The Drunken Starfish

He's purring underneath the morning, there. 

Ah, heavy, heavy, disparate morning.... &….  

& See the red cups there and there and there.  

Notice the blandished headache. Notice the trees. Notice the cool, kissing breath of early morning. Notice the boy stumbling drunkenly north down Forrey St. to the bus-stop on Greenleaf. Notice how ecstatic he looks. Notice his disheveled beautiful and ugly facial expressions. Notice the small, oily stain on his leather jacket. Notice his hair awry, his eyes sunken and young and full of purply hungover youth.  

Notice alike the couple standing together across the street from the guilty, most red-cupped house (the vicinity of which this young man just walked away from). Young man leather jacket wearer walking diagonally across the red-cup planted lawn (they are everywhere along the driveway and on the lawn and in the street and all over the damn street and all over the damn place and there the seagulls are even starting to notice and land and spike a threat at the poor couple, the red cups fill the street and the other lawns all around the local neighborhood, there are boxes [beer, 24 and 36 packs] also everywhere, and squirrels run, some smack the red cups with their tiny haunches, fleetingly, under the morning, purple-and-blue sky, and in the morning sky a small syncope of faintly clouds faintly passes). Notice alike the beauty of the couple, both in their robes, the man’s blue, dark blue, and the woman’s, light yellow. Both with mugs, shall we say the man with an almost fresh and almost steady cup of Maxwell House, a lesson from his father held, and the woman with an orange tangerine tea, her coffee time coming up at the office later after lunch. Notice alike their facial expressions, almost matching and yet crossing over their respective nose-wrinkle and cheekish symmetries in different and idiosyncratic respects: the same emotion- confusion, disgust. Notice alike the cups everywhere. Notice the cups.... everywhere. Little blasted red things, those bastard college kids. They'll get the city on them this time. Unforgiven.  

& See the red cups there and there and there.  

Notice the young man in the leather jacket smiling all around the scene and yet to the couple holding slightest nod of sorryish goodmorning as he follows the adjacent street away to the bus-stop, admiring the (to him) prurient and ample evidence of the destruction of the decadence of the night before, smiling because the scene is beautiful, and though hungover, he is most probably still drunk somewhat.  

& See the red cups, there, and there, and there.  

Here he gets to the bus-stop. Then, a Seventh Day Adventist is- all of a sudden- standing right beside him. The possibility for fright is dulled by the still-drunken hangover. She would have really startled him, if it weren’t for his condition. They’re nicely folk: poppin' out from behind trees at bus-stops and the like all the time, blast. Notice her gray, floppy, broadbrimmed hat. Notice the wonderful, keenly flower in it. Of the morning.  

The young man smiles at her, somewhat startled, as she had just walked up from behind the bus-stop where he was sitting, as if materializing out from behind the big Ash which sprouted lovely grace there beside the road. Nice friend to the bus-stop sign on the sidewalk, vertices of youth and religion and greenlife and metal and signage there off Greenleaf Ave. Whittier, California, circa 2009. In the summertime.

"Goodmorning, there! Hallo! Goodmorning there! Goodmorning, you! D'ya want one of these?" The nice lady in the broadhat offers a pamphlet. The young man smiles faintly up at her. If he were in his sober attire, as it were, he would have declined her her offer, though still with a smile. But, in the moment and as he is, he takes the pamphlet and looks around, anxious for the bus, anxious for some space away from the strange tree-dwelling pamphleteer.

He thinks to himself about the old axiom, a thousand cranes make a picture. She and her hat and her thousand pamphletti cranes, lovely. Just lovely.

& See the red cups there.  

Yes, the young man is rather romantic and somewhat dumb, at least, so we think, in proper measure to his surroundings as they duly present themselves. Then the bus arrives and he wishes the lady a “Goodmorning” as real and as lively as the scream-mute, hungover-drunk daybreak. The birds: chirping. The Ash-tree smiling, too.  

Back in the red-cup tortured cul-de-sac the birds also chirped and the Ash-trees also glorified the morning street. The couple, by this time, had gone inside. But their lights were aglow and the front door was open. The neighbors were open, as it were, to begin preparing their rightly rage, to dress it up proper, in order to make it presentable and utility-oriented enough to make a dent in the stoney eyes of the council. City council members. Embezzlers. Bastards. College frat rugby-team boys. Bastards. Bastards.  

& See the red cups there and there, and there.  

& See the red cups: there, and there, and there.  

And notice on the green lawn, scattered, peppered with the red cups, there is not one single drunk starfish sleeping, snoring, arms splayed. All of them are sleeping either in the backyard or on the rooftop, or inside the house on the couches and beds. Notice how the scene would have had all the more romantic delight if there had been, perhaps, a starfish sleeping under the twilight as the whole wide world awoke all around 'im. & Smile. 

The Starfish blues. 

& Notice the young man, now sitting on the bus, feeling his forehead, starting to sweat the day's sweat: though not from any form of goodly labor or professional focusing, notice him sitting on the bus, notice him sitting back, sighing, and finally resigning to wipe the stray, bright-green pieces of stray, scratchy grass-beads from his jacket-shoulders and pant-legs with the Christly pamphlet. Oh, those stains of grass. And oh, those bunk, coughful, youthful mornings and red-cup memories left out on the front lawn of the rugby frat house. Swipe the grass-blades off, there. Ahh.  

& See the red cups, there, and there, and there.  

And the neighbors, back in their house, were still wondering about the leather-jacketed starfish who woke up smiling in the grass, arms spread-out like a dreamy snow-angel, as the sun rose somewhere behind the high and snow-distant Ash-tree tops.  

They are smiling....  

& See the red cups, there, and there, and there.  

We will now leave the young jacket-wearing poet to his knockabout bus-ride from Whitter bumping west toward downtown L.A. Through the In-N-Outs of Pico Rivera and the train bridges of Southwest Montebello: rumble and ramble and bumppety boomp on through, on through. Smiling.  

We notice, back by the bus-stop, the woman in the gray hat, still leading her heavenly pamphlets about the morning’s skins. She herself notices a messy, scatterplot line of plastic, red cups leading southwest down the adjacent road and begins to follow them away from the bus-stop on Greenleaf and, like some kind of Seventh Day Adventist E.T. character, begins bagging up the Riece's Pieces of these red, plastic cups- these mysteries of the great lovemorning- stacking them and placing them into a bag which she took out from beneath her hat.  

& we notice how she has the cul-de-sac clean before noon. Notice how all the neighbors, smiling (they had joined in to help, of course), had decided to leave the council troubling to the birdsong. Notice the Ash-tree, by the bus-stop. Notice it: it is smiling. It is smiling. Yet, I wonder, yet, yet....yet those red cups.