To Order:
or
(Ships free from the United Kingdom to any location in the world!)
Tag: Los Angeles
Categories
2,202 miles
i am 2,202 miles
away
from where my twin sons
rest their ash blonde heads
at night
and while los angeles
has been
lovely
gracious to me
i would trade the vast pacific ocean
for the cobalt blue
of their eyes
( mama misses you, darling boys, I love you both…more than the sky)
You are cordially invited to attend the
Third Friday Salon @ The Rapp Saloon
featuring
Alicia Young
Vachine
Alexis Rhone Fancher
Music by: Daniela Podobea, Tom Gramlich, Guido the Bass Player, Jean-Louis Boudreau,
and Derf Reklaw
December 19, 2014
8:30 pm
1436 2cd Street Santa Monica, California, 90401
presented by the beautiful and gracious Elena Secota
.
Women will swoon.
Men will beg.
The poetry will drip from our lips like honey.
Music will soothe us.
Arias will propel our souls to heaven
Gods shall weep.
Bass strings will be plucked.
Enchantment shall be the order of the night.
And plenty of snappy dressers!
i
i saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
thoughts of kissing me
sleep on disreputable futons
show up at hotel room doors
unexpectedly
.
just about the time
one of my gods said
i was coming close to my
howl
.
but i’m nowhere in proximity
.
upping the ante is perhaps required
my addictions too mitigated by motherhood
and the yolk of practicality
.
i’m not lesbian enough
i’m not disenfranchised
i’ve never been to france
i’ve never given anyone a hand job for a grant
ted hughes has not yet abandoned me
.
he would see to it
i had what i needed
when i got to california
no matter where the gig
whatever i wanted
he was my prince
bodyguard
dealer
lover
muse
and champion
he knew exactly how to balance me
drunk and in heels
on his hip
arm around my waist
sweeping me away gracefully
at the end of a night
when the mariachi band had begun to spin
around my head
no matter what we were pulling off
we were better at it together
he’d throw three large on the table
see to it i had my purse
schmooze the goodbyes
play us off as ricky and lucy
through sobriety checkpoints lights
get me back to my hotel bed safe
unmolested (if i so desired)
tucked in
i miss him on nights
temporary highs
and fleeting comforts
would be enough
Categories
finger fuck
finger fuck
.
.
when i went to los angeles
for my first book release party
my so-called literary agent
tried to stick his hand up my skirt to finger fuck me
and his tongue down my throat
simultaneously in a booth
at jerry’s deli
right across the street from cedars sinai hospital
where his wife was in labor with their son
our waitress pretended that wasn’t the reason
she dropped an egg salad platter as i fought him off me
i had never met him in person before
and naively thought he was lude on the phone with me
because he was living up to some
slick LA expectation
after refusing to see him alone after that initial trip
he waged a war against me
slamming my book on amazon and good reads
creating false facebook profiles
with which he could terrorize and slander me
then three months later i found out
he was being sent to federal prison for three years
for sexual deviance and a parole violation
his mentor and a godfather of outlaw poetry
asked me to keep quiet about what he did to me
so he wouldn’t lose on a 50,000 bail bond he had posted for the reprobate
when he gets out of prison in october of 2015
i expect he’ll once again begin to terrorize me
but i’ll live through it
i’ve survived better monsters than he
good thing it turned out to be a helluva book
i’m writing this to shield myself
from his forthcoming flying debris
he is not allowed to continue to hurt me
that was my first experience with
the literary scene
Categories
poly-amorous
of course
i have a crush on you
why deny the obvious
we poets are all in love with each other
and i remember the whore
leaning against a streetlight in los angeles
saying the world is poly-amorous
Categories
terminal
my priority was silence
after being weighed
measured
scanned
and cavity searched
by tsa agents
i just wanted to find a quiet chair near my gate
within the noisy LAX terminal
preferably a dark corner
with no other passengers within twenty feet
lacking over-molested copies of the LA Times
and the pink sugary crumbs
of well traveled two year olds
ah, there it was
my weary feet and rolling carry-on
made their way toward flight deck utopia
a rounded blue row of seating
right by the tinted night windows
my eyes were swollen from crying
i didn’t want to leave the city
or the love i had come to find there
unable to read, think, have a smoke or a drink
all i had at that moment
was a peaceful spot
in the airport
before my red eye back home
that’s when he walked over
disturbing my solitary meditation
a learned looking man
accompanied by a worn brown leather miami university attache
i suspect he felt safer near a fellow buckeye
smiling as he read my sweatshirt
which reads
college of mortuary science cincinnati
he asked if he could sit
certainly i replied
this area is annexed for Ohio
we exchanged life stories
24 hours he had been on a layover
in Los Angeles
on his way back from China
he said he was a professor
who had been sent there
to teach the chinese
how to slowly kill
the American economy
the exquisite irony
wasn’t lost on me
because he was positively green
his skin gray
eyes glassy
silvery hair dusted black
from breathing particulate from coal plants
and suicide net surrounded factories
floating in the Beijing air for the past three weeks
his shaking hands
pulled out a stash of respirator masks
still in his pocket
the sight horrified me
it was the first time i realized that all was lost
the human race is near extinction
that inconvenient truths are
merely the tip of a melted iceberg
given the reality of irreversible damage
so
i got up and threw away
the remainder of my give-a-fuck
hearing the girl from ipanema went walking
now boarding boomed
as i traipsed down the ramp to the tin can
not caring as much if it safely landed
full of the knowledge
we’re building cell phone towers
on the corpse of a planet
Categories
incensed
tonight
i lit a stick from the stash
of incense you sent me
the exotic pricey shit from bangalore
that saul got you addicted to
funky smell good we drove around looking for in every head shop and bodega
from hollywood to santa monica
it’s been so long since i’ve burned any
knowing you would surround me
that i would be engulfed
by a rising tide of anguish
if i breathed your air
like the back of the box says,
“Padmini Perfumed Dhoop Sticks with fragrance that lingers on and on…”
it is you who lingers on and on…
i want to believe there are a few hotel rooms
in los angeles
that still smell like we just checked out
an hour ago
hoping our ghosts
cling to walls and drapes
in the biltmore
places left behind that retain the scent of smoke
of two people who lived deliberately
and fell in love there
we sat on the couch
beneath an original bukowski painting
beside a bronze bust of the dirty man
smoking legal chap books
listening to hot water music
drinking ancient scotch
discussing
the proximity
of kentucky to tennessee
poetry bombs
fell from the sky
as the king revealed his affliction
a rareness we share
one we have both passed on to our sons
our naivete
vulnerabilities
mechanical worlds
tin voices
the weight of meaningless gold
we wept into words
remembering
missing lovers
fathers and librarians
thai food
hugs
offers of shelter and safe harbor
given with
a father’s worried come-home-soon eyes
as we walked onto the patio
to say goodnight to the hollywood sign
and tuck in
the xenias and tomatoes
you cut your hand
wrote your words with
blood red
inside the bible
you had long ago given me
“All criminals are outlaws, but not all outlaws are criminals.”
that’s when i realized
you were the most beautiful thing
about california