Silent Era

A black limousine crawls in
to the parking lot behind the store,
its wheels crackling on hot asphalt.
Acacia bushes rustle softly
as housewives push their purchases
up to the backs of vans,
children pulling at their hands.
A security guard watches the limo
as it cruises through the lot
and is reminded of a snake.
His hand moves slowly to his holster.
The sun beats down in waves,
somewhere there is a radio
with lap steel and ukeleles.
A dog writhes inside a hot car.
The limo stops at the curb,
a man pours out the rear door
made of oil, shoes slick black,
dark suit rippling as he strides
between the rows of parked cars.
The sun reflected in obsidian shades
seems like fire pouring from his head,
all the security guard sees is
a sharp suit and some dark stars.
He slides down the wall unconscious.
The suit bears down on a blue corvette
in which a girl is applying lipstick.
In the air, murder is palpable.
There is a high pitched ringing sound
as the suit pulls a silver revolver
with a long barrel from his belt.
The hammer goes back, the cylinder
turns with the motion of a clock.
He lifts his arm―
                          there is a crashing noise
as the laugh track cuts in and out
and the image flickers in slow motion.
The scene is plunged into darkness,
the actors scream in their confusion
soundlessly, through roaring static.
There is an explosion―
                                       and takes her hand
as she steps out of the car in a blue dress.
They dance beneath the streetlight,
her hand on his chest, his at her waist,
as the heavens are seared with nuclear fire,
and a cacophony of saxophones and trumpets
pours from the falling buildings around them.
He holds her hand as she removes his glasses
and leans in for a kiss―

The Late Showing

In a dark movie theatre:
"I dreamt I was a dancer,
and the dream stayed with me,
prevented me from working
finally resulting in depression,
and my ultimate dismissal.
I turned to drink, and drank
in the lowest places pissing
the sum of my earnings away,
gambled away my car.
I met bums, disgusting winos
that told me of their dreams
in which they were dancers,
the most incredible dancers
the world had ever seen.
How the dream had come
to each of them in turn,
how they lived in the gutter
as brothers―"
                           at this moment
a monster made of knives and forks
tore through the silver screen
spilling razors and decapitating
most of the first and second rows.
It expanded to a colossal size,
filling the room with grating steel.
The musicians in the pit
tried to crawl into their instruments,
which were shredded instantly.
Several grossly fat women
began to eat their own legs,
but were pierced and burst.
A child with braces was snagged
and lifted from his seat
into the mass of whirling metal.
Those running to the exits
were blinded by a mist of blood
and stumbling, were devoured.
One man in the back row,
driven insane by the incidental music
of the massacre, drew a pistol,
aimed it at his temple,
bellowed "Halleluja!" and fired.
Only one escaped the carnage,
the rising flames, the blue stink
of molten metal, boiling blood.
Stumbling from the scene,
he felt a spotlight on his back
and began to dance.

For Dennis Hopper

The goon at the rumble
with a switchblade knife,
or laid out under fireworks
with starspangled crazy eyes
leering into a microphone
on the highway at night
in a steel black Cadillac,
or bursting through the mirror,
in dreams he walks with you.
He will haunt American cinemas,
bug eyed, gritting his teeth
as the house lights go down.

Where is he now? In some
candyland, huffing cocaine
from a sherbert straw,
or stumbling into an audience —
lights, camera, Dennis Hopper
this is not your life.
And he looks confused, as if
the trappings of the old world
ought to live on in the new.
He sips tonic water, growing strange
as he answers all the questions,
the audience become uneasy,
he now sees the Totenkopf
coming down out of the lights.
As in a dream the scene shifts —

the show continues, but he is old
and doesn't recognise his body.
He is drunk, lying in the street,
realises he can reach and touch
every one of the stars.
He is still being interviewed,
and to every question he replies
"Hollywood's mad dogs are dying"
and laughs a barking laugh.
The applause is overwhelming
as he lurches from the floor
into the air, clutching a bottle of spirit.
Curtain.

In Heat

In the park on the first day of summer
a woman is stalking with a limp
in a cardigan, her glasses singeing her face
past dogs fighting and fucking
and pissing gaily in the shade
where students are dreaming with red eyes
and red skin, sinking into their wine glasses
or sinking into the ground.
The dogs bark and leap like lumps
of charcoal into the echo,
hissing of the barbecues
like armies of smoky tambourines
and the dogs are burning,
tattooed men are chewing at their legs,
the housewives yip and skitter
into bunches of daisies.
A hay fevered child rolls sneezing
through a dream of rape seed fields,
in sun-stroke, in sunburnt mercy,
as the men are baring their chests,
as the women are itching at their breasts,
as the dogs are loving endlessly
their scruffy, blunted bitches.
Old women shine like raisins under the trees,
glinting eyes like diamonds, watching the kids
with hunger of marrow and black thoughts,
thoughts of age and hunger, hidden in woodsmoke,
their hands moving like a spell.

As the children wake among the flowers
the park is tumbling in a furnace dream
of sizzling meat and broken guitars,
and their parents are beetroot naked
barking at the sun.

Vessel

In the 21st century
the world has become an engine.
Miles underground, the great dynamo
rages in the act of dreaming,
pouring out a violent music
through the caverns of the earth,
its energy doubling and doubling,
lost at the surface in a craze;
the lights of every city being born,
every ancient empire failing.

They are sparks of the great wheel,
a glinting in the eye of this
diver through an ebbing galaxy.
We are conduits, cells frying
in a bath of blue electric,
seeing each other's spasms and splits
in music, as it uses us
within its brief communications,
expressions of parts of thoughts.

We hear them, sometimes dreaming
at the fringes of our world,
asleep beneath the cliffs as waves
rattle over from the further shore,
we are carried back on this electron
into a history of atoms,
the biology of ancestral stars.

Last Song at Night

With your millions pounding grain
your orphan towns and citadels
and pyrotechnic animals
in the electric alley of Gods

With the smoky chapels
stacked sadly in your valleys
the ground that stumbles
finally to the sea

With the mourning songs I hear
over your first born rivers
in the ancient night coming
the faces of your ghosts

With our tired, tired hands,
you are the father we can never hold,
only push our sunburnt faces
into the cool, dark earth

With your oceans we know like death
and the tiny, dry acne
on which we live, by candlelight,
glad of idols and maize

With your feasting clowns
loving lonely in the same evening
we have lived in all our lives
like children of other children

With your music that moves us
in tears, dancing, fire
at the tips of every limb,
as we are your children too

I can't help falling in love with you

Nocturne

The trees, and their sea green leaves
are caught in golden light
as the sun goes gulping like a carp
through jet streams and glass

to bury its face in a bed of pebbles.
The trees, smell like being young,
mint & algae, dead frog of bruises
that told tales among the plums

that like a lush drank up their puddle
in a dream of the garden of youth.
The trees, that tonight crane their necks
through the window, over the cradle,

singing to the newborn a grey song
that it will dribble on, softly nightfall
as the planet burps and rolls over.
The trees, go back to sleep, shh

that are holding up a star pricked canopy
as dinosaurs come plodding, wise and sad
down the silent avenues, beneath
the scabby arms of our loving forest.

The trees, you are peaceful now
that glower in a galaxy of towns
crying about the past, blind with grief
and your dinosaurs are forever real now,

stalking hugely into the deep black river.
The trees, on a long blind pilgimage
go sleepily back down messy lanes
dressing themselves in hay and flowers,

napping in the land of donkeys
with their heads buried in their roots.
The trees cat call you at dawn,
you are lost under white sheets

waking into a dalmation world.
The blackbirds are bursting from the pie
as the trees rip livid from the earth
and thunder as a choir into the atmosphere.

As you rise in smoke and sweat and robes
the trees are bickering in the clouds.