I read Elton performed Honky Tonk Woman
Sometime before the lines were no longer a thing,
at least the lines before we knew them,
six feet apart at least a gaggle of twenty
cramped merch tables and spilt Fireball,
pressed against the wall opposite of the bar, guitars hung, their strings, they’re totems
Joni Mitchell 1968
Amateur Tom Waits discovered some time later, thanks to Herb
Some time before Miles brought back the cool sounds of jazz
and Bob plays for Roger’s encore – keep the car going,
in this Sad Cafe, red neon into blue
and Eagles meet before they soar.
Persian rugs laid into plates of spaghetti wire
With the ladies of the canyon driving down in their trucks and double-parking,
Carly’s worth the tow.
Baths of sweat come with sines from wood
With pressed chests and shoulders making rested pillows for lovers’ chins,
Until the noise rings only in the drum of the hearts
and is once released outside in the air of the desert basin,
the towering Oz of Century City, a reminder of footing outside euphoria,
and exhaust of Santa Monica Boulevard the standing fans that cake the sweat and plunges the skin into a plaster of grunge.
New York comes to mind,
Troubadour the city of its own institution,
Friends made hours in shared lyrics, sure, shared sips of course,
Scattered into the night for good before ascending back up into Laurel Canyon or up the block through Norma Triangle, where, Billboard lights on Sunset Boulevard now gone LED
Shine bodies turned mannequins fossilize
The forever ago of the set into a single moment, a single noise
out of the wood temple trappings amidst a town of the boys
lays the city of gold,
two doors through towards the stage,
Catching rocketman at age 2-3, his America sold.
Tag: poem
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troubadour
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cars slipping down the’s
Cars slipping down ‘The’s’
Cascading river of fuming light
They don’t know what they’ve made for us
Up here or up above
I don’t think they even give a shit
I know I wouldn’t
Bjork had a video once,
Something about us
Us
Super computer humans with
Microchip warehouses
And Datahouse condos
Prius coffins also all
Overheating
Pulses
Avid clicks
On fire
We always look it, don’t we
The Sun
That’s blood orange of Northern Italy
Milan on the horizon
Where’d you get that from It looks very nice on you, doesn’t it
The speckled congregations of halogen and pathogen
You should see how Berlin divides from Space
You mass
Metastasizing
Turnpike veins
Lumpectomies for Costco’s
Strip-malls the historic brownstone
You’re post-modern babe
Googie temples
Drive-thru Mecca
You wouldn’t want Paris
But its recipes, Republique,
Or AirBNBs
Its grams and IG’s and the cobblestone
No maybe not that
Digging for the finest ideas, though, you
City harvesters
Acting as gatherers
Sometimes the gesture does us in enough.
An idea of you as home as always frightened me
‘I’d rather be buried elsewhere’.
But yes I suppose there’s something more
Now I see you
Something you’re brought on me
You tumor of grids
Masses of galaxies
Trons of Jons and Vons and Lawns
People yearn for the maps of our stars
They always fall but
Never across the sky
For all the gravities you push into your orbit
Bunch up
And pull up
Into the hills
Constellations overlooking Milky Ways
You’re just all of me
And all of us
Us dreamers
Weilding tongues of snakes and shamans
Saturn Sirens
Vegans of Neptune
Peasants of Pluto we meme-share without desire for contact
Elitist loner-dom
Echoed shadows my denizens
I’m home and I’m landing
How God I wish I could see you at night when I look up at the sky the way I look at you on the ground
Landing now, I’ll need a smoke
Maybe then I’ll say I’m home
Here it comes, the tires down
Our Landing gear in set
Concrete burn and skid
$60 Uber
And standing idly on the escalator no matter which side you wish to lean
I taste the dry
Air cakes the face like a mask
Smog-filtered movie-glasses
Rose
Into Rosé and violet and Aperol Spritz
Heavenly graffiti.
Being here’s like always waiting on the gates.
Fuck being buried,
I don’t know if we’re ever getting in. -
saint mark’s
They’ll have robotic bees soon
Halal quarrels over Venmo
Muji distopia
Fanny-pack disphoria
That’s the lack of, not the opposite
White men run the counter of Mamoun’s
Rest in Peace St. Marks
Can’t wait for your
pencil-dick towers
to shadow over rivers
Keep your Ben and Jerry’s
Fuck it with the Continental 5 for 10
Generations for steel and cork facades
Grates like griddles
Steam heat of an underbelly Sun,
Hell here and Hell under
At least the buses make less noise. -
beachwood
Today on a walk through Beachwood I’m looking down at the reservoir,
The Sun that shimmers there, that’s what matters here.
Cement holes mistaken for lakes that nobody minds. -
something about cities
People are like cities here
But you’ve always only been yourself, haven’t you
Rooftops in Brooklyn got
Nothing on your sneer
Or twinkle of eye you don’t yet know you’ve got.
At least this time around.
Hipsters have their babies now,
Canon satchels
Warby Parkers
‘Manhattan on Safari’
That’s what we’ll call it
Dickie couture
Yves Saint Laruarnt
Cut offs tucked into running shorts
Fanny packs are back
You’d think they’d run out of ideas by now
Scuffed shoes
On
Lorimer, though I counted them all
All
Scattered and flying through like stars, or
Streets I used to stumble
Or like there in our L.A.,
The houses that belonged to Simon Cowell.
They say he’s drinking beer,
You never liked the taste
You prefer a whiskey Erasure.
There’s still magic here I’d forgotten, you know.
Mothers pressing hands on baby’s ears,
Smiles down under on the platform,
As their C to High Street’s rolling in
The baby keeps on sleeping.
Poet Fathers with Picasso sons
Cardboard signs
‘Love and care our Earth’
I want to see you hold a child’s hand.
I ride a train towards another person’s home,
Another man I’ll fuck for the view.
Where are you now?
I’m somewhere under still,
Someplace between 14th and up.
You’d hate the heat,
At least the way it’s been
Swamp dick, a musty ass
The desert suits us more.
Here there’s other men.
Different flours,
Water always never tastes the same
Depending on the hangover
And or the avenue
These island boroughs have stayed the same
However
There’s now a Starbucks on Allen and something or other
God this heat
Week-long Summer.
Beads of sweat that taste of tears
down here
I know you don’t like those
And yet
I’m beginning to think I need them
If not to love song
Then to plea for you
For you to hold me in your arms
For me to know you mean it tight
It’s not an errand
But something that you want
For me
Or for us
Or for you so I’ll keep
The train’s a station away
It’s getting hotter by the second
Breeze of the underground
Break this Earth I stand on for a living
That’s a living
Living to want to Live
I beg of you
Submit my fever dreaming heart into
Knowing that you’ll want me back
So that this home I wish to
Show and brag with you
Will simmer from Hudson river aqua into rat-trash fumes
Into yesteryear until it’s finally gone.
Even if you only say it I’ll think of it as true,
I’ll hold off that demon air in corner number four
And tell my aches
I’ll still be wanted after Christmas Season
After parties
When Winter People are no longer wanted
And tossed with flipsides of high life
‘At least we had prosecco.’
There was something about cities, here,
I was working hoping leading towards concluding with,
Something like the other shoe.
I wish you were parked outside my house like that one time,
The time I pretended I wasn’t home.
I wish I were home and looking out the window
Watching you
There was something to you hoping
An
Embodiment of something
Someone
Wanting me.
I suppose.
Let’s just meet at the Grove?
Valet in the parking garage
There’s a gin bar I’ve been meaning to try,
They say Constance Wu is fantastic in Hustlers.
Maybe cities are the people you do things with.
I don’t know what that makes people.
It’s too easy calling you L.A.
Re other men,
I’ll swallow all explanation for later
Please trust me,
For I will no less and inevitably self-destruct
The way you know I can
The way that irritates
Yet makes you think you’ve done it right,
Your stronghold my frailty
Kamikaze dreams of arms
And laughter
Plastic cup cupboards
And overcooked falafel.
I wish they had Mamoun’s in Chelsea.
I’d love to watch you act as if it’s something you’ve had better somewhere else. -
l.e.s. but also somewhere off of sunset
Your honks
Now come with trigger warnings
Right of way to shark boy and his three-wheeled scooter
Mommy’s on the Gram
Pleasantries her traffic light
Right Fake on Go
Daddy’s pushing stroller for the akita
Your Uniqlo’s swapped floors
Women take the stairs now
Must be the patriarchy.
Your men no longer navigate the elevator
In fact they think it’s theirs
Pizza parties fifteenth floor
This hotel is for them too.
You’ll no less bring back cargo pants
Guy Harvey tees to follow
And then froyo
Post-modern Tasti-D-Lites
But like pus I love watching you
seethe under pressure, this island your pore.
Bile-puddled paths
Neighbor nestled nooks
For retweets and spritzes
And avocado toast that doesn’t fucking belong.
You’re growing soft, you old fart
Soft and pudgy
Pop-up shops for drove-in Four-Wheeler Photo booths
Chino shorts on your mother’s credit card
Self-fulfillment you’re all Trumps.
You’re working on your trash
Your notice taken with the rats
Your bins overflowing still
You keep digging yourself into a maze.
Astounding really
I hope you’re proud and loud
No Grace filter for your Selfie?
That’s really at the marrow, isn’t it
You think you’re hyper cool and
Hyper-safe
I was roofied once in a ghost building now a Gelateria
You walk now with your head facing the opposite direction Slower now
No jaywalking now
And yet you’ve become indignant
Dare I say boring
Good job my Prince
You’ve turned yourself into Vegas.
Fuck you. -
pocket pet
I dream of you in daze
Into nights when I see you
And I’m reminded of the
Familiar fear of never worrying –
I’m used to worry:
It’s a pocket pet I’ve fed over the years
With years
And stamps
It’s a
A Bracketed lapse in living
Where I see the known ways I could hurt
You, possible even
Break you
End us Tear away the familiarity and turn it
Into shadow.
I worry.
There’s many ways I’ve gone about it
Before
Many ways repeated
Many more ready for another run.
I could sleep with another man.
Perhaps a friend
Or worse a foe
Get you to worry our one on one’s got us
Turned on you, Us
Knowing more now of the more of you
You chose to give us
I’ve done that.
I could do ayahuasca in a suite in New Orleans
Northernmost city of the Caribbean
Seeing all the alien Gods
Or the insides of my coffin
Both the box I’m in but also the body that I am
And see what needs feeding then
‘Not you’ ‘No you don’t supply’
I’ll return to Beachwood and sit in my chair
And ghost you into phantom yesteryear
Yeah, I’ve done that too.
I could love you only when I’m pistol-
Ready, Bulleit made, foggy-brained
And say it till it’s obvious and
Predictable
And text you after that I’m gonna
Marry you
And drunken-drive to you with
Twenty dollars worth of dollar Del Taco
And make you watch
Videos of
Me
Or Stevie and pass out and half cum in the Morning
And
slowly over time
Mistaken hangover for you and loving you the most and
Decide that I need re-centering and
Distance (but never from the bottle)
And worse! –
That all of it was only what had ‘happened in the night’
That’s been me.
I could touch you.
Shit that was the other one, no
You like it when I’m holding onto us –
I could hit you.
Worse, I could say the things a person isn’t allowed to say
The dagger proclamation
Of my silver-tongued knife
Wielded by this Monkey on my back I’ve
Forgotten about otherwise
And once it’s in you I’ll twist
And
Let
It
Pour
That’s all been me, too.
I could be an executive at a studio
Sign on your mortal enemy
The Nemesis
In spite of you –
Get him two seasons
Something
About how he’s misunderstood but
Still molests at Akbar or the Dome
Going buddy-buddy with him to dinners
Or at your favorite spots
Karaoke singsong, songs about paninis
Or Pre-teen demigods who think
They’re bad guys.
And I’ll play nice with you
Because it gets you going
Gets me ahead
Oh
Always nice
Nice nice nice
You hate nice
‘boy, can’t that betray a soul?’ you say
Yes sir, I agree –
Edit: No, I probably wouldn’t go that far.
I don’t know that I’m even capable
Keep it, as they say.
I could keep believing what I fear is true
The spring of all my doubts that
I am
Not good.
Particularly at being good which is
Different than just good enough for you
I worry.
There’s a lot of things I wouldn’t do
Anymore.
A lot of things I’m incapable of
Maybe even
Tired of trying?
Getting away with.
Weak-kneed but in the stomach with dry eyes
Over
The galivanting
And the schmoozing
I just want home already I worry.
But also
Maybe there’s also something there?
In that?
In that
I dunno
You know me better sometimes
You’re the one who reads me
Has to see me I’m just living ‘me’
I
Just
Think it, will you
West elm sofas. A loveseat.
Something local for a coffee table.
Dinners.
Dinner in general
Memberships to Wagville
Never Disney+
And
The movies you’ve wanted to show me.
The words I’ve wanted you to know.
Maybe the place has a bathtub.
Two bed.
Luxury tomb.
Patio parties and proud soirees and
Top shelf liquor with that CVS discount
Cluttered glove compartment stuffed with receipt scarves.
A little less drinking
Maybe at the start at least until doors
Close more
And I’m working when you’re watching
Or I’m watching while you’re gone
And it all goes back to what it used to be
Before we promised something new
I worry.
For when it’s done and the dog is
passed and stuffed
makes a doorstop and you’re
Thinking Hancock Park or Paris and I’m thinking New York, Brooklyn or dead
A love is a lifetime I worry.
But
What if something happens
Something different dare I say
Something weird that could happen
Doesn’t happen
I don’t see
Happening
To me
But just me I haven’t thought of us that way –
What if we grow old together?
There go promised memories of your
Hand holding mine
Scratching the back of your head
But now –
A forever-adding flipbook –
Our same hands
But with new spots Thinner skin.
Closer every day towards our Wither Away
The chances of who will fade from us
First.
For to die alone is to go in peace
But in the arms of a lover, their forever agony.
Is all of that worse?
Is to love to know what will be lost?
Is it to hold it regardless of these
Boundaries in time,
Angelino mountains,
And drown our lungs in the vapor of now?
Of-fucking-course it is.
I worry. -
santa fe
‘Welcome,’ she said and
meaning it too.
‘thank you’ I
said, needing to pee. -
noise of the wood
Noise of the wood
A clink with a spoon
Skies in its colors
Mahogany to quartz
And into it too
Like pillars of salt yet
Rested on sand
A dinosaur.
Bark cut-ted to glass
Shard-ing jewels, city towers
Their speckled roofs of different heights
Grooves and floor to ceiling heights
Helicopter pads, too.
Just
Jurassic tenacity with teeth mazes, maps needed
With Latitudes and Longitudes
The stump
Now that’s the hemisphere
For these crystals of a crystal of time
Now polished and chromed over
Drilled into bits for a hose
Then gutted and fitted
And set in a corner
A sheltered space
Protected from the meteors that first
Turned this tree to rock
And
Left forever to be ignored
Or set next to the garden gnome
$2804. -
mason
Last night you told me you were going to be married
That you’d found your choice
your settlement
That you’d known fear and
found the means of which to live with it
A chosen partner for the shadows
Except for the ones deepest in your skull
A willing commitment
towards the fires
except the ones you light with your feet
A tangible hold on purpose, apparently.
A determination towards happiness, never mind to ride of grace Your sincerity lacks subtly.
Scythe to my scalp
Rebar to my veins
Napalm your wax of Paris
The holes you’re trying to fill in were dug with your very fingernails
Tears in your styrofoam cup, let it settle let it muddle a
molotov cocktail of sympathy and of drastic proportions
I’ve never trusted what you call reliant.
Thrown towards your subject of protest
I think that’s me
The me in you
Or rather the you in me in the back of me
the me in you you only know for certain –
How you’ve hurt and betrayed
and laid it all on
me and with your sincerity you hope
and aim
for alleviation of your character
You think to tell me is to bury you, to command the pyre
to hold in what we were
what you are, once again, what I am
I am the ghost and
you can’t dream the weight of these shackles that hold in all that is long and of knowing you, your fists to my cheek one thing
the way you told me my days were limited, the same
But how I was New York
Fuck
Your sorrow and earnest degradation
of what’s left of my heart
And lately what that’s been
A yearning for more
The desire for cliffs and empty oceans of Moab
Looking at mountains as the reefs
they once were or islands belonging to a Jurassic sea
Now
On my last night in heaven you spew me your words of Hell
That it is with him you’ve decided happiness
Though it’s with memories of us you’ve preserved freedom.
God
Though how I envision it.
It.
Ours
You’d
We’d have,
Polished concrete.
White linen.
Ironed.
A southern barbeque.
Rooftop in Red Hook.
We had dancing pandas
And
poFinally
You’d rapture me
Yeah.
Sans shirt or contentment though I fetishize a tux
A B-n-B.
Probably off of an AirBnB.
Edison bulb lights and mason jar tartars.
The songs we used to dance with brood
Now caricatures of our adolescence and not what either of us have remained.
That’s as far as I usually get.
thomasdanielvalls.com 