The Scene on a Beach Cycle, I Only Drink on the Weekends or A Love Song for Alcoholics, Cosmos Canto, and Manic and Depression are copyright © 2002 Anthony Morena

THE SCENE ON A BEACH CYCLE

(Five poems in one part)

NEVER TO BE SEEN AGAIN

Sharks! the moron screamed,

Get the hell outta the water!

They were dolphins. Maybe porpoises,

we couldn't be sure. I said that I could swim out far enough

to reach them.

My cousin Antonio, the scuba diving firefighter, said no. Dolphins

are swarming with bacteria. From the shore I watched their

humps undulate against the flow like waves with their own agenda

before they leapt clear

out of the water, twisted mid-air and

heft their whole selves pulsing up

furious

screeching

until they broke the pull of surface ocean

earth

flew motionless through the sky

and made a beeline for the clouds.

My cousin pursued, soon arriving on the moon.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

On the beach

Allen Ginsburg, sitting, meditative

the grisly beard of Walt Whitman he stokes his fingers through explorative head

laid in his lap

face breath's width from face

and the strong smell of themselves shared

intimate generations sung together

sitting arms wrapped around my knees

apart though a little of what they do can convince me

and closer I can whisper to them as I point up the tossed coast to Barnegat Light

with an arm that brushes both their cheeks I whisper "Look,

this is where I spent my summers."

6 MONTHS

The setting sun made

for good pictures we sat

on a wooden bench moist from air coming off the bay

her on one side me on the other distanced

her hair too was wet and wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt

sweatpants

she casually dragged on that joint

while I listening to bay waves slosh around the moorage thought

about the ocean

she would cross in a week

I turned and took her picture

FEAR AND LOATHING

The vodka we drank on the bus tasted like paint thinner

and we were too cheap to spring for a hotel so we waited

for the sun on the beach tried to fall asleep

in lifeguards chair

ignore those humongous sandflies picking through

my skin

later we bought Hawaiian shirts and hats

played Raoul Duke & Dr. Gonzo

up and down the Atlantic City boardwalk substituting Blackhaus

for acid

by nightfall realized my mistake

tore the shirt off stood bare-chested among sand dunes

witness to pounding waves lit by neon lit by moon

swore I'd skip Ringo's concert

get first bus the next day

emerge from Penn Station aware

achilles

METEMPSYCHOSIS

When we die we are transported to the surface of the moon.

Looking down at the earth a compulsion makes us laugh.

We don't understand, we laugh hard

pointing, falling over, tears

plump up in our eyes. Big

hearty belly laughs. Whooping

until we forget

and re-form as tiny islands in the Pacific.

Sungold sands caressed by greencrystal water.

Mist and breeze

whisk through palm tree branches.

Reality TV shows are filmed in our jungles.

Eventually the ocean will rise up and consume us.

I ONLY DRINK ON THE WEEKENDS

or A LOVE SONG FOR ALCOHOLICS

Sunday, a day of alcohol inspired sleep.

It's hardly understood that a true day of rest requires

Complete and full withdrawal from existence.

Coma sleep. Corpse sleep.

No dreams in this sleep.

A mandatory sentence of 24 hours subconscious arrest.

Monday. It begins.

A whole day that feels like the first fifteen minutes

After circumcision, fifteen minutes of hysterical crying WhyWhyWhy

Before wailing into sleep like it was Sunday.

But not today. On Monday these people get to watch

The social habits of live nerve endings exposed to rock-salt.

Tuesday, and it isn't as bad as it seems. I can finally

Acknowledge beauty in the world again.

It's so shoot-yourself-in-the-mouth beautiful I can't express it.

The words are stuck in the back of my throat like an exit wound.

Wednesdays. Midweek ambivalence.

I forget the passive-aggressive insults I picked up rehashing things my friends said over the weekend.

All that covert antagonism I detected? Another one of Monday's mindgames.

No, my friends are good people. They wouldn't say those things.

Wednesday.

I'm not glad I didn't kill myself earlier in the week, but I don't regret not doing it.

I feel good enough to consider drinking again.

Thursday, or as I like to call it, Friday: Episode One: The Drinking Menace.

Everything is going according to plan.

At last we will reveal ourselves to the bar.

At last we will have revenge on the liver.

Fuck all, it's Friday. If things go right

I won't realize what I'm doing until Monday.

I'll suffer selective amnesia.

The girls will feel insulted which means I don't get kissed.

I'll make a phone booth a toilet. Twice.

Surround myself with the worst kind of best friends.

We'll scare the cool kids and their model girlfriends with ad-libbed poetry from our twisted hearts

And then make them new friends. Make old friends enemies. Again.

Fall in love. Fall in a ditch. Fall in love with a bitch.

Before the sun comes up it's Saturday. No sleep Saturday

The homeless people know we're imposters, sitting in their spots.

I alternately drink coffee and gin to keep me regular.

Shield my eyes from the sun like a Morlock. Live underground

Until that bastard star goes away.

Tonight, even though I've got some kind of rash twitching between my balls and my ass,

And last night's puke clogs up my sinuses

It's like Friday never stopped and I'm running out of life.

Plenty of time to sleep tomorrow

And save up strength to make it through the next week.

COSMOS CANTO

Tonight the stars blaze like Puerto Rican ladies

Speaking celestial Spanglish that confuses the ignorant white Moon.

Meanwhile Neptune develops the pictures he needs to out Ganymede and Jupiter,

He wants to put them on the net

Because his life is empty the plan is to make theirs worse.

The International Space Station is receiving anonymous e-mail threats

And the crew is getting nervous.

"What kind of defense system does this thing have" they ask mission control?

The Sun is jealous of love poems written for the Moon,

But the idiot ignores the comets who keep coming back

Even though he treats them like shit.

They don't know why the Sun has to be so cold.

Mercury's hot for Venus

They flirt on the phone for hours

But don't know that the Moon has tapped the line

And she's mashing her clit to the conversation.

Everyone feels sorry about Earth's terminal cancer

But no one knows how to treat it.

Mars is a burn-out artist who lost his stuff years ago. He's impotent, he's bald.

He's still got the lust for life,

But all his juice is frozen in the poles.

Yes, Tonight Saturn contemplates his hard on

Tonight the pulsars are distant friends trying to get back in touch

Tonight Uranus is bleeding

Tonight white dwarves get restraining orders against red giants

Quasars are rolling light year long joints

And the obese black holes are binge eating and getting fatter....

Tonight the inhabitants of far flung alien civilizations take to

interdimensional Cadillacs and drive through the wormhole freeway

to the otherside of a Mobius Strip where the tittie bars only charge ten bucks for a lap dance

Tonight the physical embodiments of Love and Unrequited Love have a secret meeting in a murky corner of the Milky Way

Where they decide to end it once and for all:

Tonight there will be no more heartbreak, no more loneliness,

Tonight everyone falls in love

Tonight no one gets rejected.

It would have worked too, but the the spiritual manifestation of Poetry is eavesdropping,

And, for his own sake, shoots them both in the head.

Tonight Cosmic Shetland ponies prance through the Bubble Gum Nebula

Tracing rainbows that tell the stories of our lives in six part technicolor spectrum

Singing the Universal Anthem with such drunken gusto and orchestration

That they can't hear the voice of God scream out in warning:

"PONIES! LOOK OUT!

MIG-22 jet fighters!

LOOK OUT, PONIES!"

BOOM

The cosmic dust settles and coagulates to form the zygotes of stars.

As the silent cosmos

Listens to Pluto's lonely crying.

MANIC AND DEPRESSION

The cage hangs from a tree that grows in the middle of the crossroads.

Inside the Golden Eagle sings himself asleep while,

at his feet,

the Black Sparrow dances and speaks in rhyme.

While the Black Sparrow can jump through the bars and out of the cage

the Eagle is trapped. A prisoner.

So he sleeps.

The Sparrow's dance is so beautiful that anyone who comes near the cage

cries and walks away.

And it makes him angry when they leave because he wants them to watch his dance,

come closer and open the cage.

Because as long as the cage is locked, the Sparrow too is a prisoner,

He promised to never leave the Eagle caged and alone.

"Get back here and open up this cage, you whiney pricks!

My friend needs room to breathe, he's starting to feel sick!"

When they don't listen he dances more furiously and the people swear

they'll never come back.

In time the cage gets old.

Rain makes it's metal rusty and soft.

The Sparrow has danced so much he drops exhausted

and the Eagle wakes up. Hungry.

He chews through the lock

He spreads his wings and the bars crumble into powder.

Spreads his wings that reach from East to West,

Screeches like a bomb siren

and takes off, flying, with a thousand gas guzzling SUV's roaring behind him,

the full complement of a tactical military airstrike at his beak,

and curses for the Sparrow,

who lies still, asleep, dreaming of the two-step.