Bare bones in colloquialisms,

these poems.

They bound in and out like
the sounds of songs in passing cars
harsh and snapping and then gone.

There are no stories here,
only epitaphs.

Fishing Hole

fishing for cans and bottles in a
trash can by the door of the mini mart.
The trash can, green with small
black wheels in the back, brims
with paper bags and Styrofoam
cups, flyers and broken down cardboard
boxes, cigarette packs and the hope for
a couple dimes worth of glass or plastic.
Fishing for hope, his hand comes across lotto
scratch offs, played and thrown away—.
He sits on the concrete lump that
keeps cars from coming too close to
the wall, and looks through the three
cards, crumpled by another’s disappointment—
looks through their metallic sheens,
their promises of green and red—
promises already proved lies.
He leans back against the trash
can, upsetting one of his bags of bottles:
today’s catch.
His tan coat is tattered from elbows to
cuffs, its white stuffing hanging slack
out of the tears around his wrist as he
peers at the figures and numerals and
proves the promises lies to himself before
replacing them in the Rubbermaid green
trash can, gathering his bags and walking
to the next fishing hole.

sitting on a cardboard box

sitting on a cardboard box under a bridge in the city,

Dallas in the rain, reflected green, never seemed so pretty

grimy,

 and hard.

Street lights and brakes, blinkers and neon

blur in my vision,

as i am surrounded in the sounds of the city

muted by drizzle:

wet tires approaching and receding

like an urban tide, 
the sirens in the distance lifted

by the wind to drift under the bridge

and mix with the chatter of the old troll

whose party i've crashed.

LeRoy speaks to me slowly,
tells me tales of years past

glory days lived fast and half fabricated.

memories of playing music in juke joints that never existed

memories of women who vanished like mist in the sun,

slowly faded.

His calloused hands hang limp off his knees

except when he points a gritted finger at the city

or when he takes the wine from me.

He lifts it through the wiry brush of hair around his lips

and tilts his bald head back to drink

before passing the bottle back to me.

Sucking the air in between his few pomegranate seed teeth,

LeRoy, the troll, continues to speak.

"Shit, son," he turns his eyes to mine,

"i know you ain't believe half of my life.

"You think i'm liein'."

I laugh, put the bottle down
and pull out a sack of grass
and an orange pack of zig zags.

He smiles, unleashing enough reason for five DDM suicides.
We sit in silence as we finish the weed,

then i get up and give him the end of the pluck,

the last of my wine.

His grunt suffices for both thanks and goodbye

as i walk out from under the over pass

and out into under the sky.

Coyote-Under-Arclight

He glows over shadow
from an arc light just above—
abuzz.
His eyes are black holes, and whether windows
on the soul
(like the man said)
I don’t know,
but what he is
well, I think I can venture a guess
low slung pants,
leaning on a streetlight
in a down vest—
yes, slick trickery personified.

Let’s call him Coyote-
waiting.
So— Coyote-waiting-under-the-arclight
stands—waiting—under the arclight,
salty—doggin the ground in front
of his feet as he flicks his bic
shhhhhick its sparks, negligence.
Coyote-waiting-under-the-arclight
glows over shadows
brightly shines over stark darkness
as he
slinks slowly ‘round ‘tween
the streetlight and chain link fence
stalking—but knowing his game is so tight, it’s a sin.
He doesn’t need to chase his prey, they
will come to him.

Strap-Hanger

He rambles, mumbling, standing,
a hand in a fingerless knit glove grasping hold
of a bus seat or really one of the metal poles
that come up from the seats at the corner.
His long frayed coat sways against the sway
of the bus, billowing the sullied stench away
from his body and toward the rest of us.
He looks like he would be unsteady at the best
of times, and every time the bus comes to rest
creaking, as its brakes grind, he stumbles
into the people around him. honestly, if it wasn’t easy
to see how sloppy he is, they would probably believe
he was picking their pockets.

He has eyes that can only have ever been called
beady, and if his beard and brows were any bushier
he couldn’t be said to have any eyes at all.
The hair on his face must have been grown
as an attempt to compensate for the hair
that was on his head but decided on its own
it was time to evacuate. The hair he has left
is grown long around the bald scalp,
making him resemble an ascetic monk, which
he may be. I haven’t ruled it out.

He rambles, mumbling, sitting,
his fingers fiddling with the frayed end of his coat
sleeve.

Cartouche

Let's write our name in the cement

when the hard hats call it a night.

Find a stick or some re-bar, 

somethin’ strong enough

to get in the concrete as it dries

and leave our cartouche 
engraved in stone, 

out eternal names

on Jefferson and LaBrea.

Unwanted Populations

Twisted—
the bone gristle exposed
through holes in the skull
which is cracked and has
crusted with blood that
dried on her scalp—
she is wrapped in old
blankets and newspapers
by the dumpster in the alley,
under sloppy tags, her
cocoon untouched except
by rats and roaches and
the eggs that will hatch
to maggots that will eat her
dead flesh.
It reminds me of pictures
I’ve seen of the Sioux at
Wounded Knee—
frozen in the snow.

On Earth As It Is

The street glitters like a slug’s trail—
an almost unbroken string of twinkling
headlights stretching to the horizon,
moving slowly under the arc lamps—
under the drizzling rain—
the miserable drizzling rain.

We sit, waiting, with necks craned
under the plastic roof of a bus stop
littered with broken and gutted black
and milds, cigarette butts, toothpicks
and leaves, a battery, the detritus
dampened plastered to the pavement.

The tires of passing cars rip across
the wet road.
Then in the distance,
the bus approaches,
creaks and squeals,
rumbles its arrival.

We are ready—not single file,
but each instinctively knowing
who’s next, except (obviously)
the woman who steps in front
of me, waving a card. I board
the bus after her, into people
uncomfortably invading each
others space, damp on the long
ride home. The bus sighs,
disapproving its load and
growls into the street.

I stand facing a man, seated, on his way home.
His face is clever, but blunted by disappointment,
drooping at its edges; his throat, loose, gathered in
his collar like a morbid cravat; his eyes shine with
the watery translucence of the leaded windows of
an abandoned home. His hands tell of years of work,
calloused and rough edged with small nails on short
thick fingers fidgeting with the pleats of his khaki
slacks. When he brings his face into a smile (letting
a lady take his seat) his wrinkles bend unnaturally,
as if a smile is a foreign expression to him. The
wrinkles crack and multiply making his visage
resembles an aerial photograph of some Arizona
canyon land. His smile is forced and forces his face
into positions his eyes cannot corroborate—
And so, his face crumbles back into the care worn
ravines of wrinkles—what could be called laugh
lines except that laughter seems so far from him.
No those must have come from squinting in the sun
while working the fields that were in season.

The bus gasps to a stop
and I find a seat as people
depart.
Outside under umbrellas, a man
packs up from where he sold clothes
on hangers on a fence on the corner
of an empty lot that looks like
plowed black earth except that
it is strewn with garbage and dumping,
and it is growing wild along its edges.
The wall behind the lot is sheathed in
waves of bright aerosol paints scribed
and scribbled, colored with autographs
slick in the rain, streaked with tail light’s
red reflected and the shimmering purples
of the neons on the stores. The street
is lined with telephone poles and palms,
and electric wires that are a tangle of
straight lines exiting a market that has a coil
of barbed wire around the roof.

The bus moves on, and the street
lights become less common;
the windows make mirrors in the
reflection of the fluorescents,
and in the reflection I first see her.

She sits by the window
the neck of her knit T, pulled out of shape,
ripples around her throat irregularly.
The bloom of her youth has recently faded, the
last petal fallen, leaving a naked stamen.
Her proud cheekbones under temper fired eyes
are beaten bronze shields—battle worn
like the rest of her in her green winter coat
with grubby cuffs.
Her hands— stained— entrenched with grime
crusted under the nails, hold her coat closed
across her breast—so dignified.
her irises float on the yellow of her eyes,
drift this way and that in conflicting currents
not watching anything, but aware,
always aware as they pass over
the people getting off when the bus stops
the cars passing in traffic
the man lying across three seats snoring
in stocking cap and a trench so stained
it has begun to look camouflaged
but on the young girls walking down Spring
as it approaches Seventh her eyes rest a moment
as she watches
her past walk and wave at the men who slow to pick
her past up and give it a ride to wherever it leads
and her eyes jerk away—catch mine, stop,
then look away,
her irises adrift again on their yellow seas
never resting long enough to attract attention.

The bus slides to my stop—
slowing lazily down half a block
I stand out of my seat and step off
into the slick glistening streets
that glitter like galaxies impossibly
packed with stars— the light
catching in the edges of each piece
of blackened gravel, and the
street top’s shine is only broken by
the expanse of black sky
mirrored by a puddle, until a car
passes and breaks its surface
into a thousand shards of the
headlights reflected in the
ripple and splash. Yes, the road
is still wet, but the sky herself
is clearing, dotted with stars
and cottonelle clouds flat on
the bottom—on the top plucked
into plumes and jagged teeth,
framed by the tall buildings of
downtown LA as I amble home
from the bus stop.