Violin

And so there you are

In your shirt and shoes

In all those colors and looks

That I never knew

Blue

Black

Off-red

Half-sad

I came here by bus

My hands and such

By heart and dog

Now those things are gone

Miles of clean

Those roads now long

Curved and turned black

Now sing my song:

Slurring violins

Hallow drums

Snapped strings

And all those shifting notes in between

There you are

And here I am

My dust

My regret 

Little Dog

The way she saw it she had to dance. She had no other choice. At least that was her excuse. Aaron was out of work. Her chihuahua, Punch, needed a new toy, and the bills were piling up on the table.

She wore the tightest skirt she had and headed out the door. Aaron was sitting on the porch three hours into his new job which was watching the neighbors and taking blurry notes on their comings and goings.

“How’s work, Aaron?” she asked, her perfume heavy and drifting towards Barstow.

“Slow,” he slurred, a pint of vodka in his hand. “Not much action going on. The Addams family is arguing. Something about the cat shitting all over the living room. Doesn’t look good for the cat. So, I take it you’re serious about stripping.”

“Exotic dancer.”

“Stripper.”

“Asshole.”

Brenda pulled into Spanky’s. She was nervous, her stomach tumbling like dice. A thin girl wearing thick make-up was outside smoking a cigarette. She stared at Brenda and blew a hit of smoke out of the side of her mouth like Popeye.

Brenda did a jagged awkward dance in front of Max the club owner. She was green, didn’t know how to move her body. In time, he thought. He liked her tits. He was a tit man. That and whiskey.

“You can start tonight,” he said, staring at her dark nipples. “Do you have a man?”

“Yeah. Punch.”

“Punch?”

“Chihuahua. Six months old.”

“You’re gonna like it here,” he said, closing his eyes, seeing the bottle tilt. “It’s all here.” 

58

The sun was breaking behind me when I hit Highway 58 heading north. I had a head full of coffee and a head full of questions that didn’t have any answers. For what was up ahead, what would transpire, I didn’t know. There was a girl at the end of the road. A beautiful girl. She told me over the phone that she loved me. Told me to come see her. Play guitar for her. Write her poems. I loved her, too.

On both sides of the road the desert spread out like a sea painted in tans, browns, and pale greens. Joshua trees sprouted from the ground in jagged angles—its spiny blossoms splayed out like sharp star light. A train track followed along side the highway carrying the weight of rusted trains marked in faded graffiti. Vacant concrete homes stood lifeless on the hard desert dirt. I hit the gas and pushed forward.

I was just outside of Bakersfield when my phone rang. It was an old high school friend. I told him that I was on my way to northern California, that I was packed to move there, but didn’t know how long I’d stay.

“I’m winging it.”  

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “Good luck.”

Radio stations cut in and out, but the one constant was her face before me. She was smiling. She was across the table sipping wine. She was sleeping next to me as I brushed my hand over her back feeling her skin, feeling the rise and fall of her breath. I could hear her voice coming over the line. “Hey,” she’d say, her voice familiar and warm. “I just called to say that I love you. A lot. Got to get back to work. Have a great day. I’ll call you as soon as I get off. Bye, baby.”

I pulled over for a bite to eat around three hours from Sacramento. A hard wind was coming from the north. Flat agricultural land was to the right of the freeway. On the left was a wall of mountains where the freeway weaved around and disappeared. I sat on my tailgate and watched two crows sitting on a fence, necks swiveling, their feathers lifting and dropping down into the black.

I contemplated what brought me here. The choices I made. The ones I didn’t. My failures and my successes. I thought about my friends and family; most of them didn’t know where I was and where I was going, much less what I was thinking. And just like I’d hike the Montecito Hills alone as a kid, here I was moving over a strange highway with no one in the passenger seat. A seat that she’d soon be sitting in, her face turning and catching my nervous profile as it moved through her city.

How long she’d be in that seat, I didn’t know. She didn’t either. But the drive would be made regardless.

Your Bed

I like your bed

The fat pillows and red sheets

The covers that give heat

and tell me well-paved stories

Heart stories

Sob stories

Open hands

Open legs

Past hassles

Now, a row of vacant castles

And of those who came before me

Hard ties and loose jeans

Their dreams

Your dreams

How this is love

For sure

Indeed

Repeated words

Stock phrases

I heard them before

In my ear

For this was my year

A year of ex-wives

and naked swan dives

Snapped rings

and strange turns

Now, slumped in the arms of girls

and things I didn’t learn

But I like your bed

The dented pillows

and wrinkled sheets

The stained covers

that won’t come clean

Still, I like your bed

Do you? 

Pretty

On the wire I tell her things like beautiful

And pretty

And that the cat on my chest has stripes and whiskers

We laugh

And remember

After days of doubt, love, overlove, and memory

We talk of bicycle crashes

Cheap cars

Kisses

A shy child

And one that sails on a bed of balloons

And I tell her that those things are beautiful

And that they are pretty

Because I don’t have any other words

On the wire

That’s what I’ve found

And we’ll plan a mock wedding

A fancy across state lines

A day full of blue and purple

We’ll make sure this one is full of passion

And not the ghosts of where we’ve been:

An old girlfriend full of predictable lines

A man as colorful as white paint

Cold stones and buried bones

We reinvent and find our way back home

Strange are these days, we say

So strange are these days— 

On the wire I’ve found who I am

(Thank you)

And who she is

A jester

A scientist full of measure and warm evidence

And that’s beautiful

And, yes, very pretty 

Something Beautiful

“Make me look good, babe. Don’t make me regret this,” Jim said. He took a drink from his beer, pulling his hair from her hand.

“Stay still,” Sandy said.

She lifted a tuft of looping hair and ran the scissors across it. The hair rolled off her fingers in tiny black wheels, down over his shoulders and onto the scuffed floor. He looked down.

“Hey! Don’t get crazy. Just a trim.”

“Stay still,” she said grabbing more curls. Clip.

Sandy was buzzed and after she danced the scissors over his head like if she were an actual beautician she realized that the haircut was uneven. She got the front right, got the curls to wrap Jim’s round face. It looked good. She grabbed his face in her hands, running her slumped eyes over his hair and smiling.

But the back was ruined. Patches of hair were snipped out in clumps. She tried to fix it but it only got worse. She put down the scissors and led him to the bedroom. .

“I can’t believe there’s not gonna be anything to drink at the reception,” he said in the darkness. “But at least I have a brand-new haircut.”

“That’s right. You do.”

They fell asleep holding hands.

* * *

When Jim woke up Sandy was in the kitchen. Eggs were in the pan. He smelled toast. She walked into the bedroom in her underwear.

“Wedding is in three hours,” she said handing him a plate with a plastic fork. The eggs were burned, stained from a hot pan. She looked at his hair as he got up. The front was okay. It was tight, fit like a helmet. She glanced at the back hoping that it magically grew back. But it didn’t. Flashes of scissors snapped across her eyes which were already feeling the high of her third beer.

“Breakfast in bed. All right. To hell with the wedding let’s stay here.”

Jim ate and thought of Laura’s first wedding. It was stupid and sentimental. Too much build up for a bad relationship. He knew they weren’t going to make it, gave it three years. They didn’t make it one year.

She ran through a pack of sad men full of drink and boredom and half-ass promises. She fucked them and dumped them and didn’t think twice about it. She never brought any of them around the family. Then she met Jerry. Even dumped him a couple of times before he convinced her to marry him.

“You have to trust me,” he said.

“I know,” she said and put away those raunchy days.

* * *

Jim came into the living room combing his hair. Cologne (some generic stuff he bought in a parking lot) followed him like a mutt. Sandy handed him a beer.

“Hey, is the back of my hair all right? I can’t see it. But it feels weird.”

“It looks great,” she said, patting the back of his head and looking into his eyes. “What do you want me to wear?”

“Something beautiful,” he said. “A dress.” 

So It Was The Desert

So it was the desert

A place you called home

That’s where it happened

You came out of the sand

like a scorpion

Long arms

Smiling like a crocodile

We burned under the sun

Cigarette boys

Unemployed

Full of lies and jokes

We talked of little wars

and violin girls

Grunts

Snake dreamers

In the desert: that’s where we met

And like the lives

of our drunk fathers

we passed the days

In smoky rooms

On the edge of a dirty creek

Lulled by the music

Stopped to play

those weeping strings

And somewhere on

that flowered street

we became gladiators, men

Or so we thought

Sticky fingers

An infamous tale

We carried on

Found jobs

Grew worried

And drank over a table

like those tyrants who fell before us

Testing to see if we too

had the same disease

If we too would also fall

for no good reason

We regretted

We chanted

We survived those Decembers

The Sirens;

The chill sweeping

off the mountain’s back

And now, like a wheel

Like an old undying creek

The days flow

Waves of blurry dunes

Still worried

Still punching

Alongside our ghostly fathers

Alongside the golden scorpion

We regret

We laugh

And wonder what will be:

Songs of cactus pang

Songs of prickly lives

In the desert anything is possible