"My Blue Hawaii"

Every queen loves a lobster
with the nerve to kill time
since it's easy to be sure in a bistro
where more than dogs are turned away

Your mother had the particle
but key words are too brittle
to warp the probity of a lifetime
for a perp walk through a wafer fab

If you don't pay attention
to the little things
the big things will fall down

It's only a pay per view moon
and slowness makes everything royal

Born and raised in New York City, Alan Bernheimer graduated in 1970 from Yale University, where he studied with New York poets Ted Berrigan, Peter Schjeldahl, and Bill Berkson. In 1976 he moved to San Francisco and spent time with other young writers such as Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten—a group who would soon become known as the San Francisco Language poets. Bernheimer also wrote and performed for Poets Theater and produced and hosted In the American Tree, a radio program of new writing by poets on KPFA. This collection includes recent work; brief selections from his first two books; the entirety of Billionesque (The Figures, 1999); and the play Particle Arms, which was produced by the San Francisco Poets Theater in the early '80s.