The Phone

Everyday I hear you on the phone
I can tell it is you by the way you talk
I can hear you smiling through the air
With an awkward strain on your cheeks
In between coughs and yawns


Everyday I hear you on the phone
But I cannont hear your kiss
Or the soft comfort of your hand
I cannot hear your eyes
In between the days of separation

Questions

People.

Hmmmmm.

Sprinklers at the Border

There are sprinklers at the border

Lining the dirt road down Goat Canyon
Feeding the native plants on either side
So that the road will not wash away

There are sprinklers at the border

Freely soaking our hats and heads
At the nine o'clock hour on posts
Up the hill to see the bull ring

There are sprinklers at the border

Neatly maintained by guys named Rob
Collecting tires and snipping plants
While Mexicans cook beyond the fence

There are sprinklers at the border

Between Bunkers and Spooners
A large concrete dream of engineering
The hallmark discarded bottles of a wetland

There are sprinklers at the border




I would have never known

Home

I was driving to work this morning
when a radio advertisement said
"Helping you to buy a home closer
to work so you don't have to commute"

Closer to work?

What a horrible thought
to live in an eastlake wasteland
of fast food chains and million $ homes
walking to my job

Better to live closer to home. But where?

Where my friends sip coffee
and lament missing the weekend dance
or languish, toothless, in a last chance motel
or waste the years in endless engagement

Where Kentucky drinks one too many ales
despite the fun time and cool breeze
Where I am a once graceful dancer
who misfits in just fine

Where my son prowls the night
restless in double digits
Where we are two minutes away
from true love and the latest malarcky

Where my drink, which I sip alone
is too expensive and Grants
and Franklins are reduced to ones
Ravens pecking at their own reflections

Where the crack and boom that have become
my soundtrack persist before the pub
Where I am comfortable, where I am good,
Where I am myself, Where I am at home.

How do I buy a home closer to that sound?

Where is home for a rambler?

Re-Issue Blues

Shimmering crack in the room
Boom in the gut of my doghouse
An articulated honk that speaks
The very words I can never find

In the groove
In there somewhere
in the bumps in between
Somebody's soul

Each time
A little bit erased
A little more noise
But we say there is warmth

The fading ghosts of Tina Brooks
George Coleman, or Ike Quebec
In the hush of that scratch
Less and less each time

It will have to do