Further down the street the street-lights stare, cars hurry away, the cold creeps up behind you like a sex offender, the echo continues of a thunderclap that never came to wash the filth off the pale sidewalks, the malnourished, consumptive shop fronts- the inhabitants cower in their rancid corners, too far back in their shells of poverty and paranoia to give help to another. Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown.

Dry Bones

And in the days to come, we will speak only in rhyme
For we have time now to look at the ceilings of our rooms
And, timid, sound out the limits, the dimensions of our tombs
For all together, but each alone, we are on the tracks
As Eliot prophesised, we hear the rattle of the bones behind our backs
And know at last, that pride and stupidity was our crime.
The nightmare passes as quickly as it came,
Silicone and stainless steel alone remain.

Simulacrum

Welcome to the simulacrum
Sign after sign and many more
Run in legions away from me
Here comes the parade of the real

Breathing quietly will kill you
When reality parades right by you
Say it loud, I'm gagged and I'm bound
Broken bottles, the sign of sound

I am a Crab

I am a crab, I am a shaker of babies, a burster of bubbles, I am a bag-eyed hooded nark, I am an affirmative nihilist creeping dog, a godless commie scum, I am a ticker of boxes, I am a senseless clapjawed jackdaw, I am a silent standing statuette among the sparrows, I am a kicker of sandcastles, a vindictive deity of petty conversations, I am a bad chariot driver, I am a hollow-eyed slave of semantics, I am a skinny shivering servant to routine, a tardy tucker-in of t-shirts, I am a headphone-wearing hovering jackdaw slackjaw nag, knackered old notary's valet, I am a pest, a jackdaw. I am a creeping, complaining, coercing, concealing, confounded, corrupted, co-opted, castrated, confessed...
...crab.

Idol

Magic hours of dust mote grey settle
On the marble beneath the statue swept
Up in the wake of a young boy walking
Alone through the arcade passes
Out of the shadow into the garish noisy light of the market struck
In the face with sheer volume of sensory information to ingest falls
In the sandy earth, a little death, faints
And immediately is surrounded
By women wearing many colours he feels
His forehead could burn
Forever like the funeral pyre of mount Olympus, Greek Fire
The carved idol falls out of his hands

Phaethon

Taking lunacy to the very edge
No option of a quick retraction now
You've put the pie out on the window ledge
You'd take it back if only you knew how

As bridges burn, thrown caution fuels the fire
Bright embers drift on air, funereal
You watch the flames, aghast, as they grow higher
In vivid shock you look ethereal

You rub salt in your wounds to salve your guilt
And turn to face the crowd, shaking with fear
Their faces say "You're in up to the hilt,"
"You'll never atone for what you've done here"

My bleeding battered empress arsonist
Bring me my burning arrows of desire
Another travesty crossed off the list
Bring me, Phaethon, my chariot of fire.

Sleep deprived meditations on The Waste Land

Men are going to visit you while you sleep, and take photos of you twitching as you dream, and show the world that we're all blind. The world doesn't go away while you sleep, you become helpless - and you lie almost still at the world's mercy as much as a newborn baby is. You're just bones and muscle and gut and organs after all. Snowden's secret; man is matter. You think you are all alone with nothingness, but really you're just temporarily blind. Nightblindness drives you crazy, it's like drowning. You read, much of the night, and go South in the winter. I twitch and salivate like with myxymatosis.
Shine a light, shine a light on me. Trip down the steps so you put your head through the glass door-pane like your papa said you always would. The sun beligerent shines right down and pricks the back of the broken man walking east in the afternoon. I'm not your property, so don't get that look as you repeat yourself fastening the ceLLar d00r. You're all edges, boy. When are you going to get it together? Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear? Oh, it's pain, I'm all tiny spasms, a bag of nerves and cartilage, drowning on the beach.
I'm not listening to this again, darling, get your coat. Fuck me, kitten. Don't go so soon, shine a light, cos true love waits. Just don't leave me now can't stand me now heaven knows I'm going to spend my life at the airport but never take off miserable now. There's a little fire in the sewer's gonna eat this house start the tambourine snare kick hi-hat beehive hairdo, do you remember, the rain came over the Starnbergersee. Come in out of the cold, and read me like an open book. Reach out for me and I'll. Reach out for you. Think it over, baby think it over.
Phlebas and me, we've been having these thoughts about you for a while. No, don't go, I didn't want to scare you, it's just when I get like this it's hard to keep all the bad Naked Lunch stuff in. You have to go? Yahweh? Hah?! Goodnight, ladies, goodnight, sweet ladies, good night, good night.
The wicked witch satirical waxes lyrical, but esoterical and hysterical. Intern, me, your majesty can ride for free, most sweetlee. What did you do when you lost another, why did you bother? I had too much to drink, I didn't think, I didn't think of you, ah but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.
I tear it down, I tear it down, I tear it down
Tension has a familiar feel, paranoid paralysis takes hold. This is how the world ends; every night I go to sleep and it all goes away and I'm blind, and when I awake for the first few seconds I'm free.

Freedom

And when the gods have all laughed themselves to death
And when the docile mooncalves in their stalls are slaughtered
In the stillest hour you put your beating heart
Into a plastic bag, and beat me around the head.

Fly mooncalf spirits, fly.

Aunt Lucy the sweetie, sweeter than the truth she spouts, seeks purpose where futility only lies, seeks comfort in current affairs of the safe normality within the ordinary bounds of her world of opinions – what is more, what is less, whatever else we abbreviate her in her dull regularity like the heartbeat of a whale as she sits so shriekingly incoherent in the corner by the fire, the sweetie, violent old biddy. Isabel is Eleanor Rigby, darning her socks in the night when there’s nobody left; all gone off to the Elysian Fields calm yourself Rigby just wait by the window – your production line, reserve-army-of-labour smile must be stopped or I will cry; for the tragedy of the blister-fingered concerned other can only be borne with the perfunctory annulment of etc., and even less with the crushing hopes for valorous validation in mad medallion glory – like a child on a stick propped up for the benefit of bullets and Victoria Crosses alike, pin the tail on the dead donkey, shot in the face for the sake of parental approval. Father dearly hoped for etc. to become etcetera in a way he never had, for the extraneous details of his life were never even worth the full extension only the abbreviation of an abbreviation, but what he can’t have sadly I can, the chance to die in an ocean of my own self-fulfilling ironies, that nothing I can’t not have extends far beyond a face-down view of the Somme on a good day, I dream of you in a silent way and hope the conclusion of my extension is short but sweet, easy passing, felt-no-pain etcetera.

Are these my arms? These are not my fiery popping elbow joints. Are these your hands? These are not your hands. The ropes tight run up my arms to the wrist, sudden pain with movement, like a spasm, an involuntary cry escapes. The little drill slides up the back of my teeth into the gum, it stabs like a pin again and again. This is not metaphor. Ankles like weights gripped tight with strain. Head feels like a botched lobotomy. Are these my arms?
Burning burning burning

O sweet nuthin. Annihilation is just a phrase. Annihilation is just a phase.

“I wonder do you remember exactly when it was you became such a comedian”
“I think it was the day you and daddy laughed all the way to the bank”
“Ahh … fuck you”
“I’m gonna crack with this”
“Like an egg, right? Right?”
“Hah. Yeah, like an egg”

On the banks of the decrepit river, a joining of hands
A bowing of heads, declining of necks
Turning in towards one and one other, a union
Desperate feverish scraping nails scratch the blackboard away
Heart and head are one, as are we. You hand a gun to me.
You say “Freedom is our right, so let’s be free”

When we have laughed

When we have laughed
to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind
Which she, pretty and with swimming gait
Following—
her womb then rich with my young squire
William Shakespeare

Softly softly barges river burnished gold push off into a lamb’s-blood night eli eli lamma sax cries alone upon the still Venetian water an old woman with a face of folded leather pulls the blind
Guitar pluck droplets fall moontight light tight strum softly rotates the centre of the sun
Slowly rotates in fiery distant silence
Strum eyelids flutter spastically to the course, coarse course of chords
Chordal cool midnight sounds of lovemaking couples down in the back alley, the voice of God on the stereo, and in my mind, only in my mind, there’s no mind, no time, and only past and future trading blows of electronic signals in my sorry head
I have fouled the words BUT AT LEAST I HAVE FOUND THE WORDS
searching with grubby hands among the offcuts and outtakes of the glory god ginsberg mausoleum for these syllabic scraps of leaf.

“I was in a crash last night my darling, it was horrific; I almost lived”

Aaaaaa Aacacaaacaaa
Cocorico ratso rizzo in requiem

But she, being mortal, of that boy did die
And for her sake do I rear up her boy
And they took me in and thought me a toy
And here I lay, mesmerically I lie

Birds fly away without me—
feed me shadow scraps in the—
pale light of dawn we—
danced on grass so silky—
and we moved so slowly.