Alpha Wall

You can’t go on the beach
unless your name is Private
around these parts you can’t
use the rocks to do what 
people normally do on rocks 
for free I guess, these are Private Beaches
sans the tantalising necklace of an electric fence
to seem standoffish to the point of shock
     horror that you tried to get over it  
to steal a wild jewel from the shore
like to pluck roses before they open
    at the bud to infuse or
give to a friend, a rose
    salted with sea air makes us sleep 
for a thousand years, upon 
the wet sand we 
   are dragged in public
      and out by tides
that money can’t buy, but I’ll grant you campion
  to slot in your hypothalamus 
   cracking a cold one
 while throwing out the line
                 to catch me 
   with a little sweet bait
  come up against 
      the bright red
 territory of cardinal song 
seems these boundaries 
   keep us from falling or 
make the world larger than it really is 
   with the power invested by invisibility
but if we jump hard enough 
                  we will find the
    area containing nothing at all

Rose Latte 
For Sophia 

Auroras capable of blooming linen
are being seen in Bolinas, bitten
off the local head of foxglove 
you are a true believer in love
and a great persuader I could never
leave chastely, now romancing
of liquid subject to American 
kiss-chase across the Lake Merritt
for what roses have perished in service
of lattes I’d give years of verse
to arouse us from ocean feeling 
more ocean than anyone 
inspiring the breeze like thee 
sweet gosling of Mississippi, or Donne

Triple Negative

The knife stills. We are too old 
for our toys, lined on the stairs
many species of fantasy, many
years. What we are filled of:
suffering and pithy oranges, 
hopes and genes, regrets;
the silver foil encasing us
scrunched into a ball
we throw ceaselessly. 
I remember being awake 
so sensitive to breath, 
whether yours or mine
who could tell. Dawn.
I have this feeling they
wouldn’t be able to put
me under. I thought 
the mutation would be in
this also. Our bodies become
time bombs. We live up 
to our mothers. You carry the line 
and time stops inside me. My body
holds to the pencil’s metronome:
this is our home. You were out
ten hours in surgery so they could
remove those tumours from you, 
breasts and cellular clusters. If I just 
pause before and after everything
enough to still this to darkness, the night
as I remember us sharing it, stars out 
the window you said were reindeer, flying
I knew you would make a great 
dreamer someday, because I believed
despite myself. You would give that
to others. Yes, look at you now.

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts
After Steve Orth

Through summer, fall and winter, we watched 
the boys play American Football on television
with a seasonal VPN so we could pretend 
we were also in the States. Previously 
I only knew ‘American Football’ through the band 
of that name, who play emo songs with the 
polyrhythms of math rock turned down 
to a lyrical sensibility and something about the 
confessional realism of everything in their orbit
recalls our show in question, Friday Night Lights,
whose perfect trifecta of assonance illuminates the title
like something by Aram Saroyan except as a speech act
for the event, the performance that is Friday Night
in Texas football and lighting up has 
the vowel sound of vision itself, an I for an eye, 
winking over a wine glass with cigarette spark,
so we see how the title speaks to the slogan: clear eyes, 
full hearts. A winning formula. Watching Coach 
make boys into men, sometimes kings, and his wife 
make errant kids into solid people is everything. 
Watching their daughter crash her purple Chevy Aveo 
into a stone mailbox to avoid going back to college 
is inspirational. I would seriously try that, 
even though it doesn’t really work out for Julie.
She has a suburban, teen girl scowl for the ages. 
Everyone in the show is always worrying about 
going to college. Some can’t decide 
whether to stay or leave their home. 
There is this state of mind called
Texas Forever which allows figures like 
Tim Riggins to dream in the ongoing present
of a town like Dillon, a town of plenty ‘me-time’
and a town of strip clubs and reliably deadbeat bars
and football — a game that is played on the weekly 
and cheer-led by the high school hotties,
flanked by a gnarly array of boosters. 
Tim Riggins and his brother Billy suffer from 
nominative determinism: their fates are bound
to trouble, as rig refers to a trick or swindle;
as if to makeshift a different story,
they open Riggins Rigs and fix automobiles
but even that leads to trouble when they chop stolen cars
in a financially-motivated trick and swindle. 
This wouldn’t have happened if there was free healthcare in America.
Still, even in prison the younger brother’s limp-haired look 
    was iconic, so grunge.
Apparently Kim Gordon used to own a Tim Riggins 
refrigerator magnet. I once dreamt that he asked
for my drunken hand in marriage, then drove me 
all over Dillon in his truck, listening to Sonic Youth. 
A pretty straightforward ovulation dream. 
It was cool as fuck when 
Tim Riggins went to college for a day, literally a day
then left, throwing copies of Homer 
onto the highway. A man like that
doesn’t need to read. He reads
the world. He reads cars
and girls. His magnetism is undeniable.
He is an athlete, immortal alcoholic,
blissfully indifferent to his own addiction.
Why read Homer 
when you are already a Homeric legend? 
Why even go to a fictional higher education institute?   
Coach says ‘stay away from dumb, gentlemen’
but he is not talking about college, just 
other life flunks that adolescent men 
are often responsible for,
messing with the clarity and honour of sport.
When you grow up in a town
like Dillon where everyone loves
contact ball games and knows your name,
you have to ask yourself: would I go or would I stay?
Which is the more controversial choice?
In Scotland we have towns like this everywhere 
ravaged by the breakdown of industry; rife 
with soccer or rugby, but not a lot of money. 
I grew up in a town where school felt rigged.
I craved the episodic pendulum by which 
something eventually would beautifully give.
I chose to leave. Now I get to teach
kids from towns like mine how to read
for real. You can’t mould minds after
the age of twenty-five when the brain 
stops growing. That’s why we don’t see 
the FNL kids getting older than nineteen.
Everything leads up to that. 
Like the music you listen to 
before then burns the brightest
when you can’t remember 
much else, like Matt Saracen’s grandma
who is serious about one thing, and that’s cookies,
which in modern parlance are a data file of 
                                              condensed memory
and don’t to my mind make music, but sugar sings.
Alas, we are not nineteen forever, which is partly
the reason we make art and undergraduate 
sad lit and study plans and landfill indie.
The students always ask me questions
about life and how to write it. Every day
I try to convince them not to cheat using Generative-AI
which offers the answers easily in perfect rhyme,
but to read them is as boring as watching robotic simulators 
move their cranking asses around a fake arena. In class,
we read surrealisms and experimental poetry
that withholds its final premise
reeling in a kind of crush roulette 
and if we are lucky, eventually
plunges the reader in 
glorious montage, just like the show 
that we watch back endlessly 
in old sports tapes of our
finest moments in language,
             kissing and crime.
A thousand eyes on our triumph.
At some point Coach says 
you gotta make the answers
(for the game you are playing)
and I say 
keep moving the I 
across the field. Thrive
in relative obscurity. Can’t lose.