Lawrence Bridges: California Poets Part 11, Five Poems

Lawrence Bridges

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

Lawrence Bridges

Five Poems

The Whole Plus Fear

half of humanity

is an erotic garden

the other half

brothers holding

up the roof

sheltering

nursing infants,

scraping roots

with sharp tools

bartered

for daughters

and cattle

with men

of unknown

character

who come in

long boats

of unknown

numbers

and sit with us

around fire

that might burn

our dwellings.

While they

bed across the field

we wonder if we’ll

wake to see

another break

of day.

The Unreliable Poet

You hear the meter and the rhyme.

You’re hungry for a word like ‘time.’

But not here. The poetry parts lie about

like surgical tools before the anesthetic

to explore the abdomen of a life.

And you, reader, always never better,

could see something was up.

Forget an English degree

and posh literary friends

for finger-painted gully gab?

You know, the mic isn’t hot yet

and we’re just warming up. Feeling

comfortable yet? Coffee? Coke?

I’m itching to transcend this form.

It shows. But there’s no better

vehicle for the psyche, here,

behind the glass in the breath booth.

Forest

Your leaf is not the tree.

It’s the newsreels and chronicles

of all that’s past and fallen.

You always thought we would go with it

like Sputnik, but here we are again

with Mars and my freeway commute

through old oak trails and manzanita.

One day I’ll go hike the park.

It’s still here with the cougars and mice.

Now is a kettle with steam clouds

and blue air suspended from stars.

All the tree trunks convene, listening

to a lecture on low-tech roots,

purveyors of minerals and water

hawking from booths powered by solar.

Cemeteries mulch coffins and babies

cry and cringe at yet another generation.

Our river, dry this time of year,

flows with air toward its own destruction.

Conjunction

The present edged in here with us

like a sheet of paper slipped under a door.

Everyone got one on our floor. Blank clarity

survives another evening of dark entertainment,

facing truth with your partner and heinous

dreams. I’ve traveled to another country,

not first class. I breathe. Adjust. Feel.

Elbow to hand like a rusting farm tool.

Fidgeting will remain all day, like a holiday

celebrated by few, except your clan.

These are the wages of roots where dark mornings

are soil beneath an unknown field.

No one is quick from bed to check the morning stars

and sit in a blind corner to nurse quiet thoughts,

like an infant that cries all day

unless it sleeps, missing the bright day’s healing

and growth of time that will put us under

or make us all cry out that its accumulations

cannot be purged.

Prose For an Uprising

I touch my buttons, hear the air, straighten my spine and wonder that all my friends still live except those who died young. Misery is crowded. And here’s hope, returned scolded: With a borrowed bed, I wake with borrowed shoes laced in borrowed hope from myself. We thought the hope of a generation stood with us, but only because we lasted, and responsibility was ours by default while others scattered around the country. But time caused waiting, not increase. Is that a beautiful thing? Is that a proud futility? The pain of yesterday is as nothing with today’s hope and consolation. I hope we all meet in the afterlife. By that, I mean the life that starts today. A poem about our time might begin or end with the line: “Love is the opposite of chaos.”

Author Bio:

Lawrence Bridges is a poet, filmmaker, and photographer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Witness, Vallum, Blue Mesa Review, Watershed Review, The 2River View, The Dewdrop, and other journals. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Horses on Drums, Flip Days, and Brownwood. His recent work explores memory, landscape, ecological disruption, and the unstable boundaries between the inner and outer world. A 2025 and 2026 Pushcart nominee, you can find him on IG: @larrybridges