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Poem: Bicycle Traveling

There’s always a Church
Street and a Starbucks Cafe
and sometimes too, a
Shopping center Rise where people
greet and Main
Street’s another
old familiar face, where
daisies grew once  
 
in an old ditch by the rusting
wheel, the
 
mennonite-girls churched and taken
to the meeting place via
broadway street and
here and there in every nation,
there’s
a notional devotion to time’s
dreary
passing places
 
from the one-track lanes
 
of Carlsbad and Escondido to
San Diego’s funny faces and
other places
 
American
spaces, Mexican faces, fighting
my street’s better then your
own Road, the Church
where California-girls wed
their
ways to forelock–
tugging husbands’ beds; the
street, milling and spilling
out of business doors, factory
gates, black-biking up to the
airport, pedaling
 
for the nation
strong hands on
handlebar
moustache-less and ships and sealing wax
from cruising south and north & west–
side,
 
hulls ‘a turvy on the slips,
slippin’
down the greasy ways, away Dom
Perignon aglaze
 
So...
 
My street, street of days
and dreams and swingin’
roun’ the light-post onna wee rope
 
(grandma is having a stroke)
 
ding, dinga ding, ding, ding,
 
Away, westering down my
street-sun
disappears into the woods, the
gloam woods
 
the woods, the WAGES
 
OF SIN IS DEATH
 
on the black
asphalt pipe, runs
above the soil, runs
down, gloom-in again, in
to the dark, mossy places, the dark
mossy places where the dead dream,
 
dreams
 
of no more, the woods just
before the prefabs, her
hair in braids
 
Peach
Peeee-ch Street, new
street lumped
pummel-bits red, rain-slick
slicker-covered, hidin’
in the trees, the
actors, Hollywood actors
holding
holding up the “New movie Soon
To Be Built Here”
sign never was, was
us
board, by board, USA-built
dream
platform
 
 
Sunset and 18th good
hunt to
new street, hangin’off
leady-edge, tar-paper, three floors
roof
summer-struck
 
 
gangly time, cruisin’ the golf
course, cruisin’
for balls, turqoise green
spot, black spot, chavez street
whatever, drive
320 yards and yards of green,
cleanin’
the golf balls in the soapy
water—you turned a handle
 
quawta mista?
 
give you a dollar boy!
 
how we change and change.
 
BRING OUT
your dead, your
dead, your
dead from Beverly
fort and hill Billies
 
flesh-weals from
‘ware torn
 
down in the mossy woods, from
street to street, my street
your street, our
street, their
there street
 
South Central Hill Ashburough Heights once
Church
Street but developed country
club, Church
moved on
a truck, graves more
truck to truck, trucked to the 23rd
from last
restin’ place
 
down in the mossy woods, what
woods, where woods, bring out
 
the dead
 
out of the closet, the cupboard,
the woods; where?
who-mother cries
 
Broadway Road the last,
the last time ever,
ever I saw your goneface red
road-down face, where?
who-mother
cries
 
are the dead, the mossy
dead
 
the sudden-start
eyes-open mossy
faces of Beverly
fort and hill
Billies
country club, too, three
hundred and 20 yards and yards
of green, green
spot
 
quawta mista?
 
give you dollar, boy!
 
how we change and change
in the mossy heart places
no
change in the sudden-start,
eyes-open
mossy faces
 
BRING OUT THE YET TO BE
dead young
for the gun, young for it just
cruisin’ young
guns
your street, my
street, main Street
 
the fourth street
 
‘A young man alights, a girl in a
thin
straw hat, blue
ribbon-woundied and woundied tight
around tassels
hangin’
runs to give a kiss’
 
the fourth street, mossy
not yet
to grow
old from the stain of it
 
WHAT DEAD, WHERE BRING
from hill
Billy and beverly
fort
who-woman asks strangers
 
haven’t a clue atall atall
thorns now in the moss
 
. . . like givin’ birth in the woods alone
 
Pancho is sayin’ this to splain to Lalo there’s gotta be a witness
a witness but thinks
you give birth in the woods alone, you’re
not alone never
alone these
fecund places now two
upsprung from the mossy places
 
 
 
Streets can change their state, mu–
tate and progenate where
once passeth a brigade appears
a parade, a
boulevard where movie
stars and men
from bars ride
open-top cars under the stars to the close
embrace of a cul-de-sac, a
chase, a
ride, away crescent, park, road, amble, walk
 
can change and change
utterly rue
 
and wither or prevail, the
nub of tribal tales treachery
undone
by our boys from
our street, the
tin flutes bleat and
Sanchez’s bloody-knuckle-making skinsong
greets
the rising sun of a summer
 
street can become
place and to know
one’s place is street–
wise, the dead
know their place the bones
of extinct tarblack
pipesewers
echo the wages of sin
is death in the mossy dark
rain summer street the bleat of tin
flute
piercing my bicycle traveling.

(2015)

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