DOGS, DRUNKS , AND THE MOON

Dogs and drunks are barking tonight under my window, they share a vocabulary of bottled rage, sounds only the throat, free of language, can make. Silent train whistles and steel wheels humming droning along the rails sets them all off like bells in phone booths, no one will investigate. Tonight it's summer and there's only the moon that makes sense, there is only the moon to talk to. Anything said on the phone and letters will always lie, but the moon that hangs full over Pacific Beach controls the tide of mood, your defenses ebb and leak into the ravine of meaning, there's only grunts, deep sobs, fingers of pain that writes the script. There is only salt and hard water when thirst is a rough patch where the right words fight for passage. Some one is on that train going somewhere that has everything to do with searching, Dogs and drunks are leashed to the dumb facts of the matter, the material things that are cyclone fences and the bottled rage all the liquor pours from. I've made the bed a dozen times and half a Marlboro carton sits atop a box full of poems that are about beauty and irresolvable puzzles. Dogs and drunks are louder than warfare, the silence is white canvas my world spits on, I cry for my father who held my hand when he was dying, blind in both eyes and asking if I paid good money for the haircut, do I love you do you love me was I good enough to be your Father? Moon over PB and La Jolla, legendary stalking of streets, howling the grunts from bus stops and passenger windows, years of lawns and alleys where all the growing up was done, moon a search light in a sky the black and continuous like that's all there is when I close my eyes and everyone and thing is gone in a snap, only music and memory in the dark, moon of three decades lasting through all it's quarters my life a death by million cuts, the shadows of buildings, light from windows, lives going on, work being done, neither talking to god nor the devil but rather to the light, moon of all my years, pale cratered smirker, whose eyes are those of my father who loved me beyond the reach of his years and the light of his eyes that died on the day when breathing surrendered itself to the other side of the moon that never sets but instead rises to cloudless heights words suggests but leave nameless, anonymous as whispers in an ear from a ghost looking over my shoulder.