☀ Today's Poem: "Northern California" Brontez Purnell

1.

I wanted radical Glamour
with a capital G
we've stayed in the house so long we now seem unglamorous
and please let me extend this act
of reckless generosity
and kidnap you
to North Beach
and stuff your face with a hundred dollars' worth
of deep-fried
Cantonese
salt-and-pepper crab
no like
two hundred bucks' worth
we'll even get the champagne
and forty oysters
it's a beautiful life
oh oh oh oh

I just want to be here beside you
have been beside you
have always been by your side
North Beach was not new to us
I remember in 2006
when I was mopping jizz
at the Lusty Lady
and how after that horrible shift one night I met you
at the poetry reading
at City Lights Books
we found a bag of cocaine on the floor
(and we thought poets only drank)
we huffed that bag down
in like three seconds
and went racing through the store
and snuck into where we were certainly not supposed to be
and you almost stole
the entire box labeled
"Ferlinghetti: archive of unpublished journals—
1968-1982"
and I said
"But Marcos, this is deplorably wrong?"
And we
COULDN'T
STOP
LAUGHING
after you said
"But, like, no one's even reading it!"

2.

The stop-start freeze-frame
kaleidoscopic density
of many lives packed into one
I have to
think of time in different ways
lest it consumes me
but also
the line between
the past and the present
I have altogether abandoned
keeping score of
it's Godlike
the poetic practice
of shrinking twenty years
into a series of days

Monday: I was born
Tuesday: I stepped off BART and into the San Francisco air the first time
Wednesday: the day I asked you to marry me and you refused
Thursday: the day you never woke up—I called and called
Friday: I became immortal because I wanted to remember forever

3.

Big Sur: we thought if we escaped for a day
things would feel better
but the winding highway gave us car sickness
and the epic cliffs reminded me
I'm acutely afraid of heights
and Highway 5 is sinking.
In undergrad
at California State East Bay
my geography teacher said
"Well by definition anything by the water is eroding—the whole thing will fall into the ocean
in a hundred years"
I am drawn to anything that has finality
my own Dionysian caterwauling
now sounded like death bells
I coexisted with so long
they now seemed like the humming of a car engine
navigating this highway—I'm reading the map
the driver is a handsome porn director
escaping a marriage
and I was cross at the world
'cause no one had asked to marry me
two harmonious opposites
I remember stopping
because the road got so violently curvy
I had to puke
we stopped and climbed to the foot
of a sort of bluff called "Jigsaw Junction"
before deciding to go home
if California is falling into the ocean
a couple of inches
each hundred years
then certainly we had enough time
to go home
and die peacefully