clouds fade to pink in the solar haze
of solitary seagulls and smoky summer moons
before the atmospheric rivers that we navigate as seaslime
to the submarine sargassum cities of seaweed junkies
who wash up on Seattle shores
like filaments of the universal thread unwoven
from the patchwork realities of the subjective mind
despooled into axon and dendrite
the fiber of neurons producing incoherent babbling
brain spaghetti of dopamine addicts rolling
bent lives on the manic pavement
skidrow angelic where they glide to shipyards
unhoused along traintracks packaged in cardboard
spreading tentacles of tentcities where beatific
undergrowth of the glistening towers blooms
on underwater middens of the coralblossom spring
like seagrass meadows clouded in squidink grime
then polyphonic autumn blackholes eat the sun
in dissonant gray of bleachwater tears falling
on the old Chief’s city the emerald mountain mist
sandcastle metropolis where electrified seabirds
like guitarsolos fly into the squawking siren dusk
on the wind crying names of the whispering dead
in radiostatic voices from otherdays beyond
lost to oblivion sweetly drowning without a breath
of hope or a horizon of bright tomorrows
underwater long before the disruption of new arrivals
or Wobbly remembrances of the general strike
the dead whose tears are dripping in the pines
and on the screaming banks of muddy rivers where
flow ancient sorrows to the rhythms of the Sound
and to those wise elders lying in Lake View
who go to the deep river and sing: ‘be rain’