What wasn’t a dream it began at LAX
by wrapping itself around the horseshoe
Preserved a first W2 from the Canoga Park software maker
& skipped over the unglamorous Van Nuys apartment
Danced a choreographer’s Boyle Heights midnight two-step
with a dead mother across from La Serenata di Garibaldi
Stretched lazily across Long Beach
& allowed the long & beach to go unseen
Throttled across I-5’s sacrificed desert acreage
carburating a rush hour eerily not at capacity
Then made itself into a slingshot to round the Dana Point curve
& follow a sun sailing off for Nichinan
Retrieved a Super 8 reel of itself at 24 doing Denise & Carol
as they took turns watching over Denise's baby
Whispered into & out of wife-like arms
of San Diego, Asusa & Pasadena women
Secretively prowled Nixon’s San Clemente
for remnant deliverance & clemency
Draped San Onofre in funereal gauze
from the ghost of Fukushima
Shot flares over Pendleton’s warrior reserve where the living practiced at death-dealing
in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan before it called them to task
Lit a candle where a storage unit once held the remains of one business
but burned with the smell of three it had established & destroyed
Unsealed the door of the La Costa tennis club where the kept woman
from the Day Care center was benched or fucked
Bookmarked one Clairemont where a woman who called it “David”
traded shock-probes of improbable erotic tales
Also bookmarked the graduate school homonym
specializing in what it left stubbornly unlearned
Encircled the wheel of a dozen cars it had bought & sold
at the exit ramps of two weddings, three pregnancies & two sons
Sighted Leucadia sand sharks on the rocky shore
where a storm had leveled the pier it had barnacled
Copied addresses that bowed & cracked
under the weight of its signified separations
Fought off ATM locations more prominent
than forgotten faces it had vaporized in freeway fog
Then finally discovering itself in a picture book of microcosms
shelved at the Reuben Fleet Theater gift shop
admired how under magnification
it had leapt from nonfiction to verse
unashamedly displaying its ugliness
in a camouflage of primordialism
as prettified by what held it
as by what it thought it knew
27 February 2012
SoCal