She didn’t marry mere man, but a serf, Someone to rake the bad moments in piles And rise with the cockcrow to brew coffee. Have you ever been blinded by butterflies, Swarm of her eye and mouth around you Flicking on and off, offering leaf and limb? A country besieged in bed sheets, Her motherland exposed- A battle ground, convincing him She is Stalingrad, fight for me. What will become of me When I can no longer Turn her on?

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women. In bon ton Los Angeles, with its arrant drive for success, anyone can become a stereotype or be caught with one on a street corner or a Porsche. That’s how this city lives, without reason or shame. I like to sit on and watch the people who fit nicely into boxes. I count BMW's to pass time on the stoop. I count hybrid suburban utility vehicles with green peace stickers. I watch the people on the bus watch the people in the cars and I a...

1. You’re four weeks in the womb, I am trying to read a chapbook from a printing press. My hands are moist. They called her name an hour ago. I desire to know why the head nurse moves as if hoisted from a forklift. There are four of us men. We don’t meet eyes. Fluorescent lights baptize me with migraine. One of us coughs. Another watches the HBO movie on the 18-inch TV. I want a guarantee. One of us has been in the restroom for far too long. It’s so hard to cry in front of men. Clean. Dismal....

1. Somewhere downtown was a staple of conversation. Every sentence started or ended with somewhere downtown. Summer shows its face, shirts slowly lose sleeves and the skirts, they sway to the movement of jazz music. Heat hovers over you like a halo. Left alone at night, I am with the blues, the bay cat's-paw slithers a shimmy past the old cistern, gunning my bones and I shiver. I got nothing left but living. 2. In this town, everything is pavement. A woman at a bus stop collects her hair and ...

I arrive from work to find the new copy of some magazine you're published in positioned just so I'd see it, not that you wanted it to sit like a pair of boobs on the coffee table, its just my luck. You're at the Bookstore and I haven't sent out a submission in months. I smoke a cigarette, my god I've mentioned cigarettes, I'm trite, You'll find me reading "Letters to a young poet", I'll mention some kind of drug and then sex or something that some way deals with sex, I'm losing it completely....

We had been drinking, discussing the vastness of emotions displayed daily. How we can destroy and rebuild in the same breath. We were not drunk, but in that warm place in between. The traffic on the freeway leading to the overpass was moving slow for this late and we slowed to meet it from the city. I watched the girl die, her last breath, a gurgle, sound of a clogged drain emptying. Her body laid out, run over repeatedly, nine ten times. I did everything I was trained to do, I repeat it, th...

This land has such long lines, our blood stretched out like rivers on maps. Five hundred years of topography; a warrior runs through my heart like a Mustang, I am not crazy. I hear the people singing, fancy dancing round single deadwood, living with earth, not opposed to it. A child and its mother, one not being complete without the other, watch the seasons forget themselves. My therapist tells me to sleep more. The owl won’t tell me how to die without leaving a stain.

Your mother and I found out about you five hours after we broke up for the second time. It seems that good news always comes when it’s raining. I never paid attention to abstinence or any other form of instinct controlling philosophy. I was raised a renegade. It was your mother’s choice; it’s always about such things, a women’s right to or not. I seldom scuff at night now; I am cagey, au courant to the constant swing of the city, her rhythm and dynamics. I’m not whole, one solid function orga...

I want to say wonderful monologue, you are perfect for community theater. I can see the crowd, they are listening, what a lovely occasion to complain, I regret being Caucasian inside your temple, you place so much power in color and microscopic threads in the blankets of our being, I'm trying to be balanced- carrying fire on a tightrope to the altar of your gods. I say we don't talk about it in any length or with any common place ways and words, I say we just pretend I'm a lesbian you meet at...

I watched the girl die, her last breath, a gargle; sound of clogged drain emptying, body laid out like a holiday spread, if the turkey had arms, legs, and had been run over repeatedly. I did everything I was trained to do, I repeat, the words travel my lips then fall, not for man, for god; things move as if underwater, soundtrack of the world skipping. She's a suicide, young cop says coolly and I shiver, did she hear that, did he condemn her to hell? What of the tire-marks, the drivers who ...