Contrary to Common Belief
Good guys don't always wear white
sometimes they shine leopard green
orange red even yellow

if you want to know a man
watch the way sinewy night
curves next to his sorry spine

why a man fights to wear black
along a taut stretch of hide
how he enters your brown eyes.

CellPhone Poem 16: More Breaking Up
burned sage smudge sticks in the house
drank vodka & pomegranate juice
spliced my heart saw it beating
there was no getting past you
this number will always have static

CellPhone Poem 15: Waiting for the Call
I'm waiting to get the call in the fumes of the Caldicott Tunnel
or along the MacArthur Maze where I'm queued up to pay the bridge toll,
in traffic listening to the radio CD player boom box in the car next to me,
cellphone ringing waiting for speakers to announce the doctor's diagnosis
if I need surgery got the job when I'll be moving need to pick her up
and what the hell I'm supposed to do now I have nothing
to remind me should've saved your messages
water under the bridge going over in a bucket
everything freezes until coffee spills. My head is hot.

Today I'm sitting in the back of the 72R bus
with a woman talking to her mother,
I know because she keeps saying, "Mom, I love you, Mom.
You have to believe in God and ask for help."
The good daughter of San Pablo with blonde highlights
gets off where I do, but jumps on another bus
spreading her message. The cellphone in my purse is ringing.
My mother died years ago.

The News
it always takes longer than I want for anything to happen in direct proportion to the depth of my longing, which is not to suggest that if I stop insisting the world cough up what it owes me right now, it will happen; au contraire, the forces of watchfulness will be on to my game and make me wait, teach the lesson of submission to the one thing I care about, and just when I think I’ve finally got whatever it is I’ve been looking for, it turns into a squall of hummingbirds, disappears down the red throat of morning.

Braking News
while big cranes slip beneath the Bay Bridge, we two play hooky, out-of-practice after I don’t know how long of hurling Homeric epithets at each other, my green-eyed Econoline van, wearing sweats and peeling down quickly to basic moves that holler back to an earlier time when you weren’t taking pills to keep your heart going, and when I had a full set of lungs; I pedal with my tongue, you inside my mouth; we speed down the hill, brake for hesitation, come crashing into each other. On one side of the bed as you stretch out, I think you must be a cold black star, collapse, and leave me alone.

Bad News
and for years, I sat around believing you’d take action, that everything was going to change, but the exercise machine remained a clothes hanger, the goggles never made it to the pool, and I never made it to your bed, only the breathing machine that slept with you regulating each sigh while you waited for the father you never knew to come home.

Good News
there are always drugs: Lanoxin, Lasix, Carvedilol, Tolinase; your every day over-the-counter Tylenol Extra-Strength, Tylenol Migraine, Tylenol for Right Brain, Aspirin to take every day for the rest of your life, codeine, morphine if you're on a medical plan or have a good dentist, in-your-eye designer shots of Botox, pain-killers, depressants, uppers, downers, antihistamines, glazed maple donuts at two in the morning.

News Update
finished swearing up and down a Targét parking lot, phoned my friends and authored messages to an old e-mail list announcing how I’d decided to give up the whole damn thing forever, forget about whatever “it” happened to be at that particular moment, except whatever “it” was, bugged me to the height of my crotch; so I take a ride to the Wine Country. Stay in Calistoga where I soak in a heated pool, listen to frogs all night practice their croaking, and I realize they’re speaking my language (!) and I get everything they say, like love me, love me.

Parking Karma
There's a single woman who reaches into her pocket to retrieve car keys, her head lifted slightly, the angle of her chin indicates how far down the street her car is parked. Sometimes I target a car on this side of the fire hydrant near the lamppost; sometimes in front of the bakery. Today the car is outside the pizza store. I see it.

Before she slides into the front seat, she checks the meter, just to know how closely she missed getting a ticket. The thrill. She presses the car remote and pops open the trunk, places two shopping bags next to each other. Straightens a box of tools in the back.

All this time, my right directional signal flashes red stakes out the spot, warning off all challengers who idle by and drive off. It must be my RayBans. I focus again on the owner who turns the key in her ignition and buckles her seat belt. The car hasn't been washed in weeks. A gray streak cascades down the trunk. By now, she knows I'm waiting as she continues her ritual, turns on the radio and adjusts the rear-view directional mirror.

Finally, there's nothing left to do and she pulls away. Now's my chance. I pull in. I'm parked outside the pizza store. A boy standing in the doorway drips a string of cheese from his slice. I think about getting a slice, too. I look at the clock. I need to get to my group.I've been a member for one month. We meet every weekend.

I'm working to extend my parking karma range from two blocks to three.There's someone in my group who's been coming to meetings for a whole year. He can do it from six blocks off.

CellPhone Poem 14: Breaking Up Where XBox Marks the Spot
The day after Thanksgiving
I'll walk across the Great Mall,

and use a credit card with a revolving account
that turns pennies into gold and gold into health plans,

taller than I ever thought possible, slinky
with thighs like Sonya Blade in Mortal Kombat,

living at the edge of a culvert
where security systems cook dinner for the homeless,

a member of my own Special Forces unit,
carrying a knapsack of turkey bones

wrapped in tinfoil, the power
to grow apartments from pizza crusts,

feeding a voice inside my computer
so I sound like Stephen Hawking on a good day

standing at midnight in the Garden of Eden
wondering what God was doing before he broke out the world.

Cellphone Poem 13: Cancel Service
I robbed banks for two years straight
they never caught me except on camera.

I dressed up whenever I did a job,
the kids were in San Francisco with their grandmother.

Once they started school I'd hoped there'd be more time
for me to pull off the Big One,

wearing heels, a sheath, maybe a skirt.
I was working in the public sector so I had to dress the part,

because my kids needed things and I needed them,
so there you have it. Sure, I have skills.

I could've checked off a bunch of boxes,
but that'd be like sticking a pin up my pinata

on mornings when I walked to the window,
I was the leading lady instead of him giving me orders,

my husband with no hands in his heart,
a man who never got me except between a rock,

and a bed. After I went solo,
he starts calling on the cellphone

saying how much he loves me.
I didn't need to hear that. I was Number One,

but his calls turned me into the CellPhone Bandit,
and then all the law wanted a piece.

I'd become too good at my own game,
robbed more banks than I even had birthdays.

Listening to a Funeral Oration for Rosa Parks
at the Gas Pump
And late enough for me to pull into the station
without queueing up, ignition off, radio on.
I was a pearl onion caught between the big toes of a gas pump,

my week'd been crazy with nothing going on,
a daughter who'd just passed her driving test,
now she's got a California license,

and I'm coming back from the DMV, running again,
slide my ATM card through the slot,
hear the Michigan Governor eulogize Citizen Rosa,

who sat down so that we could stand up,
when it seemed everyone got out of their cars,
filling up on all those free words.

Seinfeld: The Broken Glass Episode
My elbow did it:
pushed a glass over the edge to the kitchen floor.
Suddenly,

the glass had become two-dimensional and garbage,
while I had become a person with one less glass,
but that's what happens when an elbow

starts making its own pointed remarks
(elbows are you listening?).
It was an asymmetry of the universe,

I was one glass down,
and something had to give.
I started sweeping.

I kept sweeping,
started to dream about pulling glass
from the bottom of my feet, saw blood streaming

chandeliers on the ground
crystals to light my way,
which is how I learned to walk on broken glass.

Cingular Wireless: Raise Your Bar From the Basement
Doesn’t getting a promised rebate also constitute being able to use the rebate? I always thought so, but it seems that telephone companies, CingularWireless in particular, has found additional ways to squeeze more money from the consumers' pocket.

Here’s my story. I renewed my cellphone contract, formerly held with AT&T, which was recently bought out by Cingular. This simple act of renewal was its own nightmare, since for some legal or other convoluted reason, even though Cingular bought out AT&T, their data records and customer base aren’t a shared entity. But I digress.

After weeks of phone calling and speaking to innumerable cheery young customer service representatives reading from various scripts, I finally was able to order my phone, which came with a promised $50.00 rebate. However, when the phone itself arrived, it contained no rebate coupon so I needed to spend additional time on the phone. It turned out that this was a Cingular phone, but it had become tainted by my previous association with AT&T, so the coupon had to be ordered through a different path.

Cingular received my rebate request on 8/15/2005, processed the request on 9/07/2005 and I received the card in early November. I know because I kept the paperwork. It took about three months to get the rebate, but as a trained consumer, I was glad when it came. However, this was not a check, but a card, similar to a credit card. I used it to pay for a meal. But it was later rejected at most other places like supermarkets.

I got on the phone again. Through Cingular’s labyrinthine customer service center, I was able to find out that the balance on my card was $15.76. A cheery customer service representative advised me that I could use the remainder of the balance by “splitting the difference” with another card.

Really, should we have to go through all this trouble to use a promised rebate? I think not. Instead, I feel that this is simply a clever way for Cingular to collect some of that $50.00 multiplied by a lot of other frustrated consumers like myself, wearing down our resistance to corporate greed by making everything difficult.

I protest!

No. 23
Mike dropped off a hundred t-shirts for me to sell in the lobby of the theater. I saw Lulu skulking around outside with her camera in one hand, and her bounty of t-shirts in the other. Don't ask me where Clyde was. Working some job, I guess.

So I had to decide how to balance my newspaper sales of "Homeless Security" with my new inventory item. Thank goodness the theater owner was some kind of weak-kneed liberal who didn't mind me setting up shop to the left of his ticket window. So many of these owners freak whenever they see a homeless person because they think it's going to drive away customers. As long as I keep myself relatively clean, I never find that I'm a scab on the general premises. Why on the contrary. I think I add an interesting mix to the general boring fare that passes by without so much as a look. In fact, that's what I like about selling newspapers.I play a game with myself about who's actually going to see me without storming by like I'm a piece of warmed over shit. Usually, I'm right. Every 20th person or so I can spot some one in the crowd. What do they have in common? Hard to say. I think it's a zig-zagging aura they've got coming off of their fontenelle's where their life spirit sits. Clyde told me that. But never mind. Time for me to get to work.

"Want a paper? He was relatively tall with cute dreads dangling around his face like a shower curtain.

"I bought one from you yesterday."

"What about a t-shirt?"

"I've got a million t-shirts at home."

"I bet you do. But not one like this." I held up Osama's name on the front.

"Is this for real?"

"Sure. This is a grassroots thing."

He shoved his hands into his pockets. "I don't know."

"What if I throw in something you've never seen before?"

"How much did you say it was?"

I knew I had him. I tied my tongue into a knot and his jaw dropped. "That'll be 10 dollars," I said.

Rondeau for the Lost Lenore
Help me to look, for I lost her there
deep in a field, or on a burnt pier,
stuck between two rotten planks of wood,
not making noise, even if she could,
kicking around a shuttle of years.

Long ago I remember she stood
on a fire trail, wearing a fleece hood
loosely, without covering her hair.
Help me to look.

She's gone so long without eating food,
take-out on-the-run that tastes no good.
I'm not sure if I know how to clear
her heart's basement, look in the mirror
when she sang to the singing blood.
Help me to look, for I lost her there.

Yizkor (Memorial) Service
Yom Kippur 2005

I'm watching darkness
embrace a glittering thumbnail
someone had trimmed and left years ago
for the cleaning lady as it rolled across the floor
into breadcrumbs, cat hair, a tissue blown by the opening door
into a tent of good-bye kisses, yet the nail,
painted glow-in-the-dark still blazing pink,
catches the light and is swept from the room
on a braided tassel,

as I follow the meditation,
but keep wandering to thoughts of my new vibrator,
a molded purple plastic water-proof super glide,
waiting for me at home tucked between my socks and panties,
which I bought the weekend before, while doing food shopping
and going for a walk with my friend and her dog,
the solemnity of making our days count,
well, I want to feel good and I need batteries.
That's how I entered the High Holydays. In a blaze.

No.22
We decided to use our existing marketing channels. Granny had the movie theater crowd sewed up, Clyde was going to work the wash-and-dry crowd at the laundromat, and Lulu would concentrate on school cafeterias. But we weren't going to stop there. I was elected responsible for getting the model t-shirt produced, and for designing a Web site to help sell the shirts, and for the ultimate broadcast.

"If we get thousands of people coming out to hear Osama streaming over the web, how's he not going to show up?" I reasoned. Plus, he wouldn't necessarily have to divulge his location, which was key to the success of my plan. I gambled that the opportunity for Osama to speak to a ready-made audience of thousands would be as irresistible as a free-interest loan from the World Bank.

I got busy. I put down my water-bottle next to the computer. First I designed the t-shirt over the Internet, dragging and dropping text and pictures on a handy blank canvas of a white t-shirt. I choose colors, named my date, checking to make sure I wasn't setting a time during Ramadan, and gave the domain name of the site I was building to find more information. Since the domain hadn't been registered yet, I grabbed it: www.osamaspeaks.com. "Hear Osama on www.osamaspeaks.com, May 20, 2006."

Done. I had a highly satisfied sensation that was similar to winning a superbowl pool. I made a mental note to be sure to provide an audio file so whatever came together could be downloaded. Exhilerated, I took another swig of water. But suddenly, the light from my basement window shimmered before me in the shape of Lulu. Time slowed down. She touched my cheek with her hand. I can't remember anything else, except she set up my networks and made them run. Thank God I'm a geek.

Notebook from the Year One
It's a small room I live in,
but the rent's okay,
a bedroom with two windows,
utilities paid.

I sleep on a couch,
I eat on a door,
when company comes,
they sit on the floor.

No. 21
"It's the theory of market share pressure leading to groundswell," I explained. "We print up thousands of t-shirts announcing a meeting with Osama bin Laden at a certain time and place, say runs of 1,000 at a time and we finance more runs with the sales of previous t-shirts; sell 'em wherever we can, whenever we can, all we do for the next six months or so is sell t-shirts ; I'll build a web site to help us sell the t-shirts. As members of the t-shirt collective, all of you can pocket a certain percentage of the sales; say two percent."

"Five," said Clyde.

"Five," I said. "Then we take things from there. With millions of people publicizing the event and waiting to hear the biggest terrorist of all time speak to them over a public broadcasting system, how can we fail?"

"We need music," said Lulu.

"And to sell food," said Granny.

Then went out for another cup of coffee to discuss the details.

Content Management System

And while I'm waiting for you in the car like an otter
floating beneath a hood of water watching the sky
pull itself into threads of orange taffy, I swam away
to Chicago and the punch press factory near O'Hare Airport,
where I met Johnnie with mahogany skin and red straightened hair
and Eola from New Orleans who said:
"Life's like powder on a powder puff, just ready to blow off;"
and a woman from Argentina who thought I was pretending
not to be Spanish so I wouldn't get deported,
a time in my life just before three-alarm fires

started to go off and I had to skate down the freeway,

when we ate three-course meals in 20 minutes
and heated food in a microwave that smelled like a roach coach.
I remember when the lugging machine punched a hole through my finger
and the foreman drove me to the hospital in his car where I spent the evening
filling out worker's compensation forms, and worked the next day
anyway and didn't make my quota; something about the thinness of the sky,
the way the airplane balances on a diagonal wire
the way Chow Yun Fat did in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,
walking on tree tops,
which is a good trick if you know how to do it.

No. 20
Clyde, Granny, and I walked the half mile from my apartment to the theater. People were queued up at the bank window. The street was filled with people sipping coffees, and I saw a hold-out with a cigarette who was blowing smoke. Clyde and Granny had fallen a few steps behind. I began looking around the corner for Lulu.

"She'll be there," said Granny.

"There's another one?" he asked.

"Yeah, and this one has a camera."

"Whoa, baby. We're making the papers."

"Only the ones you're smoking."

"I'm sorry, Miss. You can't take pictures without a permit," said an officer to Lulu who was standing in the middle of the street. "You'll have to move." Lulu kept her eyes buried in her frame. The youngish officer, who judging by the peach fuzz on his chin, might've been a rookie assigned to the school crossing on any another day, stepped closer to her side. "I'm sorry, Miss, you're not allowed to stop the traffic. Cars were queued up behind her, and they were honking their horns.

"Lulu, c'mon," I said, stepping into the street.

"D'you know this woman?" the officer asked. He looked a lot taller once I was standing next to him.

"Yes," I said, taking her arm. "Lulu, what are you doing?"

"Well, mostly waiting for you," she said picking her head up. "But I thought I'd get some footage of how we're supporting the oil companies by driving around at different times of the day, in different light. Great diminishing angles from the corner."

"Thanks, Miss," said the officer. "You can't stand here."

"Geez," she said. "You don't have to go ballistic."

"Thanks, Miss," he repeated, "I'm just doing my job." He stepped aside and started to wave traffic on.

"First you get a college education, then you can't get a decent job, and then they want to arrest you. I think the country is going down the tubes."

"Amen, to that said Granny," who'd finally caught up to us.

"Amen to that again," said Clyde.

Lulu put her camera back into her satchel. I introduced Lulu to Clyde. "Granny knows him. He wants to work with us."

"So, Thinktank," he said to me, rolling back on his heels and winking at Granny. "What's next?"

“T-shirts," I said. "We're going into merchandising."

No. 19
[digression] Clyde wanted to join the party, so we head in the direction of the nearest live wire, which to my mind, was Lulu who had struck a chord within my shredded heart. I was hoping that she still planned to meet us in the lobby of the movie theater, whereupon I had a plan to start moving in the direction of Osama bin Laden. As crazy as it seemed, I think I'd fallen upon a foolproof idea. Because if you look at the history of programming languages, they don't last forever, since technology changes, programming styles change, and good languages last only 15 or 20 years; a man like Osama fell into the same category. Let's say he had shelf life, which was only a few years left until he became ho-hum on the international market.

Likewise, I reasoned, but actually, I lost my bookmark of reasoning. I was aware of being able to concentrate more and more less. Prowlie's glass and light was beginning to emerge again in my consciousness and I didn't know what that meant except I had to follow it to its ultimate logical conclusion.

"Paranoid schizophrenic," I'd heard someone once say of me.
[ / digression]

Back to the party.

No. 18
For breakfast I rustled up two cups of coffee, brewed over a spoonful of instant, and two bowls of assorted dry cereal, poured out from the bottom of a bunch of almost empty cartons. Okay. The cereal was a little stale, but who cares if you've got milk. Right? Sometimes I can sound like a fucking commercial. So Granny stuffed her sleeping bag back into some expandable netting and then spent the rest of the morning in my bathroom cleaning herself up while I danced around waiting to take a piss.

"Come on in," she said. "I don't care."

"Don't look."

"Are you out of your mind? I'm behind a shower curtain."

I pissed, brushed my teeth, and washed up. By the time I got dressed, the water had stopped running, but she was still futzing around in the bathroom.

I decided to sit down at the computer balanced on a snack table outside the kitchen.

"You ready?" she asked after I had almost finished checking my email.

"Huh?" I couldn't believe it. Cleaning up had done things for Granny that I couldn't have imagined. While before she had been some indiscriminate age, a raunchy gnarly thing curled in upon itself, now she appeared radiant, a woman in her late thirties, and her light brown hair; well, it almost had sheen. I was glad to see she was no longer wearing several layers of multi-colored shorts, now dressed in a black shirt with a stained red top, clearly rescued from some Goodwill sale pile.

"Stop looking at me," she said, throwing her bag over her shoulder. "Let's get going. I'm not use to being in one place."

So we walked up the side of the house, past the recyling bins. I saw a man going through my bottles. He looked familiar. "Say, don't I know you from somewhere?" I asked. He was this black guy. All I knew was that he was built like a line-backer.

"I've never seen you before in my life," he said, holding up an aluminum orange soda can.

"Yes, now I know where I saw you. You were the ticket taker at the movies up the street the other night."

"Yeah, what of it?"

"Nothing much. I remember you bumped in to me."

"Hi, Clyde."

"Hi Granny."

"You two know each other?"

Granny nodded. "I know a lot of people."

"So you got yourself a place to stay last night," winked Clyde.

"You can think whatever you want to think."

"Say, you look good cleaned up," he laughed.

"Clyde and I have done street time together," she explained to me. "But right now he's holding down more jobs than you can count on two fingers."

"Three right now," he said. "Going through the recyling bins is a sideline. I work at the theater in the evening, the laundromat across the street in the afternoon, then I haul off the glass whenever I can, and get five cents a bottle."

"I'll probably see you in the theater lobby real soon," she said. "selling newspapers. But in the meantime, I'm going with a couple of these bums to build a mass movement."

"Anything I can make money at?" he asked. " I need time off from one of my jobs."