Five twenty eight

 

When you come into my house
take off your slippers
and the rest of your clothes
and wear the tradewinds instead
that come through the slats and
slam the door.
Put on the orangish light of 5:28 pm,
it's just your size
and the color goes well with the apology
I imagine you offering.

I smelled the rain tonight
before I saw it, or heard it, and
the first time you reached for me,
I was in a small Vietnamese restaurant
by myself.

Lights

 

Up I went
Deep bends, left and right
Apex, sink the wrist
and squint as the throttle does its thing
Halfway I caught up with a truck
A fucking box truck carrying
who knows
What could they possibly need at the top of a mountain?!

Anyway
The hillside was full of couples watching the
sunset over waikiki and I assume they
thought the twinkling lights looked like stars
or something
But when you're alone
they look like fleas on the back of a dog.

Bougainvillea

Across the vinyl sole of my living room scrapes

gently

the fallen petals, the blushing faces of the Bougainvillea I

picked three days ago

and sentenced to death in a pickle jar.

It doesn't make much noise at all and

in fact

is almost lost entirely

when it mingles between notes of piano jazz and

traffic on the H1

twenty yards beyond my window.

But it forms the verse to a song

the chorus of which

repeats every night at around 3am

when the highway sleeps (making one of us)

and the adjacent brook, the fresh water from Tantalus

chats with itself about topics

only a stream could ever care about

and drifts through my window.

Silence may be golden but

you can't eat gold, or live on it

so jazz will have to do.

Shipwreck prayers

 

I can’t play guitar like I used to

But there’s still

A song in my heart

And I don’t drink as much as I used to

But I still hurt

In all the same parts

And watchin my boy run

Through the milkweed

Playing tag with the afternoon sun

I felt for sure I was a hundred

And his life had just begun

God damn what a gift

Every moment we’re given

Right there on the cliff

Is when we start living

And I don’t know how long the wind is

Gonna blow this sail

But I know I’ll prevail

With help from the man upstairs 

And shipwreck prayers