Interrupted by the Fog

COMING HOME: A CHRONICLE


Coming home.  A rotten onion and no ice. A clear light of eternity.

Coming home.  The radio on. A known insinuation, a concerto of the lost ear.

Coming home.  The writing of neurotic innuendo and a crypto-literary essay.

Coming home.  A remembered odyssey, a neurologic introspection in the closet. 
                                       A linguistic exit.

Coming home.  The run-on news is colliding with a loveless entity.

Coming home.  Running out of nicotine. The idiotic cigarette. A lung expands.

Coming home.  A recycled Ophelia is naked and impassive on the couch. A leg is elevated.

Coming home.  The rats on the nightstand are inhaling cocaine and looking excited.

Coming home.  The rocks and oxygen. A nitrogen of intellect. The conversations 
                                        lurk in the expected.

Coming home.  Recalling other nights, the immensity of the continuum, and leaving early.

Coming home.  A resident of ontology, near its intersection with criminology.  
                                        The lookout of an ex-con.

Coming home.  The wreckage and the odds. Necking with an introvert,
                                       a choir of the lovelorn in the ether.

Coming home.  Repair the oven, not the icebox. A can of lentils and eggs.

Coming home.  Rumors of the other and the nerves of the inhabitant, a limited earthling.

Coming home.  The rug an opiate. A narcolepsy of interiors, a coma lengthens in the evening.

Coming home.  Refocusing the ominous, the noumena, the isolation is a cure. 
                                       A lure of ectoplasm.

Coming home.  Read an old New Yorker, an idea crystallizing or a list of ex-girlfriends.

Coming home.  Relaxing in the ordinary, naked and inquisitive, collapsing in 
                                        a languor of the evident.




INTERRUPTED BY THE FOG


Is it jet lag or does California drag me down,
this foggy town,
I mean 
it’s overrun by dangerous machines,
a population with warped motives,
but the olives
are good. I’m in an old hotel
and time will tell,
it was constructed when a certain humanism
(rhymes with hypnotism)
hadn’t been eclipsed by the robotic.
Now it’s making us neurotic,
there’s a throbbing tower in the distance
symbolizing my resistance.

It’s a city full of isometric
beings who are pulling off a hat trick
of hallucinated
humanism, some of it ill-fated,
when they live in boxes made of glass and steel
which make it hard to feel.

In the spirit of eternal return
I went back to the fountain, it was turned off,
and the adolescent
boys who represent an essence
kept on posing, being 
statues in the dark. I’m seeing
things, the park is haunted, there is a funereal
church, the dogma is unreal,
while people flaunt it in a high hotel
with their conspicuous repose. If “Living well
is the best revenge,” are we conditioned
not to think of others? The suspicion 
is embedded in our circuits
and it doesn’t quit,
no matter how much etiquette
is in the room.

The last time I did mushrooms
I was on the edge of town,
an edgy situation with the gravity profound,
it left me washed up on the beach.
I over-extend my reach,
but what I meant to postulate,
I never went to a prostitute,
the city has a Proustian effect,
and we are suspect.

There’s a ghost flag in the fog,
it’s interrupting my internal monologue,
but I am venting
and the fog is representing
the undifferentiated spirits of the dead
evaporating overhead.




THE COORDINATION OF A PAINTER


The experimenters and the dregs,
the women and the men who have one leg
to stand on when it comes to understanding
the historic, but they keep their hand in,
pushing around the pigment with a brush.
The materializing of a figment
of imagination is a rush,
an arm-jerk liberal with the ligaments
of Homo sapiens, a humanist.
The color-coordinated good intentions
with the tension having two dimensions,
but who’s counting?
                                     Any communist
can recognize a picture of a hole
in the ground, it’s harder though to see the soul.



RAUL PENDRAGON’S RELEASE


Penelope was willing to
elope with a surreptitious
man whose testicles 
were like a pendulum.

He was fresh out of the penitentiary
and was pent-up,
a recent pen-pal. She was
very open-minded,

lying in her penthouse and
her panty-hose were torn,
her peaches nearly pendulous.
He was idolatrous.

Pending a discussion of their
future he explored her
penetralia as he
envisioned it inside

a penile institution. Seeing her
eyebrow pencil he forgot
the penal code, the penalties
enormous in this culture,

while referring to the zipper
in his trousers as a zip code.
“And the zip code moves the male,”
she murmured, hot and bothered

with a penchant for understatement
and the over-reaction,
where his life was often in a
state of pendente lite,

“while litigation continues.” He was 
now and then in trouble.
She was lying on the table
looking penetrable,


the penis of a penniless
impenitent was rising to the
occasion. Reaching her penultimate
acclaimed climax

in a dim penumbra of late
afternoon it left her feeling
like she’d been injected with an
anesthetic known as

sodium pentothal. He called her
his “penuche,” Mexican
raw sugar, neither one of them
inclined to write about it

in iambic pentameter.
That didn’t mean they weren’t a little
pensive now and then because
he didn’t have a pension.