Thom Garzone

Marking My Entrance

After Mother’s Day I sprung in photos w/ grandparents, godparents, sitters

as a post-war sun beamed down & led me to wherever time had shed its flesh.

Songs caught up w/ heroes & freedom, fallen stars & airwaves,

and a silver screens that glittered with icons.

Grass grew from my thoughts, lapsing into folds shielding decades.

Spring & May days rang w/ spirits that ran aground into spheres of abyss.

So lost a child of seasons, confined to wards, then released into society’s forests,

fed to predators, harbored by saints, moored to hope, but blinded by hope’s longevity.

I listened again for this source that screamed of sufferance, but guided me with a torch

to tomorrow’s mirage as I returned to fields of memories,

a faint port mystified in fantasy, clad as a prophet

who had lost at his crap game of life.

How then did the changing of years phase its own rift?

Why land delighted on these pages from a fragmented brain?

Timeless chapters become seized by tragedy or enclosed w/ loss.

Here lay motifs that helped rescue & illuminate my journey when creating art from grief.

Daylight emanates on faces, dialogue, scenes of the past, images, hardships

& just as hitting a dead end I turn, remembering how the sunlight came to me

on that spring day that cleared from the journey I’m on.  

from the Kingfisher archive

Meditation in May

A small herd of goats gather

on a rise of a freeway on-ramp.

They are white, black, and brown spotted,

yet unmarred before Nampa.

Spring surges when students, venues,

and businesses boom on the landscape,

a question that gleans on cliffs of time.

I see beggars who solicit loss

for small bills, and display cardboard notices,

a testimony to a losing side of bad luck

bemoaning society as unsuccessful.

I move a friend into my house, a fellow writer,

and venerable English professor, my comrade in words,

conjoining our forces and efforts, and in

transit lines of challenges,

in snapshots to an over-exposure of existence.

from the Kingfisher archive

Pacific Grove

Stepping on the paved sidewalk, clouds greet me

and I bid them hello, barefooted

I long to see the beach for the first time

Lover’s Point, a cove with crags that surround a lagoon

seaweed and kelp wash in and out

with ocean current, and a light spray of salt water sprinkles my face

as waves ebb, but also in me

the tide sways and swells, local kids dive off cliffs

A bikini-clad woman sees my East Coast distinction, eyes agape and looking at her exposed pubes,

I feel urges I had never felt before

A volleyball game ensues while vendors sell taffy and popcorn

July 1975’s rock music transfigures time

After I find a spot on Lighthouse Avenue to outcast myself to a smoking habit at 13,

noticing the difference in the nature and ice plants overrunning the grounds

I had never known these scenes, iconic moods, human character I’d only known in Steinbeck novels

Now in the same setting, Monarch butterflies converge on Pacific Grove

My brother stuffs our family of four in his studio till we find a condo in Seaside

Then I said farewell to PG, yet can hear the walruses moan on the round rocks,

feel how the sea otters swim off the marina, and emerge in pages of Cannery Row,

PG leaves an indelible notch, carving out a memory, narrated by the rock-n-roll,

of wasting days on skateboards

One summer, years later I traveled from LA to PG and it drew me like a magnet, ingrained

yet rocking like a buoy on the sea