carefree

It's sad how something about the care-
free way this woman at the beach strolled 
up--her breasts just hanging 
as they hang, her smile unclouded 
by the areas of loose skin around her power-
ful striding thighs, her sway apologizing for neither 
excess nor lack of sexuality, her glance 
not checking for other glances, her joy
beaming from skin not fretted 
over as too pale or too dark, her whole body 
vibrating with the power of not being 
judged as right or wrong but just freely 
and forcefully existing--that told me 
she wasn't from here, even before spoke.

The Way the World Ends

If the sun should slowly go dark
settling us into eternal lightless night
the windows of our souls shuttered for good
and in the twilight of this fading star falls the shadow
dooming us to gloomy dusky death
I would mourn
for the way the dawn illuminates the golden sweep of your hair across your face
for the reflection of radiance in your eyes as you look down into mine
for the morning backilght on the bare curve of your hip
edging you
coming alive
you me and the sun

If the sea should rise up tumid past its shores
quondam polar ice caps drowning us in retribution
robbing our lungs of precious air
god repenting him of having made us sinners
cleansing tenuous life from this holy sphere
I would cry
for breaths stolen between kisses
for waves of laughter sent into the night
for the musk of you, redolent of sandalwood and sweat and sand
gasps of joy and pleasure between the breakers
getting high
you, me, and the sea

If the earth should slip off its axis
gravity slackening and whirling us from its surface
setting us adrift into the cold vacuum of space
no longer bound to ground or bound for heaven
hurling us from its tired back between the motion and the act
I would ache
for the hot weight of your arm across my sleepy chest
for the heft of your strong body in my loving arms
for the gut-wrenching freefall of trusting you, and soft landings in your solid embrace
falling in general, in love
garden paths and rabbit holes for
going down
you, me, and the earth

If fire should start to rain down from the sky
incinerating our forests and our villages and homes
searing flesh and spreading densest smoke across the land
cinder and brimstone raining like the judgment of Gomorrah
scorching our skin and setting our frames ablaze like dry grass
I would grieve
for the chill of your kiss evaporating on my forehead
for winter evening walks in the crook of your arm
for snuggling up to you before the hearth against the cold
cool breath on sweaty necks
blowing
you, me, and the fire

I hope when we go, if we do, it is not with a whimper, but a bang.

3 Limericks About Llamas

There was a republican llama.
He drank and he caused himself trauma.
He fell off the roof
and injured his hoof
and blamed the whole thing on Obama.

 A llama was once named petunia.
Or maybe she was a vicuña.
Every time that she'd dance,
off came her pants.
If you stood behind her she would moon ya.

 Incontinence plagued an alpaca.
It ruined attempts to play soccer.
When he dribbled the ball,
the ball was not all
that he dribbled: there also was caca.

Sonnet # 6

I love the beach on brilliant sunny days
With sky and sea reflecting golden rays,
The hot white light that shimmers on the sand,
The swimmers' bodies oiled, taut, and tanned.

On such a brilliant day I love you, too.
When skies and eyes both shine the brightest blue
When brows and shores are free of stormy guile
And sunshine beams from waves and from your smile.

But when the fog rolls in across the bay
A solemn beauty permeates the grey
The swells are gorgeous flecked with tears and rain
The cliffs are stunning through the wind and pain

The beach and you are in a class together
I love you irrespective of your weather.

Need More Space?

“need more 
space?” 
asks a sign
on my way 
home. the sign
is attached to a 
large (compared to 
me) building. i 
look up past the 
sign and the 
building and see winter 
stars, the blazing 
bottom half of the 
moon, the andromeda 
galaxy, and all the 
black between. it 
is interesting to me that 
in actuality almost 
all of the known 
universe is 
space, 
that we live 
on a planet with 
more sea than 
land, that 
even the atoms of 
your body and 
mine are more 
space 
than matter, that i 
will spend more moments 
of my life without 
you than in your sweet 
presence. so no, we 
have plenty of 
space, 
dear sign. it
is the everything 
else that we need.

Smokebreak Outside the Silver Reign Gentlemen’s Club, Autumn

She closes her eyes toward the setting sun like a prayer, her skin tanned, her shirt white, her hair the color of honey, an ember between two fingers at her side. She likes the way the air is cool and the sun is warm here in November, likes that from half a block down you can smell the pine trees over the Quiznos and the shawarma place, likes that from here the 10 sounds enough like the ocean. She traces a finger along brick rough like a man’s stubble, and lets herself really feel it. A shirtless youth glides by on his board, his face tuned to her body, and she notices. A raven caws somewhere, a newspaper with the angry faces of candidates flaps half-heartedly against a stopsign pole, a helicopter is searching for someone toward Brentwood. She focuses her thoughts on the fire inside of her. For a moment, at least, she has found peace.

She doesn’t seem to know what I know.

Soon she will frown at her watch, drop her cigarette on the ground, grind it out and go back to work. The butt will lie there as a reminder, fading over the next few days, its paper shell breaking down and the brown tobacco inside puffing out like the guts of an overloved rag doll, and on Thursday the street cleaner will angrily snatch it up and no human being will ever contemplate it again. The newspaper, too, will deteriorate, but new ones will be printed every day until the old people die off and only the web version remains. One of those candidates will win and people will have feelings about it, and in four years there will be new angry faces on the papers. The helicopter won’t find its man this time, but it will find other men sometimes and one day the force will get an upgrade and this one will sit in storage until they sell it to CBS for a period cop show that will be set now.

The needles will one by one fall off these pine trees and turn to dirt and be replaced by new needles, entire branches will turn brown and a man from the city will remove them in a cherry picker with a power saw. The sidewalk will crack, and men from the city will fix that, too. The Quiznos will close for a while and reopen as a boba place and then a vegan sandwich store. The shawarma place will get passed down to the owner’s daughter, who didn’t want it. Eventually the whole building will be torn down and replaced by a mixed-use development with apartments above a Coffee Bean, an art supply store, and a small gym.

The youth whizzing by has a few more years of still being one. As winter comes, and again with middle age, he’ll take his shirt off less and less. One day after his mom’s funeral he’ll find his board behind the freezer in her garage, and he’ll turn with a disbelieving smile to show it to someone, but there won’t be anyone there.

The girl will finish her shift, pay her rent, come back here tomorrow and the next days and take more breaks. She will put these shoes in a bag that she means to take to the Goodwill on Santa Monica, and then throw it away when she moves because her daughter is getting too big to not have her own room. The shirt will go out of style and she’ll think of it as her “grungies” that she wears for housework, and then it’ll be a rag for dusting. She will experience joy and pain, her body will be mistreated by men with faces like brick and by time itself. Younger girls will start making the kind of money she now makes. She will buy new parts. She will try new hair colors as an affordable way of reinventing herself. She’ll get a new job in a bar where the men drink to forget things and she will make many of them feel noticed again for a moment. Her idea of success will gradually shift to being about making her daughter successful instead. Something dark will grow in her, caused by the tanning or the cigarettes or the sun. She will be buried in a wig the color of honey. Her daughter will cry and wonder what moments she may have missed, never knowing like I do about this golden moment in the sun.

I myself will turn grey one day. I will lose my words as aluminum takes over my neural pathways, and I will die. I will write this all down in my computer so people might remember me once I’m gone, and they will for a while, and then they won’t.

This whole city will grow and grow upward and outward. The sea will encroach and the Novembers will get warmer. They will ration the water. Legislation will be passed to try to limit the population. Bricks will turn to red dust and blow away. The American empire will fall. Overpasses will house the people and then crumble. Future excavators will find remnants of computers in the earth and never unlock the writings inside. In seven billion years, the sun’s core will run out of hydrogen and then helium, and its outer layers will expand rapidly and envelop the earth, melting its nickel core and vaporizing all known life. Entropy will leave the universe cold and black like marbles coming to rest after a spill.

She doesn’t seem to know any of this.

She frowns at her watch, drops her cigarette to the ground, grinds it out and goes back to work. For a moment, she, at least, has found peace. Another moment passes. A raven caws somewhere. I close my eyes toward the setting sun like a prayer.

Haiku #1

colors glow brighter
beauty precedes the darkness
twilight of mankind

Haunted

Haunted

 by robbie x pierce

I swear I heard my father’s groan:
Fatigue distilled into my ears.
But I am in the house alone
And he’s been dead for seven years.

Might his exhausted, heavy breath
Be echoing around my heart?
Has he unclamped the chains of death
With one last message to impart?

 This was exactly that old sigh
He’d breathe when getting home at night
And hearing now, I can’t deny
I see him in another light.

 Back then we children yelled and played
And rolled our eyes at groans from dad,
And now they’re back I’m not afraid;
This ghostly sound just makes me sad.

 I guess this happens when you’re grown
And scraping home from work alone.
You swear you hear your father’s groan
But it’s not his; it’s just your own.

Through the Darkness

A boy murmurs, crestfallen, his voice not yet changed. He stands with a man with postures like they might not know each other, definitely not family. It’s warm for January, dark for seven o’clock. The sounds are: high school kids clanging latchkey doors, dogs jingling their masters along, the helados truck playing its calliope siren, the grand traffic of La Brea, grandmothers calling the children to dinner.

The boy and the man stand like they’re stuck here outside this apartment gate, unsure, travelers despairing of a rendezvous at a darkening oasis. He’s a light-skinned boy, his knees plump and ashy, dorky in his basketball shorts and his mix of disappointment and failed bravery. The man wears a beanie and all black; he didn’t go to any job today. The tired sort of man with skin that will always be watched in businesses. As he responds to the boy he looks wearily up the street both ways without letting the boy see.

“You know she loves you, man. She buys you food, she buys you nice shoes, she takes you on trips.” The boy murmurs again, perhaps more hopeful this time, but now I’m past. No one is coming up the street with keys out, hugging and apologizing and blaming dead phones. Just the boy and the man, standing there hoping defiantly in the barred shadows of a gate.

God bless the tired men who heal these hurting boys, and god bless the boys who see love in a meal and a trip and basketball shoes that shine through the darkness all the way back to my own house.

Freak Flag

"Let your freak flag fly,"
They tell you
So let it fly
A banner blowing bravely in the breeze
Forever
Or awhile
Or don't.
It's your flag.

But do unfurl it!
Spread it on the grass and have a sunny picnic
Cocoon yourself in it against the bitter winter cold
Or sew it into your cloak and traipse the forest with your elves and sprites.

Just never let it sit
Folded and memorial on a shelf in the den
Collecting dust and shame
A monument to splendors that might have been.

Darkness

We walk through the night 
In darkness so black
No stars light the way
Or keep us on track

But way off ahead
We hear a clear voice
Of one who can see
And we then have a choice

To follow his counsel
And trust he can see
Or wander about
In the dark aimlessly

So for years upon years
I followed that call
I trusted that voice
In the dark above all

Placed foot before foot
Took pains with each stride
Walked on through the night
And I did so with pride

Until one strange moment
I felt a new grace
And something inspired me
To reach for my face

In that pivotal moment
I gasped when I found
That my eyes were constrained
With a blindfold around

I took off the cloth
And to my surprise
The night turned to day
It dazzled my eyes

All the things I had missed
The leaves on the trees
The delicate grace
Of clouds on the breeze

The colors of sky
When the sun hits the west
The beauties of sight
I could never have guessed

And off in the distance
I saw a small man
Bidding others to follow
Wherever they can

And even from here
When I looked I could tell
That over his eyes
Was a blindfold as well

So I turned toward the sun
Leaving darkness behind
And vowed that I never
Again would go blind

Sonnet 1

You thought that I'd appreciate this cat
That every morning to my doorstep brings
A new-found treasure, left upon my mat:
Some rats and toads and other murdered things.
She sits behind the carcass looking proud
And thinking I'll reward her for her skill,
And as she licks her forepaws, mewing loud,
The house begins to stink of this ripe kill.
Well, that is how you drag to me your heart
And offer tawdry love like some bright jewel.
The value of our hearts is worlds apart.
If my love's bought with yours, I am a fool.
Come get your things (and cat) out of my house.
Your love is just another moulding mouse.

Sunset

he goes down on her
she comes alive
fire in her loins
warmth crashing through her in waves
he is vibrant
draped in gold and magenta
and clouds
she reflects his energies back
they make each other beautiful
he plunges, sinks
with a slow and solid
burst!
his fire is everywhere
she groans
roars
he lights up
she
a second behind
then still
he is enveloped in her
she pulls the blinds
leaving us in the dark
to wonder what happens
between now and morn

Conquistador

A new land discovered, food and spices, wild flowers and exotic beasts and dark cultures. But so many men stay in their ships, sailing from port to port, trying to find an empire of metals and jewels. Spend your life in endless pursuit, if pursuit is the thing you love most. Sail the seas, cut through jungles and everglades, but know before you set out that you'll never drink enough from any fountain to quench the thirst for youth. Those moments are now.


There are golden cities men spend their lives in search of. El Dorado, the gilt one, El Adorado, the loved one. I will be wise, search for a while, then find my golden city in the sunrise reflected off adobe walls. I'll find my perfect lover among the imperfect people around me and love that imperfect lover with a perfect love. I'll shine the golden light of my love onto austere earthy features, change the walls of that city into mirrors and doorways and beacons of solid gold.

Live Oak

This is a first for me. I was assigned to draw a tree for class, and since I'm much more verbal than visually inclined, I wrote a poem and turned it into a tree. Let me know what you think. :) The poem is reproduced below because I doubt you'll be able to read it on many computer screens, but I wanted you to be able to see how it looks.














were I that old
clothed in moss and cobwebs
so stately
having seen men and grandsons plow these golden fields
having watched the sun set over the hills seventy thousand times
having freed children from gravity
offered myself as a memorial to lovers
comfort for the aged
had i gained the wisdom of the years
and the seasons and the storms
had i been singular in the eye of god for an eon
i too would send my roots deep into the hillside
embrace the land
let the earth whirl around me a thousand times more
as i hold still
motionlessly watching these curious young creatures all around
as they bustle about in their town in their cars
i'd send my branches out at solid gnarled angles
never moving
ever reaching toward the light

The Love of God

Alone he waits behind aged stained glass
Back and forth and back
He likes it here
Like church
In his earthen apartment
Under the cobblestone stairs of an old delicatessen
The world, when he would look out,
Was always warbly, bubbly, indigo and maroon and lavender
The world, if it were to look in, would see him the same

He has so much Love
Here is a cricket crossing his floor
And there it goes again,
Uninterrupted,
Between stacks of vinyls,
Barriers of inventions and wires and wheels
Invented barriers
Darkness,
And that bright purple square in the south wall
The dimmer purple parallelogram on the floor beneath

The muffled ding of a bell means order up
Another order of meat to go, up above
There's a contraption in the corner,
Hooked to the telephone
so that any time it rings,
LED lights will put on a dazzling show
Fireflies and fireworks and angels
He's set up incense to cover the smell and calm his nerves

The man himself is a tattered and lonely man-
Nearing, fearing forty
Facing this world all alone
Facing away from the world, now, really
You can look at the back of him
His Gene Wilder hair, patches in his suitcoat to make him feel more scholarly
Socks that only ever match if it's a coincidence

Look at him working,
Over the past nine years,
Cutting holes in his pockets in defiance of ownership
In defiance of change
Building his dream machines out of old lampshades and a record player
Childproofing the outlets and asking them to be his portals to a tiny land of love and magic (the same?)
Leaving the doors unlocked at night, just in case.
Is it warm in here, or just dark?

There sits his bible, under the light. A magnificent tome
It's the kind with the words of Jesus in martyr's blood red
Leather binding
And pages and pages for genealogy in the front, with some brightly colored saints
(No pages for progeny)

He reads of the love of God. Pure.
To possess charity is to have love FOR god, love LIKE god for his fellow men, love FROM god, he understands
He has so much Love
Jesus loves me, reads a scrawling script on a note that will be discovered much later by some stranger whom he also loves.
Up up up goes the handwriting, and then a sharp ragged down, telltale down

In a final experiment (thanks be to god for his unspeakable gift)
He uses some wire
The effects of gravity and sharp, sudden pressure
The details are meaning less

He really couldn't help himself
It's just that god loved him so much
And nobody nearer ever seemed to...
In all of this setup, years that led to this test of a hypothesis,
The phone never rang. Still no fireworks, no fireflies, no saving angels.
And now silence,
Same as before,
Save for another muffled ding from a bell up above.

He has so much Love

I Before E

My brother asked me to "ghost pimp this poem" for him. Pretty neat little idea he had, and it was fun to work with it and add some more words and jokes and stick it in anapestic tetrameter with a cohesive rhyme structure. The final result (which earned me 50 bucks):

I Before E

English has rules that are tough, I confess.

But they can be mastered with regular discipline.

Just follow these rules and you'll find your success,

And know that at least it's not Swedish or Mandarin.

We'll start with the easy ones: mischief and field,

Or pierce, believe, diesel, and even Marie,

There's priest, and belief, and grief, thief, and yield,

The rule, you can see, is it's I before E.

And then we've conceited, perceive, and deceit,

These words beak the mold; I think you'll agree.

With ceiling, receipt, and receive–ain't this neat?
It's I before E, except after C.

The rule’s also broken when sounding like “A,”

'Least that's what I found in heir, reindeer, and feign,

And neighborhood, weightlifter, terreplein, sleigh,

As eight weighty geishas surveil my chow mein.

Society, deity, science, sobeit,

It sounds like our language is digging for laughs.

But there's still a rule that works here, if you see it:

Seems "I before E" only works for digraphs.

There's Geiger and eiderdown, seismic, and gneiss

I think of these words, and I ask with a sigh,

If Einstein's a genius, how'd he miss it twice?

Unless the rule stops when E I just says I.

Remember: forget all the rules if you please.

Regarding the plurals of words with -C Y,

In fallacies, agencies, and frequencies.

It's always I E, and It's never E I.

Now Dreidl is foreign, and so's edelweiss,

So they're off the hook. Oh, and what of Beijing?

To answer your questions, this rule should suffice:

We tend to let proper nouns do their own thing.

There's counterfeit, heifer. die, neither, weird, seize,

friend, reveille, protein–our rules are now wrecked.

So memorize rules all day long if you please,

But when you're all done, have your papers spell-checked!

Mata Amritanandamayi

She set a goal to hug all of us
Everyone
All god's children
Three million down
Crisscrossing the globe and
Whoops
A slip
Four thousand more dead in Africa while she waited
For her fancy airplane
But here she is, villagers!
To hug the orphans of the deceased then
Off
To Quebec or Denver or Pittsburgh
She'll sit on her dais and hug all who approach her
And to the hospitals and the jails and the foster homes!
Here, Have a hug and an apple and a rose petal and a Hershey's Kiss™
And a blessing from god and the fortitude and faith to deal with another day of abuse and cancer and rape.
They say she's a saint
She hears
She hugs
The gays and the abortion doctors and the beef eaters
ALL the dear sinners
She is so damn full of love
She could explode from hugs unhugged

How pissed I'ma be
To turn around one of these days
And there's a little shriveled raisin of a swami
Clamped onto my leg in holy huglock
Pressing her lined face against my hip and anointing me with the tears of the saints
Then leaving me,
Another tally mark,
Three million and one
Another notch in her belt,
A bead on her rosary.
A brick in her tower to heaven.

Sadness

This is a VERY changed version of something I wrote a while back. Some might not like the changes. I'm sorry. Whereas it was once abstract prose, it is now semi-narrative poetry. I hope you like it, but this one is mostly for me.




sadness

to find beauty for that one i’ve yet to meet
i went one overcast twilight
through spacious flowered fields
past bubbling streams
that never reminded me of love
into the shade of murky wood
i came upon a pansy wilted
gray
forlorn and choked
springing impossibly from hard granite
there i sat and pondered

on the beauty of
tear-stained tracks down children’s dusty faces
weeks of rain
strong battered women
fancy melting candles
and darkwood rooms done up in red velvet
sputtering stars fighting to shine their light through earth's twinkly muggy atmosphere
and wildflowers growing raggedly from a crack in barren rock

i want to make someone's sadness my own
cup a fallen star in my hand as it burns
shelter it from tempestuous winds
shade it from the garish glare of sunshine

on summer nights i lie in the crunchy golden grass
look at the ghosts of giants
placed in the night sky to remind us
we all must pass on
we are only visitors here in this strange land
i love them
their tragic stories
heroes fallen in crumpled heaps
mythical beasts slain in fields of blood
tiny cold lights their most eloquent “in memoriam”

the sun comes out
stories fade to soothing baby blue
heroes and their eulogies forgotten
their wonders exist only in darkness

will heaven be all light all the time
will there be the dark spaces between the stars or
will they be filled in with such blinding light that there won't be any stars at all
will there be shadows dancing from the fireplace onto cozy earthen walls
will the forest still hold its dark secretive appeal or
will the leaves in the canopies be forced to move aside
let in the light
reveal her secret places
will all music be in major chords
all clouds cumulus
all stories have happy endings
will we mourn our damned loved ones or
will our grief be enough to save them
or
will we have to forget in our happiness that we ever loved them at all

when we are stars ourselves
will we all shine the same stark white
can I shine burgundy
olive or
burnt sienna
let my dark desires be the catalysts that make me more like god
let my self burn up beautifully like a meteor as I near perfection
let the forest shelter foxes in her secret places and murky mysteries
let the gnarled roots of this old oak tree hold the branches high
let my scars
be
my beauty
or i’ll choose to stay right here in the gloom of cloudy dusk
a wizened and bent old beggar man
who can’t bring himself to pick one sad little flower
who will have to bring that one he’s yet to meet down here instead
who has maybe found a new kind of grace

Outside

So, I transferred all my poetry over to this blog (at least, all my favorites), and I spruced them up with some pictures and all. Since this blog is really my gage to see what out of the things I've written is the most popular, please leave comments on the ones you like the best. Hopefully my voice comes through in all of them. My signature is heavy on opinions and wordplay. We'll start off with one that is sort of an experiment in sound.

Outside

My feet get all pruny, skimming just below the surface of the water,
down where the frogs and the fishies frolic,
down in the brown where they squelch around,
faintly afraid of worms and germs and
creepy crawdads in the cold murky muck,
digging for twigs and stones with my tiny toes
while water wends and slowly flows.

I rub the sweat off my brow with my hand, and see the crisscross lines from the grass,
feel the bending blades under the weight of my body
pressing my pink palms to the ground,
Hold the land in my hands, and wonder what the world is worth,
feel the beetles and roly-polies busily bustling beneath me,
My fingernails scratching into the dark mushy earth.

A mosquito hums high by my head, harmonizing with a distant beehive,
while the river rocks provide percussion,
a swallow sings solo, slowly,
and I, their unnoticed but awestruck audience,
lazily lie by my creek, listen and learn the tune
of June.

The sunshine, like drops of sweat, rolls down my crown, turning me brown,
drowning me in gold-green warmth,
as my skin and limbs try to slowly grow
in its glorious glow like the grass down below,
eyes closed, and the rosy rays radiate through my little lids,
puzzle pieces of light on my face, all around this place,
the bright summer light providing quite a nice show.

And here, behind my eyes, between these pleased ears, my fears disappear,
the stress and strain of a world gone insane,
panic and pain down the proverbial drain,
and here, in my heart, a happiness hides,
spreading spryly inside, shining childlike light right out of my eyes,
and after a while,
my blackberry-bloodied lips quiver at the tips,
and softly slip into a sweet, sticky smile.