Life in America Up Until Now

The white people

have gone crazy

in the back seats

of All American cars

looking for the sex life

that fell between the cracks,

meanwhile screaming the rudeness

of Romantic love

that   finds them

hung-over in court

too early in the morning

of a business day

where they'll tell the Judge

that it's only rock and roll

and that there was something in the way

the singer dropped his "g's

and a manner

worth noting when the guitarist

grabbed his whammy bar

and that all they did was taking

Creeley freely and pile into

the four-wheeled remains of a rumored prosperity

and drove into

the running gag reflex of the night, down a blvd.

filled brand names and bored cops,

cruising to get "some", to find "it"

and where "it" lived,

a slobbering example

of failed bonding

locked into habits

where even as their language of outrage

is bought and shredded

in magazines whose pages stick together

just as they did

in the parking lot after last call,

harassing the cocktail staff

that's  going home,

they'll stick to principals

familiar and vague,

like that song whose words you never memorized

but tried to sing anyway, with a hushed secret at the core of the chorus

Saying that love is somewhere

just around one of these thousands

of and that it’ll shake your hand

if you drive long and far and often enough,

if you've the gas

to complete the journey, the journey

Celine dreamed of while lying in bed,

staring at ceilings, concluding

that his language of outrage could only

describe the surface details of wrong turns,

that it  had been bought and sold in a tradition

of literature that speculates about how wonderful

our  lives might have been

if only the dream hadn't ended

when we opened our eyes,

Our eyes are constantly

getting used to the dark

absorbs every inch of brick

in  parking lots

behind buildings and under bedrooms

of others who've made

their peace with

the sameness of the night,

the radio blares

more guitar solos

emerging from the

static of stadium

drums and strumming,

crazed cadenzas

whose neurotic notes scurry

and cleave to a neuron receptor

and keys a change

in the brains chemical balance that  changes

the language of what the nights' really been about,

But we remain where we are,

white heterosexual males bond

by nothing more than

the chain sawing motion

of jaws lifting and falling

on the pillows and

sofa cushions in

desert motels

in time to the pans of a camera

on the silent television

where it’s nothing but a wall full

of clocks telling

the time in

three separate

time zones while

temperatures are mentioned where

anger and rain mix in the fields

and valleys of economies

based on pride,

some abstract grip on selflessness that

needs no sleep

as do the bodies in this room,

dead to the world when the

engine blew, when the gas ran out, when

the last drop in whatever bottle of

cartoon labeled beer vanished on the

buds of a tongue

whose thirst could not be slaked by?

promise of fortune or even

water, pure and free of lies,

We sleep in shifts until

our time here runs

out on us,

until the phone that rings

everyday for twenty minutes on end

stops finally and leaves

the house quiet

from stairway to attic to porch,

with only the whir of the

refrigerator engine

starting up

and filling the stale,

stale air that

used to carry

mean jazz, drum boogie,

scratched riffs of declarative guitars,

the frets of God announcing

a life worth inventing in the notes

that passed through the room,

the boredom,

we realize in frozen moments

that any excuse for getting

out of the house

is a magic trick

that’s performed after

they’ve shown you

where they’ve hidden the mirror,

“Language is the house

where man lives”,

let us say

that this life is

like being a fish

that cannot describe the water it swims in,

endlessly at 3AM

when only the coffee at

the 7-11 has the

aroma of anything

real enough to make

us think of getting

out of town

with one suitcase

and a bus fare,

next to a goddamned big car,

five shoulders

to the wheel

and no one able to drive

between towns , from carnival to still spot

where ever we could

pitch tents and trailers

and set up Ferris wheels that

would rattle against a

large scowling moon

hovering over

Modesto and Turlock

on dry August nights

when dollars are

grimy with mung from

many a farmer’s and mechanic’s hand,

power chords slice through

the speakers, destroy the cracked dashboard,

your face is slapped

with a power not your own,

it comes down to something

that’s a secret that even The Judge

won’t cop to it before he lowers his voice,

“The beat goes on,

the beat goes on,

the beat goes on,

the beat goes on…”

We can do better

this far away

from our past,

we have something

we’ve turned toward,

a light in eyes, a sun

that shines a light

those blades of

grass and long

stemmed flowers lean toward

even when clouds

and the stammer of fire eating transistors

sizzling from car windows distort the

image in the minds’ eye,

I see a city where we come

and plant our feet on lawns

where we can sit

and plant in turn

new seeds, ideas

of a future worth having,

Let’s lean into the sun,

into the sun,

ride bicycles into the sun

on the road that becomes

a ribbon around the

heart of the world.