Poems, thoughts, and stories.
Montecito. Atascadero. Paso Robles.
Monterey. Santa Cruz. Your smile.
Places more magical than real,
more past than present,
traveled through.
They live in my memory.
I write them because I miss them.
And I was told naming something
gives you power over it,
fixes it in place.
Well, then:
money wealth recognition words
anonymity hands night sky
ocean breeze sage and iceplant
arches
Redondo
quick intake
you.
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I went looking for a feeling today,
that one special feeling I once caught
somewhere, maybe a river in Wyoming
slipping by wild grass or a night when,
still studying philosophy, I looked up
from my book and noticed the soft-light
of my little dorm lamp and loved it.
I hunt this feeling, trap it with
Grandma's plastic tablecloth that was
padded so no waterglass could be placed
on it without almost toppling over
and her tossing a tennis ball to a dog
in the backyard, the distant sound
of a train rolling down dark tracks
as I slept.
I surround it and demand its name.
It smiles at me and slips through the
gaps and the hunt is on again for that
feeling I'm looking for today,
maybe walking down a dusty road in
Sacramento and seeing a lizard dart
off into the bush and then my shoes
seemed quiet under the hot-white sky and
for a moment I forgot where I was going.
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Alternate Route (Winter 2024)
Click on the pic and you’ll find some of my words on page 42 of this gutsy beat journal. “Rebellious, transgressive writing with attitude” in the tracks of Kerouac, di Prima, Ginsberg…all my heroes.
Print copies of Issue 12 available soon.
Spend some time with art that feels like something’s still real and alive in the world. Previous issues (print and digital) available here.
Down deep
it is dark
and kind
if kind means silence
and peace so thick
only the strangest skulls
survive.
Up top, oh that’s the place to be —
party that never ends — and
prettiness from nowhere
to end collapsed and still
until — turbulence and dance
and spray —
spring into spacious sky
before falling
deep into peace
so beautifully thick —
somewhere begins to dance.
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This this is me not mine,
not mine to keep or even borrow
for this this is you not yours either,
not yours to lend or swallow.
All this is this
in every way that matters
as body belongs to earth
but keeps getting bothered
like a grandmother sitting
on a toilet, sighing.
I used to think this was easier
to find because you stayed put
for ninety-six years.
I got confused.
This this doesn’t leave
and is my brother now
sitting on a toilet
thinking he is alone.
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I’ve been busy. Details soon.
This is where I met Babar and Gus and Charlotte who was friends with a pig and taught us both Life Goes On even through tears. I watched my mom carry her weight in books to the librarian-lady paid to look mean but she was actually nice as she took pictures of punchcards and told me I would have such fun where I was going. We were poor though I didn’t know it as I poured over a Big Book of Ships and I listened to Drums that I hated hated hated but I loved the way my grandma read so I pretended (I think she knew). Later I'd walk to that funky stoned (literally) building on my own, corner of Vanowen and Vanalden. There I solved cases with Encyclopedia Brown and found a book called The Battle of Midway that taught me sometimes a war comes down to 28.2072° N, 177.3735° W. Gray's Anatomy — wow! How did they draw that well, and is that what I look like inside? Where the Red Fern Grows because, you know, dogs — and to make myself feel better I picked up The Red Pony. Mistake. Except tears and truth often go together. Steinbeck became my god before I met Corrie ten Boom in her hiding place and Siddhartha Hesse kept asking me questions until I found out why a caged bird sings and that wars are going on always, sometimes in the bedroom, sometimes far from streets. Angelou Birdsong led to Beloved Morrison and Purple Walker, and I saw with new eyes a way: war is going on always, always, but to speak is to fight. Never stop fighting. Never. Stop. Fighting. Still later I met Monette and found his half-life beautiful — maybe mine would be, too. I put Melville back on the shelf 55 times before I finally breached its first great wave and then thought: was Hawthorne his Moby Dick? Poor guy — Hawthorne was a crank but damn if his letters weren't good. Woolf my Patron Saint showed me her room so that I could want mine. Tan and Yen Mah who made my mom cry because they knew, they knew — “we carry our stories” — it wasn’t easy, not easy at all. She loved those books. All this and more in a library, from my little corner one (when LA had only one area code) to the Library of Congress, a pilgrimage. Memories of mom dragging me by the hand until, later, I was pushing her chair to the books. All these people, all these ghosts dancing and sobbing and waiting on shelves, waiting to be held or thrown, doesn’t matter. Life buoyed by imagination, imagination buoyed by life. Freedom. Adventure. Suffering. America. So of course: Arizona Georgia Illinois Louisiana Mississippi Missouri Montana Pennsylvania South Carolina South Dakota Texas Wyoming let's close the libraries. We wouldn’t want anybody learnin' nothin' new…
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“This effort to change what libraries are, or even just take libraries away from communities, I think, is part of a larger effort to diminish the public good, to take away those information resources from individuals and really limit their opportunity to have the kinds of resources that a community hub, like a public library, provides.”
— Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.
You said your lines, took a bow — your part, you thought, finished, the play, you figured, done. Such a blessing, the ramp to Freedom. Such a blessing, California Dreamin’. That’s when he tells you: “Stay. Here. Please.” You love him. He loves Miami. So…you sway on Santis strings as neighbors dance before der King; whisper nothing, take your cake (strudel, like the children say); booze your man in darkened car, hide deine fury, hide deine scar — while Panhandlers ban your books take your wage choke your heart burn your page — Are you listening, Brother? It's not metaphor. They want you dead. That’s the plan. Forgotten ash in gottes cleansed sky. It’s time to leave the SunShineStaat. Escape. Please. Take your love and run now. Now. It’s not going to get any better.
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“If it means ‘erasing a community’ because [they] have to target children – then, damn right, we ought to do it!”
— Florida Republican Representative Randy Fine
“Our terrorist enemies hate homosexuals more than we do.”
— Florida Republican Representative Jeff Holcomb
“Many people – many nations – can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy.’ For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. Here is the product of a conception of the world carried rigorously to its logical conclusion; so long as the conception subsists, the conclusion remains to threaten us. The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm-signal.”
— Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
You and I pretend to keep the extra heartbeats and moods that follow — wagons loaded full of words to pull against the bright sky empty because we cannot fly.
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Word in the wind is wind in the wind shaped not changed, noise to crude-drum ears, then still. Send yours again across skin that is kin to touch and moves to tremble, limbs hot under breath that holds earth-deep fire then cool to rest as I birth grope listen hope a man immersed then drowned.
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for KG
The air smelled all Georgio and ocean in LA and my body worked so well I felt nothing, nothing, which is what health and vitality are, feeling nothing but heat on the bed, body on the sheets, the summer smell of my body in that not-new crusty motorhome parked outside Aunt’s house at the top of a street on a hill on a curve. It shouldn’t have worked parking on the ridge between Torrance and, over there, Redondo. The street was too small but she loved that RV and parked it in front of her house after she picked me up at Beck’s, my other grandpa, the one I hadn’t seen in so long. He didn’t know where I’d been or why, how I hitchhiked across the Utah desert and Nevada and slept with a truck driver in a cheap motel with shitty beds because I was fourteen and my step-dad threw me out of the car in Salt Lake.
He didn’t ask and I didn’t say. She knew but didn’t say anything. We had that in common.
I sometimes go back to that hill but nothing’s there anymore except I am in that bed over the cab, my own little place because there was no room in Aunt’s house. She acted embarrassed but to me it was heaven and I told her I couldn’t think of a more-fun thing to do. I ran to it that first night to fuck around because I was only fourteen and didn’t know how to pick up sex then and the whole thing was mine so I jammed myself thinking about the missionaries that used to come knocking on the door and the new nylon shorts I was wearing, the blue running shorts she bought me with the slit up the leg so high, and I couldn’t be stopped and nobody was around and they probably couldn’t see even though the little cab-light was on and they probably saw, or saw the camper moving, but I didn’t think about that too long because it felt so good. Nobody said anything the next morning, not even her son, even though he looked at me weird and they’d have to be blind not to see.
I was a nice boy everyone pitied because I was not strong and who my step-dad married. Someone once said at his church “For what he’s been through…Heavenly Father sure made him smart.” Skinny arms and twig legs and desire for those missionaries, desire so wild I yelled the first time I came and then it became a contest to see how far it could go until I knew I was gay and not just friends with guys and my first thought was “Cool.” Then all hell broke loose again and I’m almost fifteen in an RV parked on a curve at the top of a hill. I want so many guys I feel like a whore back when being a whore was dangerous because AIDS was out so I’m fucking around above the cab amazed at how I smell and happy. Aunt drives me to Universal Studios the next day and says she thought she washed the sheets but evidently not and opens the windows as she drives up the 405 freeway. This is the first time I feel like a man. Everything changes. I didn’t think it would — I wanted time to kiss Bryce and use my body with him and have someone beautiful take me away. But she smelled the sheets and I was proud and didn’t need Bryce or mom or a dad because I was sure.
It’s all good now. There’s no need to go back to my glorious skin or dream other whores out there waiting to be touched and taken and left so they can go to work the next day and then home to kids and husbands who know nothing. I go back to that bed over the cab that smelled of sweat and cum because I love how the story began and I watch everything that’s happened and say:
“Fuck you were a skinny whore.”
I feel good. I feel fifty while I sit at the table, stay up for the words because they are strong and true and because this is who I want to be, where I want to be, writing under a crap light while people wonder what the fuck I’m doing parked on this goddamn hill.
Photo by Sebastian Huxley on Unsplash
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Greg Beckman 