California Noir

after Ross Macdonald

In dingy sunset motels
scattered along the Pacific Coast
dead bodies surface
with horrid regularity.

Unsolved homicides one and all,
who are these corpses
but card-carrying members
of the lost American dream?

Stabbed, shot, strangled,
bludgeoned senseless
by the proverbial blunt instrument,
sprawled across mattresses,

on cold bathroom tiles,
spread-eagled and face down
in kidney-shaped pools,
their bloated features
mock our ingenuity.

Noir as the night,
indifferent as the stucco or sand,
they offer no salty sermons
for the unwary.

Crying sirens taunt us.
All our hardboiled figments
jackknife into the breakers
of an oil-slick sea.

Appeared in Cold Tomorrows (Gothic Press,1998)