In Bed With Joe Linker

I like a combed or uncombed bed. No worries – by morning, all is disrobed, disturbed, perturbed.

Sleep is often restless, but when the wind turns offshore the morning promises glass.

The bed is a barge run aground in a storm. Bed me down at the beach with Penina’s Letters. No, it’s not a very small bed, queen size, but it is a long board. The surfboard is not easily domesticated.

Penina spent the night in the bed of a pickup, the Peace Truck. Preferable, she said, to sleeping in a queen bed with a surfboard.

The subeditor obediently rubbed coconut oil over every blemish. What was it Emily said? “There is no frigate like a bed.”

The surfing term for in bed in the wave is Tubed.

I do still get tubed, then, from time to time. Dry seaweed makes for good bedding, in the grass, under a palm. There’s a paucity of palms in Portland, true, but the palm is part of the fiction. Los Angeles. “The palm at the end of the mind.” Stevens described a sunset. Time for bed. The bed at the end of the mind.

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