cheers in the arena roll up & down, a cadence of emotive conundrum,

  & in the middle of it all eye feel the matador slaying the bull,

  in the center of the arena, see its blood flowing bright as the matador’s red suit,

  emblazoned with golden epaulets, hear in my mind’s ear clapping castanets,

  cracking sounds of flamenco dancers shoes slapping the floor staccato,

  in a rhythm reminding me of popping sounds of conga drums, miles’ lamenting

  trumpet on Sketches of Spain, now that the sun is high in the blue eye follow

  the curve of his mournful lament, fully awake now, walk down

  to your walled in courtyard, peter, bright with green, yellow chumbera cactus

  buds, bright birds of paradise shoot out blooming tongues that burst into heads,

  geraniums fragrant as the sparkling water fountain is lyrical, tantalize

  the senses, you want to sit here forever amongst these red & yellow lobster

  claws, scarlet red begonias laddering, emblazoning these old walls,

  want to sit & write poems of hope & serenity, but today, back in the states,

  president clinton is being deposed in front of a grand jury, people are screaming

  his head be axed off, thrown into a bucket like fish, or snakes

  but you wring out words of joy, peter, they roll off your tongue lyrical

  as a happy mantra, relieved that the weather vane’s arrowhead still points north,

  the breeze tongue cool as springs of water high in mountains of italy,

  you are relieved the day is not scorching hot with la vente,

  though we hear words circling the american congress like declarations of war,

  on that day we went down to the blessed beach between cadiz & rota,

  where the waves washing in rough & warm were beautiful, the sun setting low,

  in the west, just before evening wrapped itself around us like the arms

  of a favorite relative, my spirit reaching out across the straits of gibralter felt

  the tip of africa, so close, so far away, the promontory of cadiz pointing

  like a finger full of white buildings toward the dark continent,

  when the light grew dark as the sun dropped like a ripe orange into the sea,

  where ships crawled into port like giant bugs, sea gulls glided over & through

  the sweet, cool air, like toy planes banking over waves thick as molasses,

  the air here thick with andalusian spanish, syllables cracking rapid fire,

  machine-gun staccato, the laughter sudden as terrorists explosions,

  spontaneous as great music is always, everywhere it is played

  3.

  night has come again to this place of caballos, noble horses & brave fighting

  bulls with curved horns trying to kill a matador with a red cape,

  toro, toro, toro, bravo, toro, the cheers rise as the bloody black bull charges,

  toro, toro, toro, a man & a red cape & a horse, the spectacle beyond what

  eye feel is beauty, though eye see there in movement the sheer power,

  choreography of war, the grace of man & beast during a moment

  at the edge of death, locked into a mode of survival, is as far as my heart can go

  in the service of destruction for beauty, but who am eye to say what is or isn’t glory,

  the lance poised in the air like a scorpion’s tail before the strike is art for so many,

  murder to others, in this land of the inquisition & franco’s execution of lorca,

  what is there to know but your own heartbeat pulsing love, peter,

  the blood of friendship pure as your smile, these bodegas of wine you have shared

  peter, full of the finest sherry, meals scarfed down & laughter shattering moments

  like gunfire, these are the things you remember, castanets & flamenco dancers,

  the chimneys cocked ace-duce like icons of tio pepe in the cool evenings,

  your gracious, spontaneous welcome, my friend, your friendship that brought us here,

  for me to see margaret’s body wrapped like a mummy in lacy white linen,

  asleep in the center of our bed, the shades open, in the dead of fragrant nights,

  her face sweet, always turned toward the open window, as if to kiss

  the first morning light when it comes, is a blessing & a gift,

  eye tell you now, peter, it is a blessing & a rare, poetic gift

  III.

  THE POINT LOMA SERIES OF HAIKUS & TANKAS

  for Mathieu Gregoire

  I.

  beauty all places

  here, look inside yourself now,

  look deeper, it’s there

  II.

  gray day underground

  in tunnel, bright, warm sun

  outside in the blue,

  inside your own deep working

  time, thoughts of making sweet love

  III.

  think of making love

  to work that you do here,

  think of it as song,

  music whispering, a breeze,

  a tongue of someone you love

  IV.

  think of a sweet place,

  now that you are here, in all

  this darkness, light where

  you are standing with yourself,

  wherever you have to go

  V.

  smile whenever you

  think of the sweet love blooming

  inside your hard head,

  think of it as a flower

  you will hand to someone soon

  VI.

  down here in darkness

  think of roses when you look

  at these concrete walls

  VII.

  your mind a window

  to look inside yourself, see

  a rich garden there,

  bright with flowers, whose faces

  pop the air like sweet music

  VIII.

  deep rumblings in air,

  is sound of sea waves smashing

  skulls of wet black rocks

  IX.

  somewhere on a hill

  burning candle flames—tall pines

  shoot up, reach skyward,

  their V, for victory signs—

  lick hot tongues, scorch the air

  YOUR LOVER’S EYES SPEAK

  your lover’s eyes speak

  to you so softly in this

  place of wind, sea, bright blue sky,

  sunlight after the gray lifts,

  stuns your face into smiling

  IV.

  BELLS

  after Gustaf Sobin

  eye am hearing bells in the music of poetry, bells

  inside laughter tinkling like silver, bells rinsed in colors, shapes

  & forms washing wave after sonorous wave, bells washed through

  wind chimes, swept through morning’s first breaking light, rolling

  bells shivering in damp cool speech hip language seduces

  & imitates, bells coursing through syllables spilling from lips,

  bells tinkling through raindrops, pooling on rooftops,

  spreading like rosebuds, airborne on wind tongues,

  drooling down storm drains, riding water through whirlpools,

  drop by dropping drop, bells spooling electric

  through hearts in sacred himalayan mountains of tibetan buddhists,

  bells swirling through pooling deep eyes of lovers, trilling inside bright voices

  raised by small children, bells seducing through winds that play games

  with our minds, with the way we hear time slipping through our ears,

  & there are bells heard in kisses when sucking lips meet, vibrating

  electric bells, strolling bells, breeze-blown bells that tongue

  through fragrant afternoons of spring/time,

  bells in silver dewdrops shimmying down bright green leaves

  that land & float like rafts skimming surfaces of glass-blue rivers,

  bells that dive through sparkling waterfalls like voices or solos

  rinsed with clear welling sounds that tickle our senses

  like crystal runs of bill evans laying down clues, bells sluicing through,

  in flight, the way a thief steals through the night’s deep music, like a sleuth,

  the way blues tiptoe over piano keys dropping bell notes here

  & there, as chords shimmy-shangling through the thick night air rinsed

  in shimmering, electric beauty, bells that render us spellbound,

  as when the heart seduces sound by locking pure

  rhythm that is light, conjuring, bells that speak in voices dazzling,

  church bells that ring inside seductive sweet strides of dancing women,

  as when bells roll through their hips swaying lyrical, incredible magic, & eye heard

  bells in the heat of summer language making sweet flowers rise,

  heard bells in the voice of pavarotti’s “nessun dorma,”

  heard bells clanging & rolling through the square fronting westminster abbey

  heard bells in the sound of african dew mornings rising, trumpet blaring,

  saw bells in the silver ice of hale-bopp’s streaking comet tail,

  heard bells ringing throughout plazas of freedom everywhere—

  but not from the cracked fluke bell squatting mute in Philadelphia—

  heard bells inside all beauty heard or seen anywhere,

  bells, bells, splendid sweet bells,

  heard bells in the seduction of great poetry singing,

  heard bells ringing through luminous language of sweet birds

  riffing, bells, bells, splendid sweet bells,

  swelling inside the air’s sweet music

  V.

  CHORUSES

  for Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1997, and Lucy Goldman

  I.

  within the muted flight of daybreak, inside its leaked trembling light

  of birth, after the cracked shell of night’s dome has spit open,

  cut loose a flurry of pitched voices grown from different, linguistic sperm,

  we hear a cacophony of opposing rhythms integrated inside the body of a song,

  carried as if upon the widespread feathered wings of a bird across the sky

  of imagination, as in circling, beating mantra the heart knows

  as breath becoming choruses, becoming soundtracks

  lifted off a poet’s chanting tongue, syllables become moments

  within moments, are transformed into song

  beautiful as any morning glory colors when the sun slants down,

  cuts through whatever is there with its golden blades, become beams

  bright & sharp as voices heard anytime hands meet drumheads of skin

  tightly pulled, the rhythms vibrating there in skimming waves

  washing in or out at you as if they were imitating foaming sounds rolling in from

  the sea, curling tips of its waves into shape of grigri lips that can be cataclysmic

  as foam sudsing off lips of madmen moaning, or roaring,

  or doing whatever it is madmen do, in katmandu, in the center

  of nepal, or on the streets of new york city, where voices fire up pitches

  fast as old satchel paige threw a baseball down the heart of the plate

  or snaked it across, inside or outside corners, disguised as an aspirin,

  like sound nicks edges of language, chips off syllables & meaning

  until the voice cracks words electric as static,

  perhaps resembles the sound lightning bolts make when ripping

  off small pieces of dark sky & space

  when thunder cracks its jagged whip in the night high gloom

  there, where wolves sing love songs to the moon, where looky-loos crane

  necks on freeways trying to spot hale-bopp comet’s streaking silver ice tail,

  who listen to songs of beck over the radio hightailing it lickedy-split through

  the dark out west, burning rubber signatures into asphalt, as cars

  wheel in & out of traffic, screech brakes, shape a kind of music, a new language

  only the initiate know & imitate as it twists itself around again & again,

  doubles-back in the way rhythm turn in & back on itself

  like a concrete pretzel claiming its own place as it curls into space,

  lifts off in the shape of interwoven, interlocking freeway ribbons carrying cars

  & speech above heads on conveyer belts as motors screaming high speed

  octane, zooming around curves like crazed vagabonds

  hitting moments of sweet need, as music fills the air with magical incantations

  wrapped in voices that track down sound, then double back blue as terror

  recycles itself through years when good old boys guzzled beers

  on back roads of america in a slew of cars that sped down roads twisted as limbs

  of people suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, gun racks over their faces,

  grinning like cheshire cats who just ate a slew of canary birds,

  yellow feathers scattered all over that sordid history

  & everywhere blood on whiskers of hyenas, blood frozen in ice-

  cold stares of serial killers, blood in drawing rooms of politicians practicing

  blood sports, bullshitting us in washington, blood on the cheese face of a leering

  moon after eclipse hung down over rancho santa fe, blood on grimacing faces

  bursting from bloated black bodies in rwanda, blood exploding from that

  incinerated house in waco, texas, blood shooting from the eyes of a child before

  he pulled the trigger in paducah, kentucky, blood in speeches of ministers

  pontificating from pulpits, bloodall up in the curdling screams sliced clean

  through by razors, blood smeared all over the blues

  choruses of screams heard chilling after explosions in jerusalem,

  in the choruses of hand grenades tattooing the nights of bulgaria, colombia,

  in the choruses of machine gun bursts stitching the evenings of mexico city,

  los angeles, that snuffed out the life of notorious b.i.g., tupac in las vegas,

  choruses of fire meeting choruses of bullets, choruses of hand grenades

  greeting the imploding language of love, blood on the syllables of choruses

  spewing blood on musical notes that sing of these times everywhere

  & blood on money pulled from ocean bottoms by deep sea divers,

  blood up in the voices of poets impregnating stanzas with music,

  blood on the tongues cut off because they sang beautiful images of love,

  blood where the landmines littered the earth with eyeballs,

  skulls & severed hands that point accusatory fingers stiff as bones in the mud,

  & choruses & blood & choruses & blood & choruses & blood,

  behold, time-clocks ticking inside blood irrigating flesh,

  inside the moment when the poet knows language as a wellspring,

  inside the moment when truth is understood as a two-headed sword,

  duplicitous as the notion there is true beauty in flesh, lyrical with movement,

  final as death, time marches on, leaves flesh imprinted with maps of spiderweb

  sites, that spread across the body’s internet, as songs pealing across

  this embezzled air tantalize us with history of our continued failure

  II.

  when we sing we hear & know the music best, hear it with hearts

  imitating breath, the rhythm of drum beats in cadences

  true poets hear, the heartbeat of their breath in time signatures spread,

  scored like music across fleet pages scrolling the mind, dreams composed within

  language, when words become musical notes or chords language is retraced back

  where it first burst from song as anchored root,

  grew into a melody (a sweet flower smelled in springtime,

  summer, when birds clear their throats of seeds, open piccolo beaks

  & run tremolos beautiful, at dizzy gillespie speed)

  & there is joy in the sweet singing of melodies,

  beauty in the voice marveling at the sweet, blessed curves of a lover’s

  ripe body, in the way a woman’s mind is shaped, her thighs, breasts, her lips,

  caressing in the way a dress might caress the sensuousness of her body,

  pure joy in the rapture of her kiss, blood boiling over there with sweet heat,

  glory in her song, glory in the choruses of blood singing

  beneath her flesh, choruses of heartbeats drumming faster & faster still,

  glory in the mind running over from a space rooted in love,

  where a poet creates from inside a moment of stillness, silence,

  when metaphor is ejaculated from mystery into language,

  sluices from the brain as words scaffolded onto the page like archipelagos

  strung out in a sea of air like notes blown complete from a bell of a trumpet,

  becomes poetry when form connects structure with magic, when breath

  carries poetry with the indelible smell of damp rooms after lovemaking,

  rumpled sheets stained with semen, history, the claustrophobic odor of cigarettes

  when jamming their crooked burnt-out butts into overflowing ashtrays,

  into rooms drenched with stale smell of whiskey & garbage,

  & all this forms a question mark, a gesture—

  a hand curved in space & bent at the wrist—a fragrance of mystery evoking

  the color of pastel drenched in the lilting speech of the caribbean hinting of soft

  seas, the air there filled, fragrant with garlic, peanut oil, saffron,

  orange-gold sunsets laced with magenta, pink streaked magical coral

  reefs, purple threaded like veins through blue, the feel of it is a chorus,

  is a song lifted from the blood of the sky by a poet who sings

  another prayer at sunset, practices ancient science of cabala,

  cabala lore, cabala, cabala lore, cabala

  III.

  & eye heard you died today, allen ginsberg, heard it over the radio—

  like eye heard about miles’ passing over the idiot tube—that you went home

  surrounded by friends & peace, heard you wrote till you slipped into a coma