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The City and The Fall
Contributed by
petejm
on
Sunday, 13th January 2013 @ 02:45:37 PM in AEST
Topic:
oops
|
The City and the Fall
Framed in purple haze
with your distant Siamese gaze
you eat and you laze
and you smile
and amaze…
On your shoulder the strange little perky-faced man sits smiling,
he has Moths fluttering about his crimson lips that glitter with the Moonlight,
shimmering in through the hole in the floor.
His eyes are stones turned white,
his voice cackles and makes electric shivers run like ice along your
naked spine.
You are Splendor and Joy and all the lights blazing like fire in the night.
You think you know it all little bright-eyed girl.
You slip the kiss for me upon your lips,
it winks and smiles like magic might
if it were as real as you and me.
Laughing like drunks,
stoned and drifting with the melodies cascading
like the stars trembling from your hair.
You let silence hush you quietly with your dancing eyes misty
and playful.
The grave robbers take your hand
and lead you to the promised land where children play mystic games
with shells for flowers in their hair.
All the walls of Sodom were not as bright as those little prancing dancers
catching whispers like the time-man knocking on your door.
They were all dangerous liaisons,
meaningless paramours without contention.
The gift of sight is in the seeing,
we see the great caustic Christ making redeemers out of the hobos, tramps and
vagabonds.
We were always footloose and strangely intent,
tentative fingers touching cold hard window.
The withering of light is all too apparent,
the room shivers amidst its floorboards,
we are vague tenants in a vengeful house,
the walls try their best to remember us,
but we are anarchic and definitely totally spent with the wild night
riding our shoulders into bedlam where the whores of charisma gather cherished
ideals for slumbering decimation in the fields of lingering lust lost to the madness
and the sadness of the forever-dream arriving with the kiss of death
upon the lips of tiny afterthoughts and solitary regrets.
You have to see me sometime my Lady,
for you are worth the wait.
The tide beckons beyond the walls of solitude,
your words slip with the drink inside my heart,
each tremble gathers momentum along the sinews and the byways of my skin,
it stumbles into vague vibration.
The sad Gypsy lets you grin in your ignorance,
the roads cascade into innocence.
The trees gather summer into sounds of mystic melodies,
music falls from the Gypsy’s eyes.
Rhyme and reason gather about the open fires for warmth.
The cult of definition is marching to work,
suits tied to suits with bright yellow ribbons,
dark eyes cast the Gypsy spells without intent.
The last catch is the child skipping to the heavy eastern beat,
it isn’t rap, it isn’t rhythm,
it’s platonic exploration of the symbolic soul,
the gathering of the ancient clans to the calling of the sacred quest.
People look towards the north,
you are not there my love,
nor am I,
we are playful children messing about down by the river,
the reeds add a strange combination to the streaming sunlight,
it makes patterns in the air that almost turn into language
and meaning.
It’s all rhythmic of course.
The banks of the river flow past with the trees,
the whole world shuffles to the beat,
clouds of rain coalesce into sentient light,
the life-blood of nature turns everything yellow
or golden with more shine than Cheops or Giza.
The dog-faced soldier licks at the grime at the corners of his mouth,
he has missed sleep gathered up in knots inside his weary eyes,
he carries the whole world on his shoulder,
and a gun.
He can eventually know you sweet Lady,
he might even know me,
but we are not meant to alleviate our collective pain,
we are the edge of matter,
as if that ever mattered.
The soldier carries the child inside his chest,
blood slips slowly down his arms,
there’s an open wound bound up with memories of home,
each wincing pain is a gift from mom and dad,
he tries to hold onto the child,
the child cannot stop crying,
tears wane and wither and flow once more.
All the soothing means nothing in their sign language.
The soldier mouths protestations,
falling headfirst into the dirt,
into mother’s arms.
The refugee becomes the pillow to lay his weary head,
the dying child lies dead beneath the weight of western resuscitation,
the time-man kicks in the door,
sees lust upon the naked floor.
Boulevards whisper sinful towards the executive presentation.
The City has skyscraper blues,
it whistles out of tune,
like the elevators; if you listen carefully even cables can talk.
Catching the downtown bus lets you slip night from your soul,
the sidewalks breathe your name like the lyrics written in your heart,
running forever towards your passing.
My Arrival...
I arrive as always down that back alley with the resident transients
laughing at my demise.
I drink there for a little while.
My mind bends and wavers out of shape,
everything inside my head turns upon impossible orbits.
I am cast down before the lure of septic piracy.
I take the captured ideals and smash them against the walls of morality.
My vagabond poets tell me tales of faraway train rides,
of the long black track leading straight down to hell,
of the leering guards upon the phantom towers with searchlights
and fences and walls shuffling forever towards death row,
visits by strangers become friends behind closed walls,
holy crap preached to save the desperate days of the deadly kith and kin
and great orgasmic sin.
It’s all redemption.
I drink to it with my tramps and my scavenger lords,
with my scattering of litter and dumpster desires.
I preach to them of the mystic ways left high with the laughing policeman,
he kills family and friends with a certain desire,
a cunning beyond the prisons and the glittering facades of social content.
We are lingering with the banished and the banned,
you can always find me out there kissing ancient songs,
playing dead sea scrolls with the haunting of my written testimony.
I have no restitution,
being forever damned by the passing of the last bus out of town.
There is a grinding prerequisite to the affirmation of wealth,
it becomes intrinsic and baleful, assuming dignified guise with the lust well hidden
behind petrified eyes.
I see decimation inside the iris of the businessman,
he picks his nose at the traffic lights,
I see him,
he knows,
but drives on anyway,
like he didn’t care.
I am not the reason for his success,
alas little suit,
for I am the reason for your demise.
Forgive my bitter tongue Ladylove,
your passing gives vent to strange hallucinations,
I assume realities that simply cannot be real,
it’s just magic that I precariously steal.
I kiss your tongue little Ladylove,
our lust lingers and whispers towards the Moon with harmonic dedication.
The buildings reach for the skies,
polluted rainbows bend towards infinity,
somewhere a Stranger arrives unknown,
unseen,
grasping each thought for his own usurpation.
He is the Harvester Lord with capital letters.
He certainly wreaks havoc inside the City.
The stock exchange assumes symmetry with the arrival of the Stranger,
the doors slip like syrup towards the stone marble floor,
the walls merge towards nature but never quite make it in time.
All hell breaks loose as runner’s stream towards the windows,
someone tries to back up to disk,
it assimilates the diagnostics of redemption and the computers liquefy before
the terrified eyes of the Suits leaping in symbiotic desperation towards the streets
outside.
But you know the truth to be found out there my Lady.
All the streets are filled with the conversations left in the airs by the recently demised.
The dead voices remain to haunt,
passing the time of day between life and rampant death.
Nobody wants to haunt forever,
but winter has the habit of restraining the lure towards silence,
it lets memory survive a fraction longer than it ought;
so much so that throughout all the streets the dead walk amongst us
like visions of afterthoughts,
or pleasant conversations left hanging in the air.
At the back of the mind the fear sits haunting
and wickedly taunting to reprise the reason for the treason of Lucifer
who begs rights as strongly as the pale-faced born-again bastards of Gomorrah.
Each to their own you said,
you told me straight one night in Mexico City,
we were drifting with the tides
slipping South with the Sun and the blues,
each night was as wasted as the one before,
the hazy days were the lazy days lost to Cantina screams.
The charisma of spaghetti westerns was an alluring symbol of decay,
it wasn’t quite Spain but the streets were the same,
and the buildings tried to be white but settled for faded peeling grey instead,
it was all falling apart down there south of the border from Hell.
We played dancing tunes with wild sex in dancing rooms,
the ceilings whispered and wavered to the rapid throbbing resolute determination of
the ceiling fan.
It tried so hard to be cool,
but then didn’t we all.
Even the cops had ideas’ of utter grandiose bourgeois ideals,
they slipped Shakespeare into your hand beneath the parking ticket,
we were tragic players in a desperate tale of falling forever from grace.
Blood upon the floor,
the subtle aroma of vomit lingering everywhere to match the strange stains on the bedcover.
It was all so very empty.
We had lost our melodrama,
our first night was long since seduced into excess and the passage of grave-robbers
We were taunting each other towards the end.
Once we were sovereign in our love,
we were sacred in our lust,
but the dust gave you the illusion of leaving,
when the roads were clear you were gone,
lost to time and a certain predestination.
I was limping by the time the sea reached me,
it was waiting for me,
like a great big lump in my throat it sat there so majestic and blue,
it was almost enough to make me cry,
I might have done if I had any tears left to spare.
I thought I saw you out there upon a wave,
it might have been the light listening for my tears to fall
or a surfer drifting into my desolation like a harlequin fool
my eyes just didn’t give a ***** any more
I fell just then,
looking for the floor,
listening for the last wrapping upon the closing door.
I waited.
Time began to draw me forward.
I was so intent upon my seclusion that I lost my foothold and slipped into the skies,
grasping a passing rainbow shimmering and full of wishes.
I tried to take a wish to myself,
but the curve was great
and the colours blinded me with perception,
the old horror of heights returned to haunt and I suddenly fell
losing my grip of the captured wish
and as I fell I saw the wish fly past
it was something about seeing you again.
I was reading the wish when I hit the ground at speed.
It was freezing cold in the tenement yard,
I thought my nose was running but it was bleeding instead,
the fall I suppose.
I had no tissues to use but the sleeve of my shirt,
it was satisfying to see my life outside of myself as so much red liquid,
there I was sitting out there upon my sleeve
I was liquid and bone but mostly liquid.
Like the Earth I had islands and I had seas and oceans of memories to stitch
to falling stars to shine upon all the holy places where I heard you had been.
You were everywhere,
you were burned deep inside my every thought.
From somewhere behind me a rat ran feeding from a fallen corpse,
it was dead before it hit the stone,
it was someone I knew,
though we had never met I knew his type and I caught that aroma
of an old man of sixty-something.
I think the rat was trying to close his glass eyes,
they shone with such life it was difficult to accept how wrong I was,
there was no life,
even the rat knew that.
I liked his boots
they were cowboy boots that were supposed to be from Texas,
but more likely they were from another corpse somewhere further along the road
to hell…
I walked out of that backyard towards the city lights.
It was starting to rain,
I had no regrets,
the boots looked great on me,
and I didn’t mind the limp
it added grace to my poetic guise
I was mystic and mostly grotesque,
it was so totally how I wanted to be seen
the Vagabond Poet you used to know
remember?
Christ only knows where memories go,
I ***** hate them,
but still,
I loved the boots.
The sidewalks were like mirrors,
it rained that heavy.
Every dash of storm was a mirror through which I saw the city reflected,
it was a crazy catastrophic cataclysm of mingling definitions.
I loved the storm,
I had the streets of midnight to myself,
and the rats and the whores and the Cops and the Hustlers and the drug-faced kids,
the pimps the pariahs of parody and the dead and the dying and the screaming
almighty roar of the torrent of abuse that was steaming across the shattered city
skyline.
I saw all the victims playing death-games with the dark gangs haunting
street corners with threats and a certain assimilation of threatened respect.
All the tales told were vengeful and easily resolved,
bloody trails led everywhere,
down the streets paved with lust.
Through the halls of hatred and across the tiles of terror,
behind broken windows and inside empty trash cans
hidden by incense across church nave’s,
inside remnants of homes where voices whisper for help and sanctuary in
sanctity.
Everywhere the vanquished moved unbidden and hidden by the night,
they stumbled they shuffled they crawled broken and damaged weighed down by
time, by pain and regret,
they asked they begged they pleaded,
they deserved restitution without vocal chords.
Great open mouths reaping solace like so much wheat
taking droplets of redemption at the edge of a knife,
at the lip of a bottle,
at the rush of a killing.
The demise of lies in their eyes was tantamount to restoration,
but was no more than drug-induced mayhem.
People died alone and in the dark,
you once told me about that my Ladylove.
Born into light and love and laughter,
dying into darkness death and desperation.
How we drank to forget that wisdom.
I had rain-eyes,
splashed half-closed and blood-red.
The storm was whipping my shirt into a kite.
I thought I might fly again and go look for that fallen wish,
but the night had glued the city sidewalks to both my feet and I gave up trying to
escape.
It was all I could do to shrug in your direction.
I always imagined you heading east,
sitting with the far eastern termites scrambling for your attention.
if they had seduced you I would die,
that’s why you left a kiss on my pillow,
a pin inside of my heart,
a memory scorched into my soul.
You were terminal inside of my head,
you held such power over my destinations,
my stories were all yours,
the poetry mere symbols to grant elucidation between our two selves.
We were failing to be mystical,
that’s why you went away,
that’s why I still allow the City to treat me as debris.
I was flotsam before the concrete shores of conventional behavior,
the irony almost stung me with its cadence.
I was definitely losing my grip,
even the rain ignored me.
I saw the last bus pull close to the curb,
there was always a last bus going somewhere from nowhere.
I was in nowhere so I decided there and then to board the bus,
I was gone a thousand miles before I realized I was penniless,
the driver threw me off,
it didn’t matter,
I love Alaska anyway.
I’ve always loved the ice,
it was so clear,
unlike absolutely everything else.
The Eskimo looked at me with black bear eyes,
he was making a tourist into a snowman,
or a bobsled or similar,
it’s all relative.
I imagined water skating on a frozen lake,
the crisp cusp scraping away at my shoes.
After a while a crowd gathered to see the new Emperor in town.
They called me Magic, Magi and Bluestone and gave me Eskimo triplets to hold as
they played Inuit sacred songs with seals for instruments…
it was all so very surreal.
The skies listened and I think were very pleased indeed because it began to snow
heavily and full with vanquished elders returned to administer wisdom and want
through extrapolations to the little villagers gathered and huddled about this strange
apparition spouting poetry and theories of evolution.
I was becoming so full of lyrics I almost slipped into a death fugue.
I merged without effort into a lyrical dramatic pose,
they called me a minstrel,
a wanderer from the lands to the South.
I couldn’t lie to them,
I told them I was looking for you my Ladylove,
they shrugged and told me to ***** off.
I couldn’t believe how quickly they had slipped from revelation to obtuse resignation.
Without a further thought I caught a passing breeze and stitched it to my breast,
it caught my breath tight in my throat.
I choked on vomit,
but I laughed at that,
holy ***** I hadn’t eaten in years!
It was all secondary of course,
primarily I was still trying to find you,
even the unending ice floes knew that much.
I felt the scatter-light touch of lice gliding on secret surf-boards through my hair.
I needed a haircut.
You cut it last before the flood on Main Street.
Christ we were all over the place.
You had ice spires in your eyes even back then,
you were so many different things to me.
I could see the songster blues whistled down by the tracks where the steam haunts the
last of the crazy black linemen coming out to the ancient engine as it squealed and
rumbled and tumbled cast iron fists into the gathering thrall of the far away southern
night,
and you were there.
Dear God I saw you losing the light of the night as it slipped into shadow,
your white dress was letting go of definition.
I saw you shifting with the steam-haze locomotive hallucination,
the water roared towards my face as the prickly heat creased streaks of grime into my
mouth.
I almost passed out.
It was an iron-cast vision of heaven and hell.
When I reached towards your hand it slipped with a wink into mesmerized
shadow-glimpse memories.
Standing back there on the railway tracks my world fell into instant moments
shattering like glass,
each piece was a forsaken gift left hiding from the light,
it was always hiding from the light,
distant stars began to assimilate me.
I was becoming as far away as they were from all things warm and cosy-soft.
It was a proliferation of desperate measures building up inside my mind like hysteria
perched at the edge of the whole wide world.
The train was a whisper slipping towards the dawn.
I had to leave,
you knew that before I did,
even the mystic madman knew that much,
and he only sold matches to feed his addiction.
He used to watch me with such intense resolution,
he was a real revelation to me.
I bought matches,
he gave away penny dreams.
It was all perverse of course,
dreams are haunting perceptions written by sacred souls riding leather through the
desert storms falling towards civilization.
There was the City and the Fall,
my great charismatic novel based upon my strange surrealistic revelations.
It was the story of the time-man and his seven wandering children;
each child was a prodigy and unique to their village,
there were parks and swings and trees and a hero saving a tearful lady from the dark
clutching grasp of the local villain;
somewhere I dragged religion into the story playing significance with the number
seven,
it was a number with depth and meaning and could well have been significant to the
overall structure of the tale,
that’s how it was meant to be,
full of deep meanings and petty squabbles.
I suppose it was my great universal soap-novel.
I spent five long years in pulling it together,
strutting my perceptions from page to page like a real novelist;
it was so ready for the whole world to see.
I left in on that broken down bus in Columbia,
we were in Mexico before we knew of its loss,
you cried and broke my heart,
it meant nothing to me you must have known it was all just words to read and I had
lots more of those just dancing inside my frown,
but you were so upset you frightened that little beggar girl selling weeds by the side of
the road,
she was a vision of jet black hair with brown button eyes beneath.
Her lips were lost to fear and the fright of the lost look of innocence destroyed.
She walked away towards her own darkness.
You took our last ten dollars and bought the weeds,
the little girl smiled away a secret tear and skipped away silently towards the sealed
church doors at the end of the street.
We placed the weeds become flowers at the headstone of a stranger in that crazy
multistory cemetery at the edge of town.
All the dead were listening forever awaiting heaven or hell,
the lives of a thousand souls left to fade beneath the almighty glare.
You said we were like Angels visiting ancient graves to leave promises pinned quietly
to the walls of each mausoleum, each promise a gift of redemption,
a scattering of perception before the ever-widening years tumbling through the
gathering of centuries ending and starting there in that grey and crumbling place.
The vision ended and I was firmly returned to the earth,
I was looking for you in every face I saw.
The buildings seemed to sway to my passing gaze,
they became animated at my passing and the windows whispered secret sayings
beyond my hearing.
I was being coerced into acceptance.
The glass in the window shifted to form and to re-form my face,
the rain made scattering attempts to consolidate my true reflection,
but the night held dangerous minions and I could no longer delay.
The horrors awaited my return to the semblance of pre-destination.
I was coming home at last.
The subways were like great wet mouths opening up in the sidewalks,
people scurrying in and out of the mouth like ants escaping and being eaten all at the
same time.
I had a dreadful feeling that I was descending towards the escalators to hell, that at
any moment the white tiled walls would shimmer and shift to reform into the Gates of
Hades.
I ran faster.
The rain was suddenly left behind me,
I felt it actually slipping down from my shoulders to form little desperate puddles on
the floor of the subway station.
For a moment I watched the puddles fight desperately for cohesion,
they were losing to the mud splattering of hundreds of shoes merging into mess and
maelstrom.
Somehow the loss of the rain hurt me more than I at first realized,
I had felt safe inside the storm.
I had been anonymous and sacred inside my little huddled empire of dryness,
the whole city struggling inside the storm,
all those infinite islands heading home going to work going to see a lover a movie a
date a reception a blood-feud.
I was slipping again into my South American mindset.
I had believed I’d left that back in Tiahuanaco,
but it sucked at a little bit of me someplace back towards a memory of you,
it was always there with that faint aroma of dry-rain after a tropical storm.
The train announced its arrival by a scream of air pounding at my jacket.
It shuffled effortlessly into the station.
Without the rain I began to slip into my transient disguise,
it was enough to deter people from looking at me.
It wasn’t as effective as my crazy-drunk-psycho-tramp disguise but I was in no mood
to get arrested again and I needed the space to think, I was in the City again and I had
absolutely no idea how I had got there.
Somewhere inside I had a faint shadow-glimpse of Eskimo's but it was far too surreal
to be real so I dismissed it as easily as I dismissed the awful smell of urine inside the
train carriage.
I hoped it was the carriage because I hadn’t ***** myself since Honduras and back
then I had an excuse,
some bastard had slipped poison into my tequila and I had half a dozen fingers down
my throat,
none of which were mine...
happy days.
The train bumped forward and bumped again grinding my teeth with the passing walls
falling into the rear.
The floor was once clean silver without the encrusted crap of domestic animals,
it had that old *****-in look,
like me I suppose.
I had no destination and I wondered who else was the same, they all looked so intent
upon being intent,
they built such mighty walls about themselves,
Christ they didn’t even discuss the weather.
I caught several eyes and they quickly slipped away like darts or fishes flitting from
the divers exploratory touch.
I had thought that I was the only coward aboard the train but I saw fear everywhere,
it was paramount, dominant, prolific, resolute and powerfully pervasive.
I took all my strength not to run screaming down the carriages to the last car
where I would leap off into the darkness and the silence of that oh’ so very welcoming
concrete tomb...
But I was a prisoner now, restrained by circumstances to remain standing in line
waiting for the next station to appear, any adverse movements on my part would be
seen by everybody, they would all turn to stare at me seeing me tremble and sweat
and stumble into bodies pressing breasts and chests against my sweat dripping like
syrup down my neck and onwards down my spine.
I was suddenly claustrophobic and lacking of all restraint.
I was about to assault a strange little man standing close enough to touch my face,
I was almost at the finite decisive point where my fists would flail into his soft under-
gut region and pale bloody sick would come streaming out of his tight little suburban
mouth,
I was almost touching a criminal state of mind when my eyes were slammed
into resolute stillness before the great white blazing revelation emblazoned in
multicolored letters across the front page of the newspaper the little harmless man was
reading:
Colombian Dead Sea Scrolls!
It wasn’t easy reading the story with the little man shuffling from one foot to the other
and the top of the page balanced precariously upon the shoulder of a really neat
looking girl who looked all girl-Friday and fulsome fancy free recently leaked out
from campus for the new year assault upon her virgin senses,
but I managed.
Apparently a local farmer whilst traveling home from market on the Trans-Columbian
jungle highway once a month maybe-bus had found a faded battered book left it
seems by the hands of Angels upon the back left seat of the old rickety broken-down
peasant carrier and he believed the book to be the Word Of God and that he Pedro
Jesus Sanchez Jr had been chosen to bring this tome to the outside world. It was
hailed as a revelation and a find akin to the original dead-sea find.
I was stunned.
There in bold type was the title: The City and the Fall.
Just then the station slammed me into coherence and the doors fell open as the crowds
pushed me forcibly towards the exit.
My thoughts went racing up the stairs and out into the afternoon after-storm sunshine
shimmering with taxi lights and blinking crosswalks glistening with the scents and the
haunts of a vast stone city crowning the gateway to the East.
Tens and tens of thousands pushed and jostled and surrounding my every viewpoint,
I could not see beyond the crowd and I was being carried inexorably towards
destinations that I could only ignore upon my arrival.
Every view was blocked and the daylight banned from sight. I saw widows and wives
scuttling along at speed, handbags clutching and tongues clacking in unison to some
vague idea of purpose lost to the masses and the undertow pulse of the vibrant city
which continuously pulled at their little legs until they all ended up somewhere else
eventually like the office workers timed and primed defined and resolute taking the
stance of prim proper pride and perfect diligence out into the maelstrom streets
heading towards pre-defined points of origin and faint hints of hearth and home.
Realization hit me like a slap on the lip or a hint of sour breath at the end of a dreary
weary night lost someplace beyond the last empty cracked glass.
The mass of people grinding throughout the city were a storm unto themselves and I
could only thank God that the rain had stopped for I didn’t think I could cope with
two storms occupying the same place in time.
I slipped unnoticed into a below-street-level bar,
it was such a wonderful feeling of coming home, for all the bars like this bar were
basically the same all over the world.
I think a special contract must have gone out a few hundred years back:
Build dark pits deep into the ground surround with concrete or bricks or twigs or trees
or leaves and stick a wooden bar inside preferably running the length of the dark deep
room until it resembled a womb to comfort and give solace and grateful anonymity to
the passing strangers in the night and add an understanding philosopher in the guise of
a barman to serve liquid beverages to slip sweet forgetfulness across weary eyes and
tired dirty souls left shattered and defiled by the tumultuous calamity that was forever
humanity,
it was like coming home.
And there was my deep dark corner vacant and sitting empty without me and waiting
and luring me towards its patronage of my soul like the Incubus of my dreams
taunting with the soft tangible lust of feminine desire...
and you were almost there,
you told me that the glass was full but my soul was turning empty into the wind,
you slapped that sanctimonious crap into my face,
you must have picked up that airy attitude somewhere out west where the pretty
people go to sow seeds of deification of terminal currency spent to buy dreams desires
and dark desperate intents.
They seduced you with their benefit package smiles and their cars that ran for miles
whilst you opened your heart to tardy temptation and I lost you once again to the tides
that turned forever towards the west and away from my tentative touch left seeking
the last embers of your love.
I was a shadow-glimpse person in that dark pit all night long.
I watched the comings and the goings and I listened to the under-sounds which moved
like mist about the room.
I scratched a six line poem on the table top, and left it there for posterity.
Words were whispered and used to seduce and to restrain,
it was all just so much sweat and grind no more removed from the Savannah or the
cave walls of our innermost genetic traits.
It was all DNA displayed for effect but I knew the truth, I had seen it all before in bars
everywhere no matter who the patrons were they were all puppets dancing on the
same strings before the same mannequin audience which though ever aware could no
more acknowledge their performance than the patrons could themselves.
There was the heavy drinker forever mouthing off to his unlucky companion who sat
nodding and keeping his tight family-man mouth shut whilst the other bawled and
brawled his chaotic word stream across the smoky misty dark airs of the clamorous
bar.
That loud mouth was all over the world.
The language changed but not the intent or the result;
relativity I suppose.
In the corner opposite sat the addict reflected in the bar-room mirrors swallowing
back constantly to reach the previous nights heights.
He was glass-eyed and profoundly sad, his eyes were lost to the drink, his hands
trembled like my own and he was forever solitary amongst the crowds,
even the multitude ignored his great fall from grace.
I saw all of his debris scattered in lumps across the floor leaving a definite trail of
misery in his wake.
I saw his wife in tears clutching her baby to her breast, the house in a vast ruination,
nothing remained tangibly real in her life anymore, she was broken down by the sheer
task of staying alive,
it was all she could do to hold her little daughter close to her warmth.
All his friends changed phone numbers, changed routes to work and gathered in
conspiratorial debates behind sealed toilet walls,
They knew, she knew, the boss knew, the doctor knew, they all knew that he himself
knew that he was beyond reclamation.
He was totally lost to the lure and the lust of that first swallow which itself was far
more dangerous than the last swallow before collapse.
I knew him so well.
He had been in every city and in every town, on every beach and in every shop. He
was the man at the back of the bus, at the edge of the train window looking out upon
invisible vistas. He was forever there before me in a thousand different languages and
he knew me well.
I decided there and then to leave the darkness and head back out into the gathering
night.
I felt the comfort and the seclusion slip away from me as I left the bar and moved into
the returning night as it once more welcomed me to its vast incongruous anonymity.
I knew one last fact before I passed out in an alleyway at the back of the building.
I would head out west to find you my love.
I would go west.
There were such strange visions along the long hot dusty roads that clung like painted
black ribbons to the constancy of the highway vanishing with the night into new
bright mornings and late days spent in a lazy haze written in my book once lost and
forever found by the side of a madman's bed in every hotel room in the world. It was
all so chaotic and everything seemed to lack substance whilst behind it all the little
vague definitions kept pace with the shifting heart feelings of life as a vast pulse
beating into little wayside towns and great grey cities heaving themselves out of the
earth to form avenues and roads and little by-the-side-of-the-road places where
mystics danced lyrical to an invisible fluttering of wings sheltering behind the
iridescent illumination of spectral sounds and finite visions become stars and planets
and dreams falling forever down the well of night to my fevered mind still hot and
cold from sleeping without sleep for so long fit for visions and intricate extrapolations
delineated by the native American Indian sat opposite chanting to himself and
becoming a bear and a deer and an American eagle soaring infinite planes catching
light and sounds to play to children and to trees slipping into greenery letting the
desert fall behind blindly to its own diminishing glare leaving me swallowing from
the little bottle of regrets I kept specifically for just such an occasion whereby just one
sip at the void of eternal degradation would once more restore to me that pale
semblance of power that once had been mine to see the passing rivulets become rivers
and oceans become mountains tumbling and falling forever into the distance which
was forever beyond my ability to reach or to touch or to even know.
The journey west fell forward in ever decreasing miles and ever increasing intensity,
I was losing the shore ever more besides leaving pieces of myself at every stop along
the way like a smile to a small child by the water bottle outside the gas station which
looked forever closed but was just finding it hard to make competitive ends meet or
the man with the scar across his weathered chin cut by time and yet another long lost
lover’s story which no one else will ever know even after he was dead and buried
beside nothing more than a tree stump whilst she lay years past life in the far corner
framed forever as pretty young thing too young to die or to know he was so angry and
bitter and bent double inside so that the Indian felt it as well as well as I did but who
found letting go so very much easier than I ever could.
It must have been a native thing that ability to know and yet to let go
words I stumbled through like an illiterate peasant who can speak the words but
cannot form the meaning nor hear the sound behind that meaning.
I listened and I listened...
The bus a sound surrounding my existence in a constant pattern of movement and
mechanical response. I knew each sound and mentally I matched the sounds to the
individual movements of the internal mechanics inside the engine so that after a
thousand miles I knew every single sound made by the bus including the multifarious
movements of the passengers to the point where I could assign colours to each sound
and in doing so form complex variations of rainbow lights twisting towards sound and
silence forming and reforming in a weird orchestrated manner that was rapidly
becoming beyond my ability to control or even to harvest beyond the simple forms of
colours and sounds which I felt had become my mathematical limitations within such
a strange framework of thought.
Time sipped at my cup of strength.
I was losing my blood to the lure of language, it twisted my ability to breathe into a
series of rapid guttural sounds culminating in a blinding flashing mind-expanding
revelation forcing my heart to stillness and my eyes to tears pooling amidst lost sleep
and a profound sense of losing you.
There in the great western skies I saw the eagle,
turning and gliding and becoming the Sun and the Moon and the shadows of both,
great wings withering towards the west.
The glare blinding me into stupor and I must have fallen into sleep for when I looked
again the eagle had turned towards the glistening panoramic skies blood-red and
dying towards night,
and as I slept you came to me and you touched my face,
silently you leaned towards me and left a soft wet kiss upon my brow,
and as you turned to leave I saw you were an eagle and you were yet so very far from
my love.
The bus whispered goodnight and I fell from yesterday to tomorrow once again.
Have you ever listened to the violins my love?
They arrive with the first light glistening as if to add colours to melodies and lyrics to
Feelings.
We turned all the music into a strange series of shadow-assaults upon the senses,
we weaved the words like gossamer across the sheer nakedness of our innocence and
arrived without intention upon a starlit night that became our night to last forever with
the pounding and the vibrancy of our pure love lasting seemingly forever yet slipping
with the dawn into tedium and mediocre forced upon us by the rise of the city and the
fall of our sacred love.
First it was the night and a forever-panorama of desert piled upon desert,
of cacti stitched to wavering mirage visions of heat-haze and interminable distances
falling seemingly forever beyond my gaze and beyond that further still on and on
desert and black ribbon road and desert and black ribbon road becoming rhythmic and
dangerously inviting.
I almost asked the driver to let me off the bus,
but the dawn came first and I was free of the need of isolation.
I had left the east behind with the great mass of City become monolith,
before me the new day beckoned and with it the lure of you my love,
the scent of you was a whisper-touch upon the airs.
The desert was losing to humanity,
and with it the past,
falling away with the night and the fears drifting still within my soul opened now to
seek you my love to find you wherever you may be.
Below and beyond the desert stood the vast metropolis,
the City of Angels forever falling from grace resting sublime in its unique parody of
reality.
You can dance in shoes or you can dance in bare feet
either way you’re gonna *****in’ dance
the inevitability factor...
I wrote that once remember?
I tried to write it so it flowed without pause,
you said I was the master of cascading poetry,
our new concept,
but I hated punctuation,
I told you it was just literary restraining orders,
you said okay...
and ***** the full stops!
I was off the bus and walking,
my back was killing me and I knew I was writing my thoughts in a completely
different way,
not so much guttural as stutteral,
not a word of course but a meaning nevertheless.
I had to get more focused.
I’d let that bus journey play strange games with my cerebral cortex,
my soft and tingling amygdale was doing its complex dance throughout my limbic
system to the point where my motivations and my emotional behavior were swinging
as if tethered to a fresh nightmare so recently played out inside my dreams.
I had an instant of total disorientation...
the streets of Hollywood fell into the streets of New York...
towers were turrets and islands of stone kissing black waters slipping time inside the
great walls leaping skyward to be skyscrapers and palm trees and cities with deserts
and central parks and masses of people scurrying and hurrying like neurons flashing
life-messages along the sidewalks and the boardwalks seeping their lives like blood
into the life-force of the city until the pressure of sheer coagulation forced them to rest
and take stock of their gains and count their losses which hurt far more than the
absence of true pain...
I was almost lost for a moment...
It was the night scream of police cars which reached out to take me back to a familiar
scenario.
I was here...
but where were you?
Streets which whispered lyrics were becoming melody,
there was that piano still being played by the man with no face,
if I could find him I knew that I would find you there.
We called him Mr. No-face,
his playing made you cry and you just couldn’t look at him over there in the misty
corner lest it spoil your vision.
We danced like mesmerized children just discovering each other.
He played that song about remembering lost love,
you said we would never lose our love because we would never lose each other.
I told you we were all of our own memories,
we made our own stars and stitched them to our own heavens.
I swore that piano music would last forever,
that we would last forever.
The city took you down and tore me away,
it stole your sunshine and killed my summer breeze.
You knew we were becoming stone long before I did.
I was left lying on my back in a hellhole somewhere beyond all hope,
you stole my heart and vanished into the night leaving me empty and listening to the
last fading bars of the piano playing Mr. No-face.
If we give faces to our pains they can kill,
if we give life to our hopes they can still kill,
we had to be more than an audience did we not?
All the questions came alight one by one matching the streetlights winking towards
the gathering gloom of a false and insidious twilight.
I was trying to catch my memories as they leaked out of their own accord,
without them I had no substance.
I did not want to be forever new,
I needed some part of my past to make me live,
I couldn’t rebel forever against the realization that I had let you go.
The cold stone beneath my feet gave feeble echoes withering against the wind as it
whistled and gained strength against my body.
I was suddenly the centre of a whirlwind of litter,
it danced and sifted amidst my movements.
I walked enshrined as a street-walking vagrant king.
The night leaned close and touched my eyes with tears,
I found a doorway and slipped quietly into my shroud of homelessness and transient
display.
All the palisades of parody began an ancient chant.
I was being summoned towards the lights,
the city of Angels,
the city of pomp and extreme circumstance,
a whispering allure in a strange language commanding my
presence before the neon Gods shimmering with the night
towards action and reaction.
The multitude swam with the tide,
great roads snaking ribbons of light towards the wild Hollywood
extravagance.
The mystic druidic enhancement assuming enchantment and mythical
guise became the ultimate definition of my aspirations.
I realized in an instant that the City had taken you forever from my grasp,
you were lost to the chaos and the degradation of a soul turned sour.
Though our hearts would sing as one unified love the pathway towards
peace would wither with time.
I found myself filled with resignation.
The wind stopped its intrusion,
the streets played lyrical with my thoughts.
Looking up at the stars I found myself enthralled by the vast infinity
of the universe.
Walking out of the shadows I slipped quickly into the citywide anonymity.
I left you with the crowds gathered for display,
somewhere up ahead the bus pulled into the station.
I was in my seat as it left the city behind.
I had one last smile at the sheer futility of my search,
you were gone, and I, with my damaged soul knew this fact finally,
even as the smile faded and the night took me into its vast velvet embrace.
Copyright ©
petejm
... [
2013-01-13 14:45:37]
(Date/Time posted on
site)
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