Red tail hawk landed

in all its wherewithal

on the branch

from the cascade of

the crowd at Dodger Stadium.

Features & feathers

cut like glass

a raised, crisp sepiatone

among the greens:

some majesty squeezed in right before sunset

on the hill in Elysian.

Kissing a tree on the ground

flirting with the realm of feet,

Red tail hawk flew on

above the reach of sad dog eyes

to point C.

cool brisk fingers in my hair

the fresh sweet bite of crisp red delicious apples

service stations with “sorry no gas” signs

palm trees.  the american flag full mast and shouting

sun.  the body shop in red black and white. wind

the black man in blue who’s got to get to cerritos

on 55cents. latins stealing swigs of tequila from

a torn brown paper bag in the back of a bus

radios barking disco

dogs mute in the face of poverty

old white ladies with shopping bags as wrinkled

as their necks, in tattered wigs, black high-fashion

eyelashes and green mascara

crisp starched sagebrush narcs crawling campuses

for children dealing illegal drugs

sweaty gay runners in tennis shoes jogging up sunset

chinese japanese thai korean vietnamese and

soul food kitchen smells

the mindless roar of

traffic on the boulevards at rush hour

endless grey curbs of home.

or “What I experienced on my most memorable urban adventure last week.”

Return the vulgar gesture.

A hippie man with reddish brown ponytail and glasses sits directly behind me.

A young black man in a red sweater passes to the rear door.  With a grunt, he shoves past the hippie man.

“The word is excuse me, not move,” says the hippie.

Which is two words, I first thought.

And yes, how absolutely rude, was my 2nd.

And 3rd, looking briefly at his swagger & gait of the young black man, the sound of his diction suggested an impediment of mind, and/or speech.

Return the vulgar gesture.

A white man enters, elderly, wearing sunglasses and laden with a backpack, computer case and sports bag, all stuffed to the gills.

His bags sway and whack the seat poles as he makes his way to a seat on the back of the bus.

A few stops later, a woman sitting at the window seat across the aisle stands up to pass through to the exit. She tries to get by the alert, articulate gentleman holding a paper packet in his hand.

The elderly man laden with bags stands up to get off at the same time but pauses in the middle of the aisle.

The alert, articulate young lawyer type says, “This woman is trying to get out.”

“Who’s trying to get out?” he asked in a very serious query.

“This woman right next to me.  Could you please move faster?”

He’s still on pause, but eventually moves to get off just a stop before Alvarado.

What a bizarre sequence, led by these pirates of personal space.  What a surprise to need a referee at 8AM.

This is the first song from my new music project.  

https://soundcloud.com/feelala/hotel-atlantica

Music and Lyrics by John Wells, a gifted guitarist and pianist originally from Florida, with a background in theatre.  I instantly trust someone who is willing to put on whiteface mime makeup.  

Please enjoy.  Stay tuned for performances and the launch of an official band page!  

Fee

I don’t remember seeing it at night.  It would look like

the groom at a wedding, in his black tuxedo

with only a crest of foaming shirtfront.

Of course when I lived just a block away from the ocean

in Laguna Beach, or in Solano Beach, California

I must have seen it often

at night.  But I have a hard time

pulling the image to my eyes, the way

when someone you love dies,

your husband, your father,

you suddenly realize you can’t remember

his face.

It panics you, it frightens you, it

most of all

makes you sad, then angry:

what is the matter with your mind,

your mind that was once like a history book

filled with everything that had ever been recorded?

Night is when you stayed away, if you

were going to

stay away.

Night is when the oranges rolled out the door.

or the spoons rattled in the drawer.  Night

is when the cup emptied itself, night is when

books broke their leather bindings, and toothbrushes

disappeared.

At night, the ocean swallowed everything

until the whole word was invisible.  At night,

my father betrayed my mother, my husband slept with

others,

and I could only look at the ocean and be fearful

that nothing in it was an orange, a rose,

a glove, a book, or

anything I could count on to take care

of me.  Not even the white crests of groom’s -shirt waves, so

often

imagine in Classical literature as horses.  No

white horse, or even a surfer on an old board, coming

out of those waves to carry me

to safety.  No I can’t

remember what the ocean looked like

at night, though I do think

of the ocean

all the time.

__________

Diane Wakoski was born in Whittier, CA in 1937 and studied at UC Berkeley.  She is among the deep image and beat poets of the 1960′s, citing Allen Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams as two of her influences.

A girl driving a blue sports car comes to a screeching halt at the corner of Sunset and Alvarado.  Her car has broken down.  She bursts into tears, lamenting over how stressed out she is.  A passerby approaches her for consolation.

“What happened?”

She starts dancing, explaining how her car broke down between sobs. 

“Wow,” says the passerby.

“Is this funky enough for you?”

Now that’s a Triple Breakdown.

Valentine’s day is unfortunately fast approaching, according to both the calendar and the increasingly-pink candy shelves at CVS.

Recently I had the privilege to listen to a discussion on LOVE.  It was a consortium of ladies (The Bitches via Genius Pills, to be exact) brainstorming for an upcoming show.

The answer to the question “What’s funny about love?” morphs into several different subsets.  But the gut reaction?  NOTHING AT ALL!

Romantic Love is serious business, a contract between law-abiding mortals governed by the unruly Emperor Emotion.  We fight for it constantly.  It’s the dream of dreams to experience that continued reciprocation of affection.  Enough of that unrequited stuff!  Takes up too much damn energy from my experience.

And now for the platitudes in which I completely believe:

• Romantic Love is all about timing.  
• Romantic Love is blind. 

You can dance and dance, but if that brown-haired guy with the penchant for charcuterie hits on you while you’re still with your boyfriend, you’re going to have a long history of hits and misses.  

“Love is blind” has always interested me. All others melt away.  You give and reciprocate until you’re a hybrid of yourself and your significant other without having made the baby.  So for most people after the heartbreak, the break-up process is one of extracting, and then piecing yourself back together.

One thing we did in the consortium of ladies was recount a memorable Valentine’s Day.  It didn’t have to be the best, necessarily, just one that stuck out.  So here’s mine.

My senior year of high school, Valentine’s Day fell on a Saturday, so my boyfriend and I took the Metro out to Hollywood.  It’s a lovely day trip from Pasadena.  We walked among the glitz and glamour, the street mascots, lingerie stores and innumerable girls in ridiculous, ankle-breaking high heels.  For dinner?  We walked into McDonald’s and dined on McNuggets and Coke.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, seeing as it was cheap.

Cut to a month later, we went out on a movie date to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, starring a blue-haired Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey.  For my money it joins a crew of movies that accurately portrays the truth of the pain of love, alongside Before Sunset, Before Sunrise, and 500 Days of Summer.  FYI, these are terrible date movies.

There’s a scene in which Joel (Jim Carrey) enters his foyer in his apartment building to gather his mail.  A neighbor approaches him and asks him his plans with Clementine (Kate Winslet) for Valentine’s Day.  ”Make plans now.  You don’t wanna end up at McDonald’s on Valentines Day.”

We turned to each other and had a good laugh.  That was US only a month earlier.  Ahh, irony.  It is rich with truth.

So I am consoled that since that high school date, I have had much better dinners for Valentine’s, ranging from gorging on chocolate by myself while watching Love Actually, to having a steak dinner at home to the soundtrack of Sam Cooke.

And that’s one thing I lose sight of but appreciate about love, is that it gives you the ability to laugh at yourself.  Passion exists under conditions of free flowing mirth, forgiveness, and an appreciation for the absurd.

It doesn’t always have to be abstract phenomenons living so far away from an ideal that the levee breaks, and the American Apparel factory burns down, all the overpriced softcore porn clothing disappearing from our consumerism, except for everything that we’re all already wearing.

Looking down to the end,
the horizon is always clean.
It’s the steps in between,
the color of ash or granite,
that are cloudy like rain.