Magical Roof

My apartment is on the 6th floor and looks out over a much shorter apartment building with a tarred roof.

From my window I have a clear view of everything down below. The garbage trucks clogging the street on Thursdays.  The neon liquor store sign with the U burned out so it only says, LIQ OR. The airport tower in the distance, and the items tossed onto the roof next door.

It’s the stuff on the roof that really interests me.

First I noticed a pair of scissors and found it odd that someone would throw a pair of scissors up there, because there is no stairway or any kind of access so the only way the scissors found their way there was if somebody heaved them up from the street below, or if they fell from an airplane.  When the next day an empty half-gallon of milk showed up I wrote off the airplane theory.

Then some kicks appeared:  scuffed-up Nikes without shoelaces.

That was it for a couple of days until one morning I looked out and a cassette tape had spewed its contents across the black roof.  The unfurled ribbon stretched across all  four sides, like the phlegm that sometimes clings to your teeth when you crack a criminal smile.

It was getting more and more crowded up there.

I wondered why somebody was throwing stuff up on the roof, and when?  Because it had to be one person.  What are the odds that multiple strangers all chose the same roof to discard their old belongings?  No, somebody was using this apartment building for their own personal trash. Coming along at night and throwing those things up from the street below. Right?

I asked my girlfriend. She was over and we were watching reruns of Seinfeld. Every time zany Kramer comes pouring through Jerry’s door I hear him shouting the N-word in my head, like a disease. One comedy show outburst filmed on a grainy camera phone posted on YouTube ruined the entire series for me, but she still laughs at him.  I liked it when Kramer was Kramer, not Michael Richards.

They say time fixes things, but sometimes time fucks things up too.

I explained to her what had gone on, how the weirdest things keep showing up on that roof.  Yesterday it was an inflatable raft. How the fuck could someone throw an inflatable raft three stories?

“Maybe it’s a magical roof?” She told me.  “The universe is full of surprises.”

I didn’t say anything.  They say love is blind, but they never say it’s deaf.

After that we went away to the mountains for a weekend and forgot all about the shit on the roof. It was unseasonably warm and the snow half melted so we didn’t even bother to go skiing. We bathed in the hot tub all day and drank white wine. I felt so European.

When we got back to the city I expected to find something new — but nada.  She went back to work and I went back to writing. I’m a writer, you know.  Well, not professionally, but I do work the words across the screen with little cracking whips, training them like an ant circus to do my little tricks.

Send me a self-addressed envelope, I’ll send you a poem of seven lines or more.

Something like…

The vanity of a manatee,
right outside the cannery,
looking in and you at me,
a twisted kind of beauty.
The city burns randomly.
Pain comes so handsomely.

( I do reserve the right to sometimes not make it to seven…)

It was a Friday when my girlfriend and I started talking about the roof next door again and what it all means: the scissors and shoes, the cassette tape and the fucking raft, and oh yeah, I forgot to mention the Barbie doll with blank genitalia that showed up, and when the rains came nice and heavy took to floating around a giant puddle that formed up there.  My girlfriend insisted that it’s all the work of unfathomable forces, perhaps it’s a spiritual phenomenon, she suggested. I suspected hooligans.

We decided to go out instead of staying home and playing guessing games.  The city chimed with mischief.  We met its call: dancing and twirling and quaffing whiskey and laughing with strangers and chatting with taxi drivers. We raced the sunrise home and made sloppy love in my unmade bed with the windows gaping open.

I woke up blurry and confused, head ringing with voices and music that swirled together in a bewildering whirlwind. I stumbled to the bathroom and let loose a gallon of piss that mostly missed the toilet. When I went to grab the toilet paper to wipe it up it was missing –  even though I was sure I put out a fresh one just yesterday before my girlfriend got here. I figured I probably used it in my drunken blackout to clean up some mess in the living room or some other logically nonsensical thing, and went lumbering like an autistic lummox through the apartment in search of the roll of T.P, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I searched high and low. Even checking under the couch which caused my brain to rattle a little in its jar.

Finally I spotted it.  Out the opened window.  Unfurled like a ticker tape across the neighbor’s roof.

Spiritual phenomenon… I tried to hold it back, but a sucker’s grin squeezed itself across my face, I was in love.

I got back to the room and she was still sleeping like a dove.

For the Babies

A baby is born, a new year is here, the wave of time crests another artificial shore… nevertheless, here we are, once again, looking back. This was a year of accomplishments for me, and one of pain.

I wish I was further in my career, but who doesn’t?

I ran a marathon and kayaked the L.A. River.

My best friend was hurt in a house fire.

My Christmas letter reads like most of ours: a mixed bag.

And that’s life, folks. A wonderful, vertiginous roller coaster.

But tonight we celebrate making it here.

Turning a corner.

New resolutions.

New hope.

Ladies and gentlemen, fellow poets: Life is War.

But tonight, there is a truce.

Tonight, we drink champagne and laugh and kiss at midnight.

Everybody think of the best thing that could happen to them in the coming year, and I’ll toast to it coming true.

Wassails all around.

May love floweth like wine.

May you meet a stranger that becomes a friend.

And see a friend you didn’t expect to see, and give them a big liquored-up hug, and reminisce about that one time.

This one is for the babies. Don’t forget the Martinelli’s.

Teach them their manners and love them with wisdom.

It’s a cobblestone road ahead, have them watch where they walk.

If you buy them a puppy, make sure they pick up its shit.

The world would be better off.

Have fun, my friends. It’s a beautiful night.

I love you.

Eating a Taco

I used to think there was something weird about me because I liked to watch my shit get flushed down the toilet. I’m one of those. I like to inspect the job.

Then one day, like a true idiot, I realized there are really only two options: two watch or not.  If there are only two choices, I couldn’t be special.

When I was in high school I’d ditch class and go to Taco Bell.  As I’d masticate my way through a taco I’d ponder foolishly about how you could tell a lot about somebody by the way they eat a taco.  Now I know you can’t tell shit about a person by the way they eat a taco.

But if somebody eats their taco from the middle out, then throws their trash out on the highway and goes home to beat his wife; well, you can tell something about someone from that.

I used to think that homeless people were like urban leprechauns, spotting one was good luck.  Now there’s a homeless transvestite rummaging through my garbage every morning and those aren’t pots of gold (s)he leaves behind.

This is all part of getting older, I suppose. Bitching about the way things are. The Andy Rooney effect.  You’re so set in your way you can’t imagine that there could be any other. We feel so much better about how we’re doing when those around us are doing worse.  It’s what most of us talk about, how each other are doing it wrong.

What does it really mean to be a Libertarian?  I don’t know.

Karen O is the heterosexual male’s Cher.

I’m very deliberate in my randomness. The chaos of my personality is a charade.

Some wise man said, “The Eternal is still.” When you don’t know who said it, it’s always safe to say ‘a wise man.’ What it means, or at least, how that applies to you and I, is that over time, all the little hurricanes of our lives aren’t going to mean a thing.

That’s why old people laugh at you when you tell them your problems. They’re not crazy. They just know that the truth is a pretty funny thing. That by the end of your life you’ll barely remember any of it. I gather at the end you realize that all along you didn’t have a clue, and neither did anybody else, and that’s tragically hysterical.

There are tunnels underneath this city that they built during the war. They were there for the citizens to take shelter in if the Japanese bombers ever came. They never did.  Now there are just homeless people down there.  Living in the dark.

It was still Christmas but Nordstrom’s had already taken the tree out of the window to make room for the New Years Sale. In this country it’s necessary to capitalize Sale.  They’re events. People get killed.

Eye contact is like accents, they vary region to region. In this town it’s very rude to appear pleasant and peaceful.  You must always appear like there is somewhere more important and cooler to be.

‘You try to be all things to all people — you end up looking like an ass.’ I think some wise man said it.

Bruised Midnight Cheek

It’s time to go home — when you see your watch hands clinging together, aiming north, when one day dominoes into another  — it’s time to get out of your seat and put your hat on and head out into the teeming, busy night. But you want to stay and have one (two?) more. It’s warm in here, at least. You have work in the morning. Your dog is waiting by its bowl.  It’s been such a long day though, and the nights are so short.

The jukebox has run out of songs to play and there’s a pall in the air that make nursing homes seem lively. You start to think about people you used to know and wonder what they’re doing right now.  You suspect if they were to play this game, they’d picture you in a bar much like the one you’re malingering in right now.

There’s a diminutive Central American woman outside making pupusas.  The smell is being carried into the bar and is calling you.  It’s an indescribable smell that you are trying to place, the history of conquered natives tickling your nose hairs.  You’re in an inebriated diaspora, wavering between good and bad, the modern world and a primitive rabbit hole. The bartender is looking at you with a patient smile and you can’t tell who’s more bored, you or him?

Your cheek hurts, like you got punched in it, it’s from smoking American Spirits. “Yeah, I’ll have one more,”  you announce, checking your watch again.  It’s only 12:15, you tell yourself.

Satellite Difficulties

Thanks for writing.

Things are much the same, but different, of course. You know how that goes.  I hear that the kids down in New York are now putting hubcaps around their necks. New York City is like one megaton watt light bulb that never burns out.  It’s one of the reasons I had to get away, I hope you know. All that unwanted attention.

Around here, it’s dark at night. Black as the period at the end of this sentence. It’s the way nature intended.  Nighttime is when people get overtaken by no-good thoughts.  I hate to speak so plain, but we’re all monsters.

You ask me why I live up here, it’s because I’m afraid of roller coasters.

All the people,
strapped in,
hurtling through space,
breathing together,
screaming together.

It’s not the machinery that scares me.
It’s the machine makers.

Don’t get me started on water parks, an invention Dante surely missed illustrating in his comedy. The modern world is one horror after another, what else would you call a skyscraper?  The elevator was surely conceived to transport sinners between rungs of hell. It started with the copier machine and now they’re cloning sheep.  I’m not shifting the blame, but sometimes I could see why she did what she did.

But who am I to question these things?

Things are okay. Considering…

There are wolves up here. I don’t mean to change the subject, but it’s pretty cool.  I thought it was worth mentioning.

My satellite dish gets channels from three different states and Canada. I watch some shows from time to time but their names escape me at the moment.

I never have to talk to anybody.

The peace of a man,
idling in nature
alone in solitude –
how he yearns to tell
somebody about it.

The irony…

But not me. I go weeks now without talking to anybody.  Can you imagine?  My cell phone was glued to my ear back in the city.  I must have spoken to fifty people on an average day; between the doorman and the taxi driver and everybody at work and the bagel shop and on the street and at home and everywhere in between. Hello. Hiya. 15th floor please. Yes, I’ll hold. No, I don’t want cream in my coffee. Did you see the game last night? I’m sorry about your loss. Two tickets for the 10:15 show please. Thank you. You’re welcome. All that shit.

The neighbor down the hill moved away so now I let my horse graze in his yard.  I bought a horse.  Can you picture me owning a horse?  The reporters are the only folks I see, now and then, rummaging around and snapping pictures.  They can’t seem to let it go.  I don’t know what they want to see.

If anybody asks: I’ve let it go…

The other day I was way up high on the mountain when an eagle came down from the sky and dropped a dead squirrel five feet from me.  It landed, not as you’d expect, with a hard thud, but with a wet, slushy sound.  Anyway, that’s what gifts heaven delivers for me these days.

You see I haven’t lost my sense of humor.

The winters are cold.  I don’t care what they say about global warming.  The other night my fingers turned purple.  They looked like little figs. I have to chop up some firewood today. It goes so fast.

Don’t worry.  The mountain is doing its best to take care of me.  As long as my satellite doesn’t go out I’m all right. There’s a lot to think about.

Give my love to your Mom.  Tell her I’m sorry, but just because I want to forget, doesn’t mean I can.  Bring her magazines.

Dad.

Dented Like a Junky’s Dream

A ribbon of smoke curled out from the sunroof.  He stubbed his cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray and immediately lit another.  Palm trees hung over the street like professors reading your test.  He drove casually, as if Time were a disposable toothbrush he could wash the teeth of nothingness with and throw out the window.  The sky was blue steel.  A harvest moon, dented like a junky’s dream, planted itself above the mountains.  The knife was discarded in the backseat.  His cell phone rang but he ignored it.

*********

The wind whipped leaves through the street.  A raccoon darted into a storm drain.  Something was coming but nobody knew what.  There was a new flavored Blizzard down at the Dairy Queen.  An oil stain on Route 53.  It was football season.

*********

“What if we call our kid ‘Three’?” She asked, eyes smokey like a feral cat’s, a dollop of methamphetamine on her lips. “You know, for the two miscarriages.”

It was then I should have known to walk away, but love is blind.

*********

Every kid loves robots and astronauts.  But my dad was a plumber.  One time after a church spaghetti dinner I clogged the downstairs toilet and he said it’s the best he’s ever seen.

*********

She opened a window so that the breeze would blow through the house, lifting the curtains like a ghost passing through the room.  She would watch them flap and daydream about chaos.  On the floor of the room was a pair of red high heels with one broken strap.  When I meet my prince, she’d say, I’m sure once I kiss him he’s going to turn into a toad.

*********

“Why don’t we call it a poop beetle instead of a dung beetle,” my 5-year-old nephew asked me.

I didn’t have a good answer. I told him to look it up on Wikipedia.

*********

All eyes in the bar followed her as she made a path towards me.  I swallowed hard and steeled myself.

She positioned herself in front of the counter and waited for the bartender.

“I must confess, when I saw you walking over here, I tried to think up a way to pick you up,” I told her, “but you stumped me.  You’re too much.”

She didn’t even glance over.  “Is that the best you got?”  She asked.

I didn’t have anything after that.  “I’m afraid so.”

The air around her was cold, like the milk aisle in the grocery store.  “You can’t write yourself a pickup in this one, Art.”

“Nope.”

*********

The experiment went bad.  The monkeys escaped.   Luann hasn’t been seen for days.  Somebody send bananas.

*********

The seasoned hunter had the bull deer in the middle of his scope.  Its antlers were massive and stately.  He unlatched the safety when the deer did something the hunter remarkably had never seen before.  He took a piss.  An acrid, stanky piss.  The hunter got a fecund whiff of the foul odor and gagged. The deer bolted for freedom.

*********

“You haven’t written a word.  You stare at the screen like it’s going to tell you what to say!”

“The words don’t come because I haven’t earned them.”

“Oh, you’re full of shit,” she yells, tossing things out of her way.

I only have the courage to mumble.  “Well, at least that’s something,” I say.

*********

The school was snowed in on Friday.  Nobody woke up Mr. Humphries.   They found him on Monday.  He smelled like moonshine.  “Where’s everybody been?” He slurred.  Sally Worthington in the second grade let out a shriek and ran out onto the melting snow.

*********

The bottle washed ashore.  There was a note inside from shipwrecked survivors.  But the island was uninhabited.

*********

I Got This Verse, You Got The Next

You’re my man
got me covered like a tan
start every party that you can
your spirit unleashed is a beast
inside a man
fedora-hatted plaid suit
mad rhymes never in a bad mood
we rolled like stones
for twenty years
holding microphones
and toasting beers
high-fiving
and wiping away tears
you my friend and my peer
my fellow Pisces keeping it real
on the high seas when life be
a little too toppsy turvy
I’ll throw you a life vest
in the form of a mic check
you see, I got this verse
you got the next
homie, you’re on deck
I’ll hold it down
till you feel up to spec
You’re my brother and I love ya
and that’s enough said

************
You’re my boy
always down to seek and destroy
smash planets and toss asteroids
in a world of pain and selfish gain
you bring form to the void
style to the game
we hopeless romantics
caught up in the dames
easily rearranged
by life’s changes
we’ve seen some strange shit
and the only way it makes sense
is wrangling through the speakers
the beats and bangers
you’re always down to hang
I can count on you
when nothing else remains
I guess it’s a JFS thang
no need for quibbling we like siblings
when life gets hot let hip hop
pull you from the burning building
you see, I got this verse
you got the next
homie, you’re on deck
I’ll hold it down
till you feel up to spec
You’re my brother and I love ya
and that’s enough said

************

You’re my soldier
Been in every war I’ve been in
You’re my shoulder
when the world starts leaning
You’re the folder
I keep my rhymes under
Lokie and the God of Thunder
I broke in stole the otter pops
that Rob Strawder got
But I brought the whiskey so it’s cool
we boys since high school
just some wise fools sipping wine
as we spin through space and time
we keep our minds
in this harrowing world
rhyming about life and girls
and everything good
and when shit goes bad
I’m your fucking comrade
I get the importance
of reinforcements
let the beat explode
while we reload
you see, I got this verse
you got the next
homie, you’re on deck
I’ll hold it down
till you feel up to spec
You’re my brother and I love ya
and that’s enough said

Blue Angels

my brain operates
in an architectural design
I create
manifest this rhyme
by opiate
I hope you’re late
to your own wake
I take the cake
and eat it too
my brain needs the food
puts the band in a good mood
this man’s on a one-man honeymoon
the moon’s a honeydew
I feel like a bull in a China Zoo
With Zuzu’s petals in my pocket
and a ticket for a train to Xanadu
and there’s so many things that I cannot do
and so many things that I want to do to you
and here’s where the rub doesn’t get rubbed
cuz the wound gets salted and the seal gets clubbed
we pour oil in the fryer and slice the spuds
but your mother doesn’t give a fuck
and your lover is tired of your love
you just a hugless sucker trying to hug motherfuckers
and if you never been alone well here’s your chance
stepping two left feet to the dance
little boy keep it in your pants
cuz the girls flock to the football studs
guys like us just watch from above
nice guys finish last
yeah, fuck that.
blue angels shat on you
when you were young
and just learning to chew
blue angels shat on you
when you were young
and just learning to chew

Sat on a Beautiful Grave

The music pushed the palm tree onto its side.
The dead shook their tambourine bones
in their confessional graves –
with nowhere to hide,
my head took a meandering route home,
till I was splayed asleep on the pillow,
my brain melted into marshmallow.

I was fucking around, stuck in the ground.
The sky was a shade of gray with a mixture of brown.
I was loving the sound, coming from this old town.
The music played in the maze and in the picture we frowned.

MySpace dead weight, your Friendsters lie to your Facebook,
I Google your YouTube and Twitter your Blog Post.
Everybody loves a rotten ghost.
Living in the express lane, ten items or less.
I confess I love you even though you’re a mess.
Living west of La Brea, I wish you the best.
Hugs and kisses sent from my aunt Beatrice.
I remember falling off of my BMX bike,
fucking my hand up and pretending it was all right.
If you’ve ever seen the darkness then you really know the light.
If you’ve ever walked in the marches then you know shit ain’t right!

This brain is kaput.
Put it in with the hazardous waste.
I trace a skeleton constellation in space.
Ship me to the shipping yard. Y’all be tripping hard.
I just want a tree branch to sit on for a spell.
Hell, I’ll take a rock by the sea-shore
and a friend named Eeyore.
Mail this letter to my pop.
Tell him I was wrong.
Burn this book.
Turn this flaw
into a song…

…bird of Karaoke.

Hunter in the blind,
with your sights set on me,
can’t we both come out of this alive?

I’ve got street signs illuminated in my eyes,
and a boulevard running up my spine,
this city’s inhabitants contaminants of my mind.

Sat on a beautiful grave
while the stars masqueraded
as embers of a holy campfire.

The sky was stitched up and plaid.
The satellites fell to Earth one by one.
You chirped my name and I came out bad.

The continents shift and my heart somersaults.
The record skips and my body cannonballs.
There was an explosion and loud caterwaul,
and the last thing I saw was panic in the deer’s eye
and the reflection of our house burning down.

Here It Comes: Perry Goes Pious

Rick Perry is just what the country doesn’t need — another Texas Governor who believes he was chosen by God to be President. A president who panders to his base of bible-thumpers.

Some gullible people out there actually swallow this shit.

Perry mused about his personal failings: not realizing his dream of becoming a veterinarian because he flunked organic chemistry, being ordered to do push-ups as a college cadet when his superiors in morning inspections discovered insufficiently shined shoes, straying from his faith and being “lost” as a young Air Force pilot overseas.

“He who knows the number of drops in the ocean, he counts the sands in the desert, he knows you by name. . . . He doesn’t require perfect people to execute his perfect plan,” Perry said before an estimated 13,000 students and faculty members who filled the basketball arena here for their thrice-weekly convocation.

Then, invoking Moses and David of Scripture, he added: “God uses broken people to reach a broken world. The mistakes of yesterday say nothing about the possibilities of tomorrow.”

So because the guy was too unimaginative to come up with his own set of beliefs, values, and purpose he jumped on the good old Texas Evangelical bandwagon and hitched a ride to Jesustown. Are we supposed to be moved by this spiritual tall-tale? No. We’re not. This is a speech aimed at social conservatives, born-agains, hardcore Christians. It’s meant to give them a narrative to overlook his rather mediocre life, ordaining him with righteousness and merit because he ‘found the lord’.

Here it is. He finally took a break from attacking the president, while egregiously omitting any plans of his own, to openly court the unhinged Christian vote, those sanctimonious flat-Earthers who believe shit like Hurricane Katrina was sent by God to punish us for abortion.

These are Perry’s people. This is why he’s been so successful in Texas. They love to pull oil out of the ground and eat large hormone-injected cattle. And they gobble the gospel and lick their hypocritical fingers with pious Jabberwocky.

Those are angels flying those UFOs.