1998

1.

A victim of the insane. Myself, yeah,
but also this ruinous city of beasts.
I stood outside Grand Central
smoking a butt, staring in my lazy way
at the whirling traffic,
streaming crowds,
shiny demons;
the icy trickle in my gut
not of pilfered Stoli (yet), but of utter dearth.
Dead humans. In me, in them. Same.
Nothing good grows
in concrete, nothing pure is born
in stillness. Far away
and gone then rode
the last cries from my lightning glissando,
chased down from Eastern mountains
and beaten into slave songs.
Shattered guitars
mulled into corn cakes
for the prisoner, dumped penitent
from his hospital bed.

A broken shell
cracked now and forever,
cradled in a barman's
trembling
hands.

2.

Sucked down to sleep you go,
pickled,
sprawled
and battered on a peagreen
divan (yes divan)
handed down from some clan
of homoerotic madmen and striving
batshit artists,
a cursed couch and wrinkled,
rancid with sweat,
your sweat,
the tepid issuance of your blanched
midnight hours,

too few. Sweltering drops
of crude, look, it's
you streaking the curving
caked up back of sodden sleep.

Scholiosis, you drink
too much, is what
a friend once told me; your head's on fire,
is what the shrink said; and it was (and is)

My Strat is gray, no longer shiny;
her cherry lights is all but gone. Now she
just a subway minstrel, picked
up, beat down
and left for dead on the L train, nostrils
slashed, an ordinary slattern. Oh,

I am Midnight Dragon seed,
quite a tall boy, but with ashen feet.
Falling hard is sweet
and easy

your head don't feel it
when your heart gets
so wasted, lost and found
and lost

again.

go home