No Ambition For Dry Pivot

The white man says walk.

The red hand says stop.

We square step with a broom

and two dance with a mop.

I miss my friends; 

the stand up bass

and upright piano

but 

when they play 

I'll listen and follow.

Inside the basement wood joist ribs

of the old century leviathan 

sounding deep under waves of memory

I finally understand.

The headlights in the rain

are flashlights searching for meaning

in place and time.

I however have no destination.

I'm up here,

north of the oil tar skeleton

of the coal Gas Works,

west of the wayward girl-ghosts

of Good Shepherd Center,

yards from the fifty foot explosion

of big leaf maple

and the nicotine stained windows

of the doll-maker's house.

You can find me

with a needle and lodestone,

no ambition for dry pivot

staring at magnetic north.

An Urban Bestiary

Down the street
up in the buildings
under the avenues
in tunnels of transit
I am always surrounded
by the beasts of the city.
There are bears in the Capitol Hill bars,
snakes in the banks of Fifth Avenue,
dead foxes on old hens
browsing in the windows
of the West Edge.
Rats scurry in every shadow
from Aurora Avenue North
to White Center
(why do you think
they call it "Rat City?").
Cows block the doors
of busses in the Third Avenue transit corridor.
Chickens hide from tavern bulls
in tepid coffee shops
abutting slaughterhouse shopping malls
where the barnyard sleepwalks
single file
past the ringing tills
of the abattoir cash register.
Better watch out.
Young packs of wolves
roam far and wide
slashing at the old and infirm
with impunity
while pigs in penguin cars
sit safely parked
in suburban drive throughs.
This little worm
is gonna find a soft patch
of cold compost
and run silent
and deep,
like a dirt submarine.

Full Retreat

I fall back

from the front

in complete disarray

and teeth chattering confusion.

Shell fragments 

of general ledger flak bursts

lodge in the holes of my eyes

trailing white collar cordite smoke

behind me in the ambivalent wind.

I fall back

all the way to hopelessness

and infant panic

through high rise mausoleums

filled with filing cabinet tombs.

In the dark

I seek out the bright white mouth

of a florescent parking garage's

empty stomach.

Just a nothing place 

to hide in the bright dead light

and finish drinking

tiny bottles of white hot

black ink.

Just a place to go 

to be gone

and sit with failure.

The first thing you have to learn here

is that you're already dead

and that there's no place like home

because there's no place like home.

Electric Laundryland

Last Sunday.

Walking south towards the bakery

on Wallingford

I saw this.

Old hippies 

had been living in the Apex Cleaners building.

They put up posters of Jimi Hendrix 

in the plate glass windows.

They put a Hendrix quote 

on the reader board,

"Blues is easy to play but hard to feel."

Somebody got up there 

and did a little bit of editing.

"Sleasy butts feel hard,

buy poo."

I am pleased.

six six six

All change comes

in modesto sun soaked wrinkles

pushed into 

wheat straw symphony folds

of highway foothills.

Nothing town 

on Salton Sea shore;

in cuts of long range focus

and letterbox quick close-up,

he steam engine idles 

through the pine board set

of the town.

Arriving fingered 

in the lux nova

of sun squint eyes,

he trails out kelp bed curls

of black dust wake disturbance.

Mistrust and awe

settle in greasy white pores

of parade route spectators

who had it so good

until their complexion went dim.

The shit's piled up in the breeze.

The lightning struck the pine.

We've all got a little disease.

All change is here.

It's nothing new.

Everybody's concubine 

is on the nod

and turning blue.

Lunar November

Up here
the snare drum
of the fishtank night
is the oil can bulletstrike
of the shipyard rivet gun
on hollow trawler hull.
The wind pounds its way north
up from the bay
through the re-grade
into the deciduous Sunnyside old growth.
Every sidewalk is a gyre
of dead leaves falling through
rot stains of concrete leaf memory.
I can't look down
or I'll forget how to fly
and fall through the maple root cracks
of the sidewalk.
Swaying curtains of rain
flamenco skirt in jaundiced beams
of cascade streetlight.
The edges of the day
that ooze out the tread marks
of the commuter bus tired
under my footsteps
and the gurgling asphalt
are stained with deep space
and howling darkness.
And now I've just heard
we might replace the moon.

The I Formation

It feels good 

to open the valves

on the AC-30 

in the stripper's basement

where four knives are mic-ed

and cut sheet metal circles

out of the ride cymbal ripple.

We've got twenty five years

of quarter inch Belden cable.

We have thousands of minutes

of meetings 

with Les Paul 

and his Celestion Greenback Speakers

logged in the books.

We've got Nixon nailing a split,

electroshock hospital jingles,

The Golden Age of Larry King,

Fender precision,

Herschel Walker's multiple personality disorder,

I-Formation,  fullback offset weak side

and sixteen tracks.

Down in the basement 

out of your earshot

playing loud rock and roll

and rock and roll and rock and roll

over

is a knockout baby.

It took years

to find the craft in our hands

and the ring in our heads

to know a good thing right.

Sorry people,

this next one is just for the band

and this next one,

and this next one,

and this next one. 

Rain Turning Into Showers

Listen I get up
in the morning's twilight.
The Sybil of Cumae
on channel 13
promises rain
turning into showers.
The Oracle of Delphi
on channel 4
forecasts a long commute.
Autumn's play of leaf fall
carpets the sidewalks
and storm drains
in slick sheets of rot.
No matter where I go
the sound of water,
running,
trickling,
splashing,
snaredrum rolling on metal,
follows me.
Away from the streets
and the tired expressions
of the city's worker bees,
the wildwood ground
soaks up the winter
in dark shades of green and brown.
I'll take you there.

Platform Rocker

When I was a kid

rockstars weren't politicians.

When I was a kid

rockstars came from space.

Everything they touched

peeled off petals of dull platitudes

and exposed glitter flashes of munificence

in struck fields of stage-lit faces.

The Tuba Man

Five kids

gang banging on Mercer Street

beat the living shit 

out of The Tuba Man

one October Saturday night.

He died a week later.

The Tuba Man 

played in the street,

usually in front of 

a ball game

or 

the opera.

I once asked 

if he could hit 

a low C

on my way into

a Mariners game.

He hit it.

The Tuba Man was like The Ramones;

you couldn't conceive a world without them.

But now, we have to.

Guts

I used to work on Capitol Hill,

fixing greasy tape decks

in a basement 

filled with solder smoke

and forklift exhaust.

This guy named Corey

used to come into the shop

with rare bootleg vinyl 

to sell for crack

when he came up short

between paydays.

I picked up a lot of good stuff

and fed his habit

with currency

he turned into

little off-white rocks

he liked to burn

deep into his 

stained glass lungs.

Urban alchemy.

They called him 

the Warehouse Rodent.

Jibb and Fish 

said he looked like a yeti

with his coarse beard

and missing teeth.

His smile 

looked like a 6-7-10 split.

I thought he looked like

Ben Gunn 

from Treasure Island.

Cory used to call me Hitler

over warm swill beers

in the back of the Comet Tavern,

the blackened pancreas of the city.

I never knew why.

Cory used to come to Model Rocket gigs

and request Back to the Beanstalk.

He knew it was about him

and his addiction.

He loved it,

the song and his addiction.

Cory finally got shit-canned

for throwing a pry bar 

at the warehouse manager.

He disappeared 

into the dark, wet guts of the city.

We're all 

slowly getting digested here.

I saw him 

one early summer morning

after a long summer evening.

I was coming up for air

from the Sunset basement speakeasy.

He was with some faded transients

gathered for a parley

behind a rancid dumpster.

I boozily called out his name

and gave him a surprised hug.

He smelled like shit and ammonia.

"You better get out of here.

This ain't any kind of place for you."

That's all he said.

I don't think he recognized me

in the small dead hours of the morning.

For some reason,

he came into my thoughts 

while riding on a bus 

going up the Battery Street Tunnel

into the city.  

The exhaust stained tile

of the tunnel's interior

reminded me of villi

in a small intestine.

Cory's been consumed,

digested and expelled as waste,

passed through the Battery Street Intestine,

right out the Alaskan Way Colon,

through the Harbor Island Anus

into to the rainbow slick of Elliot Bay.

We're all slowly being digested here.