Chris Murray
Cafe Morphemics
(San Francisco Trip, July 26, 2003)

1.
After walking Jack’s Ocean
Beach mid-cloud,
last night & a Love Niobe Now!
T shirt streaming by
dizzying desire at curb,
at bus kiosk,
four cornered traffic
a circle of sunlit linguistics
drama to be figured out: how’s the chicken

water-walker to cross?  Every I
almost epic: sun’s gone uptown—
I slipped into an Orthodox
mistake looking for art,
thumbed a stack of saints in the shop:

Irene looking
the serene
she
never was & now I’ve no bus

to keep thinking in English
where there’s no hache
or rho to fall
accent back on,
translating Jack

from frustration’s
(considering my sources are not talking to me)
minor hell rates: no Dante level

charges so mucho
& cayenne aroma of why
oh so sensitive
sipping of green jasmine tea on the grrr

sidewalk of whose happy
restaurant here—all
the food comes proportioned
in decipherable noise



2.
Noon cannot be stopped
generic as paint peeling off skin
or slats in the private

jokes I do get.
More noise just at low dis, din,
aqueous, an I has too much never
to bother with & water working hard
the woman

cook whose cheeks are permanently
Sappho apple & matter
of fact about the hungry
blonde high

heel customer outside the cafe
speaking of what moaning experience?
In the good cook’s hands portobello
sautees away.



3.
By dusk I am ask.
More between the wide whale 2
by 4 fence.  Icon of scorpion

or is it a grenade?  What are people here
putting on their boundaries today?
I think I just want a small tulip
petal circle, thank you.
Black stamen.



4.
Majority here
are critical condition good
looking
but the homeless
whose dirty socks
are published
everywhere
though no one is reading
them in this weak Chardonnay
ice light.



5.
Seven dollar cucumber and radish
salad early twenty-first century epic
love scene: no one can afford
the dentist
since therapy.  & the apple
cheeked Sappho cook
keeps her ruddy cool:

she’s adding a little salt
to the wounded leg
of lamb in port,

the cherries
jubilee aflame lovely
murmurs circulate like cash
oh this then is a kind
of carnivore’s love glove
galore.  I’m one
more hungry
one.

return to SHAMPOO 19