ARIZONA

This garden of mourning doves and mockingbirds,

palm trees and magpies and water weeping 

from rock into the swimming pool, so lush

with roses and succulents and fig trees, you

expect Gloria Swanson in her leopardskin 

coat and her soft bellied flesh, William Holden 

with his cigarette case, it is the loneliness

of age, in this oasis between purple 

mountains, the surrender to the desert,

the heat, the night chill, the death, the vast

stupid beauty of the stars lost in

the vagrant darkness, but here, here in this

garden of cactus and stone, you spread yourself

out by the pool beside the dead sparrow,

the concrete stained by mulberries, the slamming

of truck doors from the porn shop beyond the 

stone wall.  In  Sunset Boulevard William Holden  

was chasing a story, his own garish 

desire, prying into the decadence within

his own mind and flesh, his thirst for beauty

in the ruins, the savage thoughtless thrust,

and Gloria, Gloria, what was she but beauty

and time and desire herself, Salome, 

the great temptress with bracelets and long arms

and that face, her close-up, comic in her

celluloid past, the diva, the anguish, 

desire unfulfilled on the screen, the great hunger,

the misery of the mind and the flesh, 

the tortured femme fatale within each of us

longing to be seen once more, and consumed!

Yes, America, this is a great depression--

we built this sprawling madness in the desert,

America from our hunger, our desire,

it is splattered everywhere, we have

disrupted great rivers to quench our thirst,

and here under this dying star we must

learn to face our fear, the dead sparrow

beside the pool, that our great Babylon, 

our great tower to the heavens, the great 

garden of sighs and earthly delights, 

is just another script, another screenplay

in which our hero, our tragic hero,

too late!, discovers his fatal flaw, 

his love for innocence and sin, how he

ravaged Barbara Bel Geddes with

his ignorance, his smart ass cleverness

now reduced to the pathetic, now shot

in the back and floating face down in the pool,

and ridiculous, as ridiculous as 

the story he tells as a corpse, the great

confession from the lurid curiosity--

this is our story, the America story,

the collapse of order here in this

Arizona hotel and beyond,  this garden 

of cactus  and rock and chlorine. 

desiccation and lies, where the poor dope

gets his pool and she gets the eyes 

of the whole world.  But that wasn't good enough...

Isn't that good enough? What's money for 

but to buy us anything we want?"

NOTES FROM THE COCOA BEACH HILTON

Walking through the cabana bar

where some punk on sax and his friend

on electric piano play "the future 

of jazz," you walk over the bridge 

than spans the mangrove river

bed, the last vestige of Florida

here, in this strip of rockets

and strip clubs and cruise ships,

pass through this arch of polo shirts

and gold chains, so many men shouting 

into cell phones, to whom?, until you

enter  the sinister silver glare, 

the heat, the sand, the ocean, 

the gulf stream.  This is the existential

scene, to be stranded here on the edge

of the west, there is nothing here, 

nothing but the migraine heat 

soothed only by the sudden rain.

After all the margaritas 

and mojitos, women in long 

dresses and earrings that tingle 

like wind chimes, the iced coronas 

and seared yellow-fin tuna, 

the papayas and gator wrasslin, 

you have only this, the heat, 

the ocean's slick silver skin.  

There are no words here.

No language that can carry 

our stories on into the future.

You have come here 

to die.  There's no escaping

this, the quintessential fact.

It turns out there is no soul 

after all, no redemption

or absolution or grace, not even 

the decency of an epiphany.

It is godless and mindless,

just your skin scraped raw

by all this coarse sand,

the shimmering atomic age

insinuating itself everywhere,

radiation burning time itself.