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.