Free
Verse
The
Editor
I
rewrite the poem
For the third time
Print it out again
Ball it up and toss it
At the feet of my cat
Who shakes it
Like a mouse
Spits it out
Like a bitter pill
There will be no fourth time
The editor has spoken
Bayshore Junk Yard
What's left
of a classic
Nineteen-fifty Chevy
Lay's corpse like a war zone
In a deserted battleground
Hubcaps gone seats gutted
Steering wheel pushed
Into dashboard
Waiting on the car crusher
To clutch her in its steel claws
To come down on her
Like a serial killer
Mutilated raped ravished
All life squeezed out of her once
Virgin frame
Mexico
November 2008
Alone in my
hotel room
In Mexico, thirty-six hours
Before my flight back
To San Francisco
A hundred blank poems
Rattling around inside my head
I can turn each one
Into paper airplanes
Fly each one to imaginary places
Inside my head
Or write poems on them in vivid old
Mexico song rhythms
If I could draw
I'd draw a rainbow picture
Of beautiful Indian women
With faces as brown earth
Soon I'll return to San Francisco
City of dreamer's drunkards
And lonely lovers
I will turn these blank pages
Into poems fished from the
Pond of my memory bank
Baited with the history of old
Mexico
6 AM
Poem
Lying here
alone in bed
A gnawing hunger in my belly
Soon I'll take my aching bones
To the kitchen table
Take my morning dose of pills
Sad there is no woman to put them
Next to my morning cereal
