the photo of myself on the tattoo table. I decided it showed I was daring.

The next day I received my first communication from the service.

The Book of Online Dating
The last thumbnail I dated looked like a frog. But who minds a frog when after 20 years I'd been married to a coyote? Frogs have the potential of becoming princes, once a person overcomes their initial adversion to them, while coyotes just howl at you every night.

My frog did not become a prince, although there is a good possibility he may yet become another's. While our time together lasted for but a brief eight months, we did manage to help each other get through the initial downslide of mutual relationships, he from some psycho, and I from a husband who loved me in all the wrong ways, at least to my way of loving. But what did I expect? At the bottom of a slippery slope is just a bunch of mud.

So after taking yet another oath of celibacy not that I'd ever broken it, I pushed aside my membership from the online dating world. Instead, I decided to meet people in the old-fashioned way, that is, in real life. Once I made this decision, I knew things would really start happening for me; I'd begin bumping into potential dating partners in the elevator, on the street, standing just behind me in line for coffee. It was simple, just a question of belief, might I go so far as to call it faith. My desire and openness for a healthy relationship would simply translate into other areas of my life, which is why after several months, I found myself signing up for another dating service. Only this time, I didn't hurry.

Now before I typed the numbers of my credit card and pressed the Return button, I began to hone my profile. Call it a marketing resume, a single point of contact that could make or break my abililty to realize a social life.

"Gorgeous brunnette with a figure you could die for, at least I do several times a week in the gym," I began, "is fluent in several tongues in several colors that she swaps out for different occasions, is looking to meet someone who enjoys watching tomatoes grow at the Alameda County Fair."

"That should do it," I said to myself, and posted my erstwhile notice with a flourish of a keystroke. I wasn't a paying member yet. My half-baked profile would come up, of course, in searches and I could even send an initial icebreaker with some canned expression of interest like "Hello, there tiger," or "You're an Errol Drool and a Half;" but I couldn't receive email and my description was floating around in the electronic ether without a photograph, which nine out of 10 times is an admission of some kind of guilt.

Generations
My father rode buses in the Civil Rights Movement,
Atlanta Department stores dropping to sleep on people's
couches, rolling up his change of clothes
inside a paper bag, his grab bag, he said.

He told me stories, how the CIA followed King
from airport to hotel room,
how back in those days,
people believed in doing things like the Panthers

who fed kids breakfast,
how my father spent the better part
of a decade demonstrating against the War
in Vietnam, telling them hell, no, we won't go.

He'd grab me by a belt loop,
pull me into the rib of his corduroy
pants saying, "now don't rush outta here, son,
without remembering."

On that particular day I was moving out,
didn't need to be a non-paying guest
beneath his roof. "I have to go," I said,
and stubbed the gravel with my toe

when he checked to make sure
I hadn't left anything behind,
then all hell broke loose as if I hadn't already
heard it a 100 times before.

"That's great, Dad,
but who's going to tell a Palestinian
kid not to blow himself up because his life
means something?"

All he could do as I slammed the car door
and backed out of the driveway,
was to salute me with his chin.
"You will," he said.

Change your direction. Come here.
Be as a goat upon a petri dish and develop new tastes.
Unwind from today's to-do lists. Stream like a dervish.
You are the streamer. Drink tea with a snippet of fresh mint.
Come to this place, my hand extended in greeting.

The last day of June. I want to say something. What's there to say? Really?

Cell Phone Poem
Waiters are bringing wine to the table
Chardonnay - the house
we'll be leaving in a half hour

here they come
did you talk to the realtor
about closing costs?

I can see grass out the window
sprouting over my parent's graves
it's where last time

my friend's test was positive
the cancer is malignant
she wants to lop them both off.

Peace
To hear the trees tell it
would be in the rustle,
rustle in each breeze
with new growth at its heart.

To hear the birds sing it
would be a cry after dinner,
a canyon born
into purple.

To hear my love say it
would be a whole world
fogged in devices,
cleared at its breath.

Was it love?
You gave meaning to her life,
and she took that away from yours.

Gossip

About a poetry coordinator sitting beneath an umbrella
who reports so and so
is booking readings all over town
now that she's screwing your know who.

About an editor who thinks she's single
because her husband has gone
on a business trip to Italy for two weeks
while she stays home with her son.

About a manager cut and pasting grants
for a million dollar project into a Word document
who's pissed his boss doesn't know
the first thing about leadership.

About the head of armed forces in Falluja
who said Abu Ghaib happened
because an enlistee tucked his brains
up a black hood.

About the Israeli government who thinks
Palestinians are terrorists
who should go back to where they came from
or get pushed back into the sea.

About Palestinians who said
Israelis see history with one eye
and who don't understand
how a tree can die standing

even when it's been cut down.

Carnival: 24th and Mission
A blue screen of death
shut down my operating system,
the narrow escape between bed and desk
widened into the street where I found myself
first uncertain of which way to go
down the steps and then what,
without a mouse, a roller ball to guide my hand.

My feet took over,
went through the turnstile
under the water over the top
to Carnival.
Chiquita QuiroPractico
Szechewan Sapphire Photo
El Farolito Senegalese Highway
where people sit on the ledge of Wells Fargo bank
partying on fire escapes pressed to windows,
Mission Groupo
bands, schools, Filipinos, Polynesians, Bolivians,
Hunters Point, Chinatown
Aztlan Brazilian Mamas in red pasties,
I even checked out Zorro,
his black cape swirling near Vista Hermosa fashions
feathers growing from everyone's mouth, red, orange,
chunks of fruit, grilling sausages, onions
urine-watered doorways,
fire trucks and cop cars catching
women passing out.

My feet kept moving,
my feet kept dancing,
my feet kept dancing,
my feet kept dancing,
if I have to die, let it be at Carnival.

It's not Bob Dylan, but an accordion player at Venice Beach 

After Listening to Bob Dylan Unplugged for the First Time
Bob Dylan, put down your guitar
and make love to me; okay, maybe
my expectations are too high;

put down your guitar right now
and squeeze me, and I don't mean
in a no feeling kind of way,

I mean just stop what you're doing
and come over here, because your music
is moving inside me, and I want you to, too.

But now your voice is trembling.
It never did those low dips before
going inside the circles of your shirt,

as I look into your eyes past your sunglasses
because you took them off
to see your fans

standing in the warming hut
of your truth-telling music
while our country's leaders

believe peace
isn't good enough,
too wishy-washy,

a woman's excuse
to get out early.
Conjur woman's polishing

her lower lip
with a thumbnail.
Heal my broken wing.

You know that, Bob.
Peace is a woman's way
to clear out the house.

Outlaw
You were an outlaw. I loved you.
Then something happened.

I became a mother,
took an oath to protect life.

But nothing happened to you.
You stepped out of the way.

Lament for Len Sanazaro

Today I rose without prompting from my alarm clock
and brewed coffee ahead of schedule
trying to find a bent corner of time

for you to page through unnoticed
and return to your friends,
sit here with me listening

to birds belt out their chorus
as though there weren't anything else
in the world that mattered.

But it really wasn't spring
when you went
to the basement

as winter receded
from its own frostline
licking ice as it melted

with a long red tongue,
or maybe it was spring
that exposed its gums.

Nothing had a strong grip.
You had a tradition to live up to,
a father who did,

and a brother who almost committed suicide.
Then there was Sylvia
whom you worshipped,

and your lover whose boxes of books
caught your fall,
and who knew before any of us.

Letter to Mordecai
It was one of the holy of holies, not to be discussed,
the possibility of appearing traitorous to your own people
who had grounds enough to believe you were not to be taken lightly
after a brick had slipped off the roof of a building
and landed on the head of a cop.

You were doing what you always did, one of the Mordecai brothers fighting the class war in America,
but who knows if any of it is true, pieces of dust filtered
through a light tunnel of years, with the bundled saga of how you were forced
to ride the rails and ended up in Cleveland, Ohio, and once you came home kept it zipped up.
It was okay to talk politics. Those were the terms.

I listened to you around the dinner table when we visited Aunt Clara in her Westchester County house
whom you wrote about in your letters to your wife my mother, Olga, her stuck-up sister
who hardly drove to the Bronx because she and her husband, Jack, were worried
about their car parked outside being broken into; but we always went there
and you were polite at their table and blotted your mouth with a napkin,
and listened to Aunt Clara describe her work with Hadassah,
and Uncle Jack a Shriner or Knight of Columbus or one of those orders so he could get more business,
and let them talk about planting trees along a boulevard in Jerusalem,
making the Holy Land into a Suburbia; azaelas and rose bushes
grew in their backyard, gladiola, flaming torches.

You were the peace-keeper of my mother's heart, my mother who took us in the car
on get lost rides half-hoping we'd never be able to find our way back,
maybe drive up a moss-covered ramp and do it all over again,
three tasks, pulls on a lever; for the first few hours it was custard
and chicken-in-a-basket, until we drove back down the interstate, passing
Aunt Clara's house to where our dreams settled on the second floor of a walk-up.

I wanted you to go for it, but you were the bottom man,
holding up pyramids of acrobats above your head. Other people
depended upon you and so you found a balance
between what you wanted and what you could live with,
and like you, I rest on that fulcrum, always your cautious daughter.

Melt Down
I dropped my heart inside a glass,
but my love was not there to drink with me.

Spring Break
We walk down to the sea because all roads in this cypress land
lead down to the sea, a path lined with Pacific Coast Iris
starting to dry out in the early age of their blossoming

as the steady soldiers of our feet kick stones in our wake
announcing an arrival to whomever will listen, the wind, the sun
impervious to talk of family or current affairs;

it's all the same thing when we come down to it, stare
along the rolling breast of ocean for the rest of the afternoon
to remember something we both knew

when there was nothing better to do than spend
an entire day gulping water in one end and out the other.
Silly cells. We really got good at it.

Passover 2004
Lashanah haba'ah b'Yerushalayim!

Next year I don't want to be in Jerusalem
because why would I choose to be in a land
of war and death where children
blow themselves up because they have no future?

Next year I don't want to be in Jerusalem
because I don't understand why the Israeli government
continues to sacrifice the interests of its own people
at every checkpoint.

Next year I don't want to be in Jerusalem
because I can't continue telling a story about renewal
when I only see a land filled with shredded skin
and bulldozed olive trees.

Next year I don't want to be in Jerusalem
because how can I pretend this isn't happening
like some media cover-up that's come to occupy
my heart with its lies?

Next year I only want to be in Jerusalem with you
to fill an extra cup of wine at the table
for our Palestinian brothers and sisters,
so we may share the stories of those who died
so we may all set ourselves free from our fear and hatred.

At the Gym
Hair conditioner in my palm
reminds me of when we use to have sex.

Mall Moment
Buddha sits in the Rite Aid lot
beneath the 1-Hour Photo Sign,
a parking attendant of the garden variety

directing traffic around flats of wisteria, jasmine,
fescue, geranium, ground ivy, his round belly,
as I sit in my car listening to KPFA report

the real evening news,
while that stone cold Buddha
pulls out a dollar bill from his ear, and laughs.

Daylight Savings Time
I hope some day you’ll know why jasmine climbs outside the front door,
or why an empty stretch of beach runs through your blood. Until then,
I cannot pretend we're not related. You're my son.
Tonight I'll set the clocks forward, and the days will grow stems.

Airport Song
I have a carry-on with a singing noise
that goes wherever I go.
Wherever I go,
it goes eeee-eeyah!

I’m waiting to board
so I can get back home,
waiting in the airport
with a toothbrush and a comb.
It goes boop boop, boop da dee doop!

There’s a man next to me
reading a newspaper;
someone's sitting next to him,
but he doesn't want to face her.
It goes oh oh, bodie doh!

She’s wearing a shirt
stenciled with Marilyn Monroe,
but whatever girlfriend’s feeling
she doesn’t want it to show.
It goes donna wap wappa woedie!

"Ticketholders are now boarding
in aisles one through 18,"
I’m over 21 and I still can’t think
what I’m going to do in that empty apartment.
It goes rrrr rrrr rrrr rrrr rrrr!

I'll get in the car and drive back home,
I'll wash up, eat something, and check the telephone
that never goes eeee-eeyah!
It goes blah blah bloddie blah.

I have a carry-on with a singing noise
that goes wherever I go.
Wherever I go,
it goes eeee-eeyah!

A Blossom
Someone left a blossom on my windshield wiper.
A white blossom with pink spikes on the driver's side.
It had to be my love who recognized my car,
and placed it there for me to see after work.

"knowledge is only a step between two questions"
from code blue at the Genome Zoo by Barbara Damashek

"...information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning."
from Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee

On the Road to Paradise
Spring swept into the house, a pile of white blossoms
from trees outside getting ready for the next big push,
a pile of white blossoms dispensed before leaf-making

as a poem arrives in my email box with its own root-making
story, an evening of diaphanous beings, him and I,
root displaying its credits on damask sheets

as lucky dog licks juicy thigh to make a performance piece
counting how well he did, awards, even the way
an encore performance can send him further than night.

It's all good, what almost happened last night, my love,
but get real. I want to know who you are, and how you feel.

This online thing in between getting ready to go to Tahoe for a ski weekend before the snow melts. Five girls together in one car. It should be interesting. Let's hope all the girls have CD players, otherwise we're gonna be fighting about listening to what kind of music, hip-hop or trance. I'm sprouting my own corkscrew wings to celebrate a second year of living dangerously. In this whirl of random online dating hits it feels like the sperm and egg are colliding in an electronic soup of the Internet, not the strongest, but the ones most likely to connect. And what about the world today, where teachers are now being labelled as terrorists, so that Bush miscreants can seed the airwaves to disassemble the teachers union and public education as we know it. A prayer for John Kerry. May he continue to speak the truth of a Vietnam veteran.