Category Archives: Family Life

When I Was A Billionaire

When I was a billionaire, the air
Seemed to fold ’round the frame of my name
My soul, soil and skin
Buttressed by the billions

No pain here in these extra folds
Dimpled by the excess
Dimpled by the desire
To make you smile

This is, yes, indeed, another cry for you
My unrequited
My blindsided
Love

We were bound by blood
Blood the billions could not dissolve
I could never resolve the puzzle you presented
The tangled untie-able knots I resented

I was a billionaire
But you never believed
Never conceived
The rarefied air I breathed

And it was a moment only
Only a moment
And don’t I know it
Don’t I know it

You never understood how I could lose the billions
The interest alone, you snarked, would finance a nation
Yeah, a nation of slaves, ruled by
By your master race
I howled to the stone wall,
The stone wall of your terrifying face
You need to feel something like my pain
So wild and wordless, wordless and wild
But true, so vital, agonizingly real
Real and oh so true

I’ve lost the poem
Lost the billions too
There was a time we’d laugh
Me and you

Laughed till the earth stopped spinning
All the good we were winning
We were winning!
We were winning!

I never needed billions
I never did
I never needed you
I did

But it’s been so hard
So hard to admit
To submit and admit
Let me just admit:

I only needed
You I only needed
You to be you
And be proud
Be proud
Of me
I only needed you

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Happy Anniversary. Here’s a poem! Wait, this year is crystal? Oh. Oh dear…

I asked your daddy for your hand in a letter
Every warming year we got better and better
Our droughts got hotter, our floods got wetter
Like you, the moon’s a riser
Like me, the sun’s a setter
A clenched jaw in-your-face fretter 
A jilted lover’s torn-up sweater (strewn across my dorm room floor that night,  remember?)
So, yeah, we only got this rusty water in our oily red rusted kettle
And nothin’ else
But it’s enough 
It’s enough

In this calamity 
This vapid loud city
Messianic mess most definitely  
Like you, it’s real real pretty
Like me, the poetry’s real real shitty 
And barely witty 
An ugly unloved bitty
A sour off key ditty 
But it’s enough 
It’s enough

And it’s enough I say enough
Deeper than pink fluff
Softer than sand paper rough
Like you, it takes no guff
Like me, it’s besieged by stuff
Silky but tough
Tethered to you in this paper handcuff
And it’s enough
It’s enough
Cause I got you 
Yeah I got you
And

I I
Love love
You you you you you!

Mwah!

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Letter to the neighborhood conspiracist following an unsurprisingly heated and useless yammer session.

Dear Steve,

To summarize the thoughts I shared with you this morning over our heaping trash and virtue-signalling recycle bins (as you so cynically dubbed them):

The conspiracy theorist is problematic not because rational people believe conspiracies don’t actually exist, he’s problematic because he cannot offer rational people any persuasive evidence that confirms his often extravagant fever-dreams. He is no detective, but simply a self-indulgent and self-imposed outcast in love with his own fantasies and blind to basic reality and reason.

Everyone knows the truth, except you, Steve. It’s too bad you missed that day at school.

Cordially yours,

Bon

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Know Thyself

All I’ve known is the known darkness
The isolation from you
The loneliness of me
I suppose this has been the great tragedy, the one I’ve suspected all along
I just want you to know me

Dearest, I just want to be known
I just want to be known so someone can tell me who I am

And, my love, when you know me, it’s true: I will seek the same quiet shelter alone
Find that unused absence of light
Wallow in the lost library
Unseen, blind in the contradiction
As long suspected
In unplanned dreams
In wild lapses
Vino’s veritas

I swear it pains me, it does, dear, as if, as if it were some epic trauma
As if I had once been some exalted god on high, now fallen
Called to this earthy morass of light and dark
Ecstatic pain and agony joy

And I swear
Oh yes on my dearest breath I vow
I will always, I suspect, always blame you, blameless unknowing
Companion

Know me, dear
Mommy daddy lover offspring lord
Know me and tell me who I am

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The Wild Parrots of Malibu

When we would roam and fly the streets
Onward weaving freedom rides, gentrifying in the wild idyll
On foot on board on bicycle
Salt kiss breezes floating our flowing limbs, our gangly hair, ill-worn cloth and nylon
The Point Dume Bombers were active and alive!
Hey, dear valley, go home, we cried
Retreat with your refuse through oven-walled canyons to the unseen hinterland
Retreat!

When we would squawk and bark the repertoire
Limited, yes and at all hours, yes
Mythologizing the day’s frolic in the sea
Where we daydreamed among waves we called our own, origins unknown and unimagined
Calls of awesome, rad, yar, outer dude!
Burning skin in quick glimpses seen
Wanting to linger across the more virgin skin
Unveiled by a quest for color or the blow of whitewash
That touch so far before us

What filled our minds but the imagined adventure and dark intrigue we gathered from the muffled drunken roars heard late in the night through poorly insulated walls of shoddy renown
Dead whales on the beach
Dead marriages everywhere fouling our neighborhood air
We’d witness TV stars at gasoline pumps, scratching desperate lotto cards
Witness that nothing is certain
No matter how high, how gleaming
Your newly-born platinum wall

When we were parrots we saw more than we understood
Intuiting lessons at the edge of a continent where the outcast and the privileged all lay claim to the intolerable beauty no one can ever let in, lest all pride dissolve back to Malibu dust
And back to Malibu sand
Madness conceived when land meets sea, when fire and water collide
As they everyday do in this thin long burg

When we were wild and knew nothing of the strangeness of death
Only the permanence of parents
Their frailty and conundrum

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k-paso in duh neighborhood

Hey Luke!
 
Look, listen:
Lou kissin
Some broad named Tammy 
 
Look, listen:
Lou kissin
Some broad named Mandy 
  
Look, listen:
Lou kissin
Some broad named Alexandra 
 
Oh yeah, Luke, listen: 
Lou pissin 
Off the neighborhood broads
 
You got Tammy and Mandy and some broad called Alexandra
Wah wah – Alexandra – wah wah 
Doopelee dupe duh dee dang dee dang dang 
 
Lou listen: 
Luke’s kissin
Yo momma in duh Kmart parking lot
 
Alexandra! Time for your streusel and viola practice 
 
Get home girl!
 
 
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Alarm Bells Are Ringing

Somewhere in this room exists the kernel of our mutual betrayal
The faded breath of the fantasy, the faint trace of a dream for one who should have never slept in our bed

I don’t know who encountered it first nor how nor why nor why we can’t find it now
But the silent whisper in our minds still echoes and a seething hate is born

So that every mistake one makes in the dishwasher or with the clumsy toothpaste cap
Escalates into napalm blasts sprung deep from our diaphragm, seeking, soon finding the targets back deep in the soul

I agree with you that I’ve lived my entire life as a midlife crisis
Yet nothing prepared me for our slow grinding agony, our actual crisis at midlife, our soap opera better mocked when it appeared on tv or in the tabloids

There will be no ponytails or Porsches
Until this is all over

Sadly the end feels as elusive as this kernel we hope to find and squash out
We know somewhere in this consciousness it’s done but we require the planting of that actual seed

The suffering of emergence, the revelation, the mutual deaths of our pride
It’ll be the last thing we ever share. And there’s respect and closure and real life in that

Help me end this with you

 

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