The Blue Bikini

When she puts on her blue bikini,
I see her creamy skin even more
than when she is naked.
I notice the two-seconds-worth
of sunlight illuminating her bare back
as we pass by the open window,
walking down the hallway
from her room to the elevator.
When the elevator descends,
we open our mouths
and put our lips together
and let our tongues wrestle
like restless sting rays
caught in a dark cave.
The morning sun has not yet touched
the shadowed swimming pool.
She jumps right in so confidently.
I am afraid of the cold water.
But when she calls me
by crooking and flexing her first finger
up and down,
I cannot resist
and I dive
and I come to her
blue and shining.


(Copyright Michael Pulley, July 8, 2001)

Michael Pulley -- Bio

Michael Pulley was born and raised in Georgia and the
Carolinas. He has lived in Sacramento for the past 23 years. For the
last 18 years, he has been one of the city's most notable reporters.
From 1994 to 2000, Pulley was an award-winning investigative
journalist and feature writer for the Sacramento News & Review,
where he covered a diverse range of offbeat and controversial
subjects, including the Ku Klux Klan, Scientology, police
corruption, Earthfirst!ers and train hoppers. His journalistic
adventures have taken him from the back roads of South Carolina's
muggy swamplands to the hurricane-ravaged jungles of Honduras to the
crack houses of Oak Park.

From 1991 to 1993, Pulley provided business news broadcasts
for the local segments of National Public Radio's "Morning Edition"
and "All Things Considered" on FM stations KXPR and KXJZ. In 1997,
he was interviewed by a Sacramento TV station regarding a story he
broke on the infamous Unabomber case. In 2001, he contributed a
piece on police perjury allegations to The Sacramento Bee's "Forum"
section.

Pulley also has served as an editor and board member for the
Sacramento Poetry Center. His poetry is lyrical, political,
spiritual, and frequently satirical and surreal. He is known for his
moving, dramatic performances, often in collaboration with
Sacramento's finest musicians. His work has been praised by some of
the nation's most acclaimed writers and artists.

William T. Vollmann, author of "The Royal Family" and "The
Rainbow Stories," said Pulley is "a cross between (Allen Ginsberg's)
'Howl' and (Arlo Guthrie's) 'Alice's Restaurant.' A sweetly
wide-eyed attitude to life."

"He reminds me of Kerouac," said Jack Micheline, the late San
Francisco folk artist and bohemian poet, introducing Pulley at a San
Francisco reading in the mid 1990s.

Sacramento poet Michael Grosse said Pulley "continually
chases and alters form and content to create pieces of surreal punk,
dream-woven fragments and explorations that become waterfalls and
dirt."

"Achin' Pagan," Pulley's 60-minute-long CD, can be accessed
under the spoken word section of the website: www.mp3.com. For more
information, call Earthworm Press at 916-739-6734.