the king's madness

i no longer have dreams of my father.

he was a king, alright. he was a wildly mad king, like a stray coyote barking down suburban streets at lunchtime, never quite satisfied with pack life. he was a king of one, and his kingdom waxed and waned with his madness. his reign was confined to the domestic realm in my little princess eyes, confined to the little asphalt paradises we lived in back then. in them, he was king of the kitchen, slicing and dicing with the swiftness of the teenage line cook he once was as a boy. and he was king of the amateur opera house, mastering his falsetto on the imaginary stage he conjured up daily while dancing briskly through the hallways of our houses. he was king of the shirtless barbecue, filling cheap paper plates with royal feasts prepared on saturday afternoons, the canyon waiting quietly below. he was king of the stately nap, his snores rumbling across the cathedral ceilings of the foyer like burros meandering across the desert—with a languid sense of purpose, by instinct. california was his dream, a place he thought he might conquer. californian summers never quite seemed to end then.

when summer gave way to fall and california gave way to massachusetts, he used to haunt my days, a crazy cursed look in his eye, pinned right to his pupils, like some indelible mark jabbed there by a force he had let take him over—some coup d’état that emerged from the inside. "et tu, geno?" it whispered in his ear. a faith had been lost. gone was the great leader of my childhood, replaced with a broken boy-king, unfit for ruling anything.

a charmed life

life seems so dreadfully long sometimes.

sueños de nuestros padres

you could have been here, dad.

friday the twenty third: biography of a mummy

he was granted his immortality posthumously.

day dream, autumn eves

i dreamt that you'd been stronger.

a stroke of obvious

shit. no one's getting out alive.

a love letter to los angeles

los angeles, you don’t look so tall from down here.

i see you as a child might. a daughter of your shores, i am watching you. you, my father, my lover, my ward—you’re withering like a parent who is slowly, inevitably losing his godliness. you are struggling, trying to cling to the desert and the sea, hoping your mountains won’t move, hoping time will stop at your command or at least put your desperate face on the cover of a magazine before you’re lost to the sea. you can blame san andreas, but he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and even after finding the messiah, the world had to let him go. and like him, you’ll only be a martyr if you stand for something, my dear.

you were always surprising me with flowers. from the dry hillsides the blooms burst, as if they could not keep from wanting all of the inexplicable unimaginable impure you. sometimes you brought me roses, grown with the water you’ve been stealing for so many years from someone else’s valley. i buried my face in their soft bobbling heads, always forgetting about the thorns. and after all the beautiful things you brought me, after so many nights spent intoxicated, gazing at your many faces from cool patios strewn with liquor bottles and coffee cups, you abandoned me at dark corners as i waited for the buses that nearly always came late or never came at all.

but as always, i am forgiving you. i remember your inconsistencies and carelessness, your cruel muttered afterthoughts, your chaotic explosions in the street. i remember the warmth of your polluted breezes, your windy peaks and still valleys, your sweet cologne that always appeared to be some intangible mixture of beer and weed and sage and gasoline, some inexhaustible toxic selection of putrid herbs crushed by the whirring wheels of the cars on the freeway. i remember your smiles that flashed quick as the fires that burn our hillsides in september, your hushed domestic contentment romantically shining from high balconies, and your quiet concrete hardness at four in the afternoon, walking below the underpass on 1st street as the scent of urine and booze filled my nostrils and that fourteen year old heroin addict stared right through me as if we were both already ghosts.

and sometimes i wonder if you even believe in death, or in gravity, or in the vastness of the universe. and religion, you say it’s irrelevant—but there you go, making gods out of mortals. and the truth is, i love your gods for their failures, for being so exquisitely human. i once met jesus on hollywood boulevard, but he did not try to save me. i once met a homeless man in boyle heights, and he did try to lead me to salvation. i didn’t go. it smelled like decay.

you have a way of making each fall from grace so artful—or at the very least, so descriptively gory—no wonder so many of the wild people of the world flock to california to fall apart in your arms. you want it all, all the mad ones, the bad ones, all the tired ones, the wired ones, and all the selfish, shallow caricatures of what it is to exist. you want everything from this world and from the next. you even brought the stars to the ground—i saw them in the blinking headlights of the hills on the hollywood freeway.

you taught me what it is to have to love and let go and see what comes back, the way the oceans bring sea glass to the shore. after so many years of tumbling, those violently broken bottles—for so often, love in los angeles comes in a bottle—the love smooths itself into a brilliant stone, solid, and tangible, but as inconsistent in its clarity as the dirty waters from which it came. this is a lesson i’ll have to learn again and again—because every time i leave you, i seem to forget it once more.

i've gone away. don't call me, don't write.

somedays, i feel like my father.

your accidental death

we'll all be dead animals someday.

mcmansion mummies

life wrapped in carbon and formaldehyde.

a tip from the dead

in the interest of time, live.

the earth is flat

the earth is flat, you assert

your sadness suspended

like a zeppelin in dark skies,

(the only bloated monster

that will defy gravity tonight)--

as centrifugal forces trap you here,

where falling off the edge means

someone will have to clean you

off the pavement in the morning.