Victory
Ours are the only lights in downtown Worcester
Electricity is a fragile touch at 40 miles an hour.
These are the nights of youth for young inventers
With drinks and smiles, like us, and the three ladies at the bar.
Simplicity is the power to resist holding tongues,
to ignore ethical necessity, to allow change to rout
the phalanx of lightless office buildings. We’re the ones
made of stories, eyes of hallow grounds, we’re figuring out
distance means being flightless in our feelings and honesty
means being selective with our sounds
Our night was filled with worlds of swirling smoke,
poetry if not honesty, and memories that fade like city lights.
Ash falls on our outfits, burning from our cigars as we spoke
about health nuts who would never live thru these Worcester nights
with any sanity or soul. We talk about where we’d rather be;
Israel, Germany, Florence (with a lady sleeping next to me) -
But mostly we talk about going back in time and just doing this more often.
Outside, a different building, a different person, a different whole watches
through eyes without curtains too dark to see.They count off
ten orange cones marking a different route home. In their subconscious
they’ll recall 3 men exiting a bar who entered as boys at a birthday party.
Their shared victory would be timeless as they drove back in the dark.
Urban Aristocracy
I
Smoke, like that from a gun,
Ascends from her lip toward
A lazy whirring ceiling fan.
Her hemp colored dreadlocks run
Around giant headphones and forward
over naked breasts. In her hand
The cause: A bone. The scepter of the queen
(she is so because she shares something with beauty)
Like the contrast of her skin and the green
carpet. The gentle wind compliments her nudity.
Her Bishop enters through the fire escape
Having made his way to the seventh floor
A zip lock bag with word secured
He pauses to worship the landscape.
Her stone eyes lie behind resin colored shades
A pile of ash is pooled beneath her finger tips
As if the gravediggers had stayed
to dig their hole beside her hips.
The holy man tossed the bag on to the green
and waited for his silent queen to inbibe the good word.
II
Things were not simple in the kingdom
A battle of black and white replaced
By colors unimagined. A tear pools in her eye.
What unholy movement brought her to this place
A place for fools and pawns to die.
She felt their souls exiting them.
Another inhale, another word – no reply from the muses.
The Delphic signals curled as they rose
with feminine curves and tragic catharsis
that removed every desire save one alone -
the one the muses love the most
She sips from her scepter of bone
and still her hunger grows and grows
her whispers feeble, “send for my drone”.
III
She hasn’t come in so long
Locked in his castle, his prison, his cave
He waits. He waits for her to call.
His thoughts surrounding him,
He wrote them on the wall when she had gone.
Half open books littered his conclave
epics and tragedies, eulogies and hyms.
All tragedies, all eulogies, all hyms.
to keep his mind, to keep his mind in check.
Madness was his only lover now, it was her that built the wall
built the wall around. He was useless when he wasn’t in use
and it sickened him. It bore a pit – a grave – into his stomach.
He would be unimportant – if she didn’t need him. Need him like air, or water.
Yet her need enslaved him. Cut him, shackled him, maddened him.
He longed for the smoky taste of her lips, and her soulful hexagon eyes.
IV
It was then that he felt the Bishop’s hand on his shoulder.
Human contact removed him from his castle
If only to push him down its winding staircase.
His small one bedroom apartment smelt of tobacco
and accepted no light in. It throbbed like a womb
A living breathing cave. Yet its drab wallpaper gave no illusion that it was natural.
The blinding bright light of the queen’s empty room
struck the drone with such unbearable pain
that he was forced to kneel. The green floor was warm from the sun.
Her naked stomach would rise and fall with each breath.
Inhale words. Exhale thoughts. The ceiling fan silently spinning.
The drone blindly crawled the high terrain
toward his prize. A queen desperate for the winning.
V
She drags, she drags, she drags the bone.
He places his lips on hers. Communication
evolves from ashes and breath. Smoke leaks from a kiss
a kiss leaks from the mind. He tastes her philosophy,
and feels the raise and fall that creates it as her bare stomach
shifts between his legs. For a brief moment their is stasis,
a tranquility of sorts, but an uneasy tranquility.
The Bishop removes the drones shirt
allowing his green eyes to observe his scarred back.
Years of being locked within his mind left him pale as a ghost
the same color as the tendrils of smoke.
This meeting had become more intense and more violent than most
the queen had awoken in fury. Her fingernails leave a track
of open flesh on his sides. But the drone continued.
Music pounds through her headphones and into him.
VI
Through closed eyes his fingers groped her coiled hair
eventually stumbling upon a chord, thin and black,
running back, back, back, into the other room. The music.
Sudden anger, jealousy, and weakness surged
as he pulled it from its jack.
Her eyes opened to reveal her hexagonal pupils
and with a single motion the madness, jealous of the new lover
took the chord and wrapped, wrapped, wrapped her neck.
The last smoke rose to be inhaled. All was silence
except the sound of the ceiling fan. Whirring.
Anger so quickly burned became remorse.
“Kill me. I have no more use.”
“Be still my child” The Bishop replied. Having seen the violence
he responded in kind. Taking the chord still around the queen
and tied it tight around his breathing’s source.
VII
“Such is man – an oppressive mystery
with a hunger for flaws. Unworthy of both
love and hate. His achievements know no limits
or goals. Only accepting a chosen slavery,
and who would sooner kill than to envy or want.
Man, the vessel of potential, a natural tool
for both angel and demon.
Pray now for salvation and repent
for desire will strip these thoughts from your mind
until too late comes your piteous prayers.”
Pavement
She had been in a rush all day
but she paused for a second
on the cool, smooth, gray of the sidewalk.
There were no flowers to smell in the city.
No friend she ever had would recall
this small act of humanism, this epiphany
that would slow the fall for just one second
on the cool, smooth, gray of the sidewalk.
After all, there where no flowers to smell in the city
Nothing to do, if you paused for just one second
So Naturally there was nothing to pity in the fact
that something was about to fall.
50 stories up, a painter too felt the epiphany
so he paused for just one second
Letting his feet forget the many hardship they’ve endured.
His friends couldn’t recall him ever acting so odd.
50 stories below, the cool, smooth, gray, of the sidewalk
Looked as if a blank paper with yellow lines.
It enjoyed the idle talk of business pedestrians about how
There were no flowers to smell in the city.
50 different stories, filled with people
none of whom could recall
it ever raining red paint before.
Something must have gone wrong.
The black and white newspapers the next day
capture only a monochrome woman lying face down
on the cool, smooth, gray of the sidewalk.
Why she had left work, her secretary couldn’t recall.
There were no flowers to smell in the city,
Nothing but leaves and cold air.
The weight of 50 stories having painted her tale
on the cool, smooth, gray of the sidewalk.
Morning in Uturbia
It occurred to me recently
That dreams are for those who can pay the most
Over a bowl of sugared cardboard
And fungal toast
In my sublet apartment
With more rats than ghosts
In the morning the sun hits the trash
And the local man, who smells likes booze
And lives under the over pass
Emerges, and we wait to watch him see his shadow
Because, if he does, then alas
There will be 6 more weeks of winter
Winter is a fresh coat of paint
Except for those who can’t afford clothes
Who pray that perhaps a saint
Or some other wraith with gold
Can revive some distant and faint
Recollections of a life put on hold.
It occurred to me recently
That food doesn’t fill the hungry
It struck me in a dream
While I excavated a dungy
Moss filled basement
Where some prophet had gone to die.
