ANYTHING
They rolled in on bicycles, jeeps,
Tanks,
Anything with wheels
.
Besieging Leningrad with bombardments.
Ratmeat was a delicacy.
Teeth loosened.
Children began to disappear.
Young brawlers were no longer a problem.
No booze not even cigarette butts.
They churned down the earth with gobbling treads.
Literati babbled of the satanic mills.
Misreading became the norm.
Bare light bulbs shivered
Behind painted blinds
In privileged bunkers
EMAIL FROM AFGHANISTAN
Pro Patria Mori
Our golden god-the laser daybreak-
Creeps blinding through the Afghan range.
Bleached Orion fades with night.
Needle spires, granite facets,
Dazzling rock minarets-stark and flayed.
A spider work of remains
From eons worth of wind and rain.
Eyes socket deep in faces
Gaunt as cancered skulls,
The convoy’s skeleton crew of mechanics
Breaks camp with this breaking Afghan day.
Our transports grind and stutter
In the riverless canyon
Like drunk and disconcerted ants
Thrashing in the nectar of a pitcher plant.
Every hollow in the sheer cave speckled wall
An ear to note our whir and clatter echo
Or a thousand half imagined eyes
Of five hundred enemies
This canyon-mouth t centuries of conquerors.
This canyon-devoured numberless travelers, thieves, and traces.
This canyon-sucks like marrow from a chicken bone
Hope from helmet heavy faces.
A splintered skull grins at my feet.
Once someone’s goat, some farmer’s meat.
A grey sign in an ocean of grey portents.
How wisely tedious and vital tasks
Divert and keep us focused:
Rifle: check. Com: check. Position: check.
Time: check. Ass: check.
Routines we run who ride upon the wheels
Blinding our eyes lest we see ourselves
Beneath an old man’s boot heels.
Wheels disintegrating underneath the empty Afghan sky.
Three broken axles
Two wheezing engines
One chinless captain in command
A rearguard hothouse martinet
Twitching like a mustache over a martini glass.
Who‘d he piss off?
Straighten up, sergeant!
Try looking like a soldier.
Never having been one.
Thrown from an air conditioned conference room
Into this mission’s particular piece of hell
Asshole’d march us into suicide
As long as it was by the book.
A crack: a whiz.
A puff of dust not fifteen yards away
An orgasm of panic
Squeezing fingers empty rifle magazines
The rattle of three hundred shell casings
Tickle the parched dirt.
Dust knee deep everywhere.
Bullets to nowhere.
Reload.
Silence.
Results beneath the moonscape’s noonday sun:
One chinless captain, twitching
In fresh bowels and urine:
His blood an embryonic seep
The Sergeant lights a cigarette.
Goddam. Looks like friendly fire dropped him.
Bag him up, Corporal.
The sun, riding over the cathedral range
Bores down like a titan’s
Telescopic crosshairs.
BLACK IS THE COLOR
They gave me a rifle
Showed me my gun
Told me one’s for killing
And the other’s just for fun.
Dress warm, it’s cold down there.
Now black is the color my true love wears.
I’d get my paycheck
Maybe once a week.
Once a week I’d get so drunk
I could not speak.
Deep six this world of cares.
Now black is the color my true love wears.
My ladies kept me
Going through the night.
Morning came, I came alive
In broad daylight.
Sweet kisses and perfumed hair.
Now black is the color my true love wears.
The face of death
Looked a lot like mine
Grinning like a villain
Pouring poisoned wind.
Guess now I’ll never know what’s fair.
Now black is the color my true love wears.
JOLLY HORSEMEN
The jolly horsemen with iron hooves
Clap their bony hands approval
The children of ignorance learn to die
And the land is crawling with fat flies
A world so rich in poverty
Must fill them with security
Jolly horsemen ride on by
Cast away those empty eyes
Hoof-beats clatter on earth and stone
Jolly horsemen, get you gone
Get you gone, jolly horsemen.
I see their fleshless faces grin
To watch a seedling plague begin
On human soil. It roots and grows
To bloom a motley riot rose.
No one truly is well born,
And a lucky man would be a thorn
So, jolly horsemen ride on by
Cast away those empty eyes.
Hoof-beats clatter on earth and stone.
Jolly horsemen get you gone.
Get you gone, jolly horsemen.
In eerie shine of borrowed light
Look at them crouching in the cold moonlight.
They wave their colorless flags unfurled
To wrap in shadow a jewel world.
The victory would be in vain:
In darkness you disappear again.
Jolly horsemen ride on by.
Cast away those empty eyes.
Hoof-beats clatter on earth and stone
Jolly horsemen get you gone
You wake up in the morning
Right away something starts to bring you down.
The dreams you’re having lately
Make you want to move underground.
Feeling very bored feeling restless to the core-
Looking for something-looking.
Mannequins in satin walk the lonely sidewalk,
Whispering at windows.
Shops are all deserted.
Sleazy bars are closing.
The emptiness just grows.
Someone plays a chessboard. Call the pieces people.
A sacrifice is made.
Power to the clever. Call the clever vicous.
They have come to stay.
Feeling very bored feeling restless to the core-
Looking for something-looking.
Mannequins in satin walk the lonely sidewalk,
Whispering at windows.
Shops are all deserted.
Sleazy bars are closing.
The emptiness just grows.
SILENT COUNTRY
When the airplanes have come and gone
After the violent go to sleep
When the neon gives up the dawn
After the people act like sheep.
It is a silent country,
And it is nothing less.
It is a silent country,
And it is in the past.
When the strip mines give up the fields
After computers learn to speak.
When the forests turn to matchbooks,
After a bullet’s obsolete.
It is a silent country,
And it is nothing less.
It is a silent country,
And it is in the past.
When the babies wake up with smiles,
After the clouds have flown away.
When the guns are beaten back to plows,
What will the poets have to say?
It is a silent country,
And it is nothing less.
It is a silent country,
And it is in the past.
It is a silent country,
And it is like a dream.
It is a silent country,
Now it’s just history.
Just when it seems like life is unsatisfactory
Just when it feels like working in a factory
Glowing curves to ease my aching eyes
I'm rapt before I even realize
People of smoke, women of dreams
Caress us
My desires draw me to the hoax
Too preoccupied to see the joke
You are only figures on a screen
The lonely fear to find out what it means
People of smoke, women of dreams
Caress us.
Promises grow through the speakers
Beckoning hands to draw us nearer
Beautiful women thirty years old
Looking so flawless Looking so cold
Beautiful smoke
Oh my love we won’t forget your face
Testimony to a surgeon’s grace
You pay with soul to enter the machine
And now you are at one with circuitry
People of smoke, women of dreams
Caress us
Promises growl through the speakers
Beckoning hands to draw us nearer
Beautiful women thirty years old
Looking so flawless Looking so cold
Beautiful smoke
You say yours. I say mine.
The things we have are nothing to time
An image and a speck of dust
Is all that it will make of us
I've looked in my mirror and seen an empty place.
Oh, my soul is tumbling
It’s one long fall from grace
We’ve been rich and we’ve been poor
Which is which I’m never sure
An age of babble can’t explain
A slave that loves a golden chain
I’ve seen my existence
Squandered before my face
Oh, my soul is tumbling
It’s one long fall from grace
Was there an age of silver
Before I could believe?
Did I have to tear up the canvas
Just to learn how to weave?
Nights are long
You are gone
Lonely throngs
Walk right on
A soft bitter taste
Like rust
Night and day
Time away
Foreign lands
Ancient hands
A soft bitter taste
Like rust
Paradise falling in the back of my mind
Paradise falling is all I can find
Paradise peaceful
So far away
Paradise dying
What can I say?
Searching on
Walking long
Searching on
Something’s wrong
My best friend Larry slaps me in the back
Calls me a genius getting in his Cadillac
Check out my girlfriend, all dressed to thrill
Says that she believes, leaving me with the bill
I play the fool jingling bells for King Lear
With nothing to console me but my bucket of beer
You’re gonna be a star
A star starving
The dude from the radio station unknown
Says I’m gonna make it while he’s getting stoned
I break out some blow and we snort away
I pray that cancer takes a holiday
The agony etching the words in stone
Honey when you die you just die alone
You’re gonna be a star
A star starving
The wish dream Lotto goes on and on
Birds of this feather can make weeping stones
ANTS
Waking, drinking, normal thinking.
Weary eyes are bloodshot blinking.
Always seeing withered skies.
Each morning spit a thousand lies.
Greed arrives entangling
Needs, desire, and regrets.
Watchers line the streets and bet
On tricks performed without a net.
Perfume smells of burning flesh:
Not a drop of tenderness
Ants Ants
Crawl and dance
Cannibals that want romance
Feeling unloved but loving that
Ants ants
Enjoy the dance
Cannibals that want romance
Feeling unloved, but loving that.
Paper mills eating our forests for lunch,
Printing waste paper from a wrong key punch.
Think of what it‘s doing to you and me:
Names and numbers on viewing screen.
Input position where you slot the card:
Life without the plastic is fucking hard.
But with the right numbers you can buy a smile
Or take a vacation on a Fascist Isle.
The daily paper’s like a fatal disease.
The pictures are a pocket change catastrophe.
The details change, but everybody knows
It has to happen like tumors grow.
Living in a luxury fantasy
You exactly what you want to see
Sitting in the comfort of reclining chairs
The big ones bang, and nobody cares.
A long time ago someone beautiful said
Love your brother
Don’t fuck with his head
Gotta give with your belly
Give till it hurts
And don’t act sacred your holy words
We can’t go on in this century
Without a revival of humanity
Sure we got science and philosophy
In self-destruction it‘s a Ph.D.!
A PASSABLE PERFORMANCE BETWEEN EX-LOVERS
It had been about twenty years
So the approach was tentative
And became reckless
Only as the memories
Collided with the present
She has grown strident looking
He thought next morning
Slipping into work clothes.
The dawn light ash grey.
No alba, more albatross
These rags
They stick and cling
I wore them once
With the brash arrogance
Only ignorance, arrogance, and youth
Can afford.
Now I melt into them
Did the buckle
Drag my navel floorward?
What did she think?
No. I certainly was not
What I once was to her
Nor myself.
Things happen
Enormous boring tragic things.
Remorseless birth, copulation, and death.
The memories attack
Like shock troops in pincer movements.
You are useless,
Completely useless.
Nothing that I had in mind at all.
Was it a failure to follow directions?
Or a failure to find direction at all.?
And always my distinct distaste for detail.
Gravity-
Deaf to all pleas-
Bends me out of shape.
Time and gravity.
These rags
That hang on me like nooses,
I wear them for my daily Oscar
I thank you all
It could not have happened
Without a society of assistants:
Agonized, self-absorbed, task-driven,
One and all of us.
So difficult to predict.
She sleeps so peacefully
Her fingers by her snatch
Her secret place
So difficult to predict
Calculate as one can
On my return
I doubt she will be there
On my return
Perhaps I‘ll find a marble statue.
Returning, perhaps
I doubt
She will be there.
On my return
I know
This she will no longer be.
Calculate as one can
One thing palls all understanding
Twenty years without her
Was twenty years of emptiness.
Calculate as one can
One faith defies all hope
All logic
Another twenty years like that
Though thinkable
Would be unbearable.
THE GIRL IS A COMFORT
You passed me on the street aloof and lyrical
It got me so aroused I was hysterical
With a click of your heels you swish through the lobby
Designed for impressing
The spectacle conceals so well
How you got it all: undressing.
The girl is a comfort
When you’re soaked in the rain
The girl is a comfort
When you’re lost in your pain
The girl is a comfort
When you’re out on the street
The girl is a comfort
Tender and sweet.
Oh, yeah?
Hell, yeah!
You got me drunk and took me to an apartment
Said I was an artist who’d get his allotment
Candlelight dancing in the pearls
You got from your United Nations man.
You said we make the peace in our time
With every piece that we can.
The girl is a comfort
When you’re soaked in the rain
The girl is a comfort
When you’re lost in your pain
The girl is a comfort
When you’re out on the street
The girl is a comfort
Tender and sweet.
Oh, yeah?
Hell, yeah!
You teach the world’s your oyster as swallow
It leaves a slimy trail so easy to follow.
But driving in that customized Porsche
Helps reduce the feelings of nausea.
The girl is a comfort
When you’re soaked in the rain
The girl is a comfort
When you’re lost in your pain
The girl is a comfort
When you’re out on the street
The girl is a comfort
Tender and sweet.
Oh, yeah?
Hell, yeah!
HELL'S PERILOUS TOPICS THAT NEVER PERISH
Yet once more you-
Spirits, muses, fates?
There's singing at your door.
But the berries are growing cruder
And a dry wind blasts the moor.
This accelerating world would lose
Its own ears for singing to escape the harrowing
Of her agony. The dark and despoliate place.
Manicured feet treadmill tread
A mouse like routine pace.
Now there is less to the movie than meets the eye.
Desire is contorted and concatenated
In the cyclopean travesty of the glass lens:
Blood sport, greed, deception, and radiating teeth.
The new beast:
The tyranny of the Famed.
There are no shepherds without flock or mead.
You can lead the sheep to concrete,
But they cannot feed.
I hear Cassandra
Gag to see how truth drowns in a mob,
Decades' labors all betrayed.
A moment's scorn; the gates are raised;
All is burning down.
Now all the hearts that sought to strut the floodlit stage
Find home inside a vulture`s mouth.
Their final encore: Gobbets dancing on a tongue
To charm an audience of cells.
BULLSHIT, SIR
Old man Hobbes
On West 100th
Never got the pension check
To pay his rent
Now they’re carting off his crutches
And his medals too:
He used to be a hero
Back in ‘42
There’s a paint factory
Right across my street
That spews an odor
Thicker than rotting meat
Look at the kids in front
Playing stickball
The experts say
There’s nothing wrong at all.
What the hell’s hopping up
Under my hat?
You’s have to be crazy
To like it like that
The print shops keep pumping out
Quicksilver words
It ain’t got the odor,
But it’s bullshit, sir.
Who would be king of a fishless sea?
the waves’ eyes winking at eternity.
I get up to my radio
It’s a false alarm
That blares that maybe
We ain’t done no harm.
I had a dream of an unborn sun
Where tears of fire
Rained on everyone.
Maybe I’m crazy
Or maybe I’m mad
But are these the good times
That we think we have?
SLIVER OF THE PIE
Now that you got what you want
Hot in the palm of your hand
It looks like you’ve jumped in the wind
Blown like a grain of sand
Climbed up a bloody ladder
And ate to the heart of the matter
Now that you’re showered in smiles
You pick the grins that you need
Fanning the flames of desire
Are tongues that are flapping with greed
Charming your way past the faces
You have no home only places
How can we be satisfied
Feeding on that lonely slice
Sliver of the golden pie
Lonely is the day you die
With some sliver of the pie
Later you’ll wonder what happened
The fantasies shatter like glass
All of your friends will be sickles
Mowing you down like the grass.
Climbed up a bloody ladder
And ate to the heart of the matter.
Constant parties all the time
Everyone you know looks fine
Everything you say or do
Entertains your point of view.
Conversations over drinks
Someone waves and someone winks
Riding high atop your game
You know just where to stake a claim.
Some people want to party
Till the end of time
And sometimes I wonder why
They showed up at mine.
Living in your promised land
Eat that manna soft and bland
Count yourself among the blessed
You’re a vision of the best.
TIME TO GET AWAY
A Klieg light room loud speakers blare
Words of peace are spoken
And every word drips like a prayer
That’s nothing but a promise to be broken
Are the eyes as empty as the lies they do not mean?
Looks like it’s time to get away
Cause everything they’re saying
Says there’s nothing to what they’re saying.
Looks like it’s time to get away
Cause everything they’re saying
Says nothing to you or me.
A prune faced liar on the TV screen
Says that everything is all right
Meanwhile the boy toy solders
Join the armies of the night.
What kind of cold desire
Casts young bodies into a fire?
A gaping hole in the weeping sky
Bleeds high above our ceiling
No one knows the how or why
But you can’t deny you feel it.
Living as the lie commands
We tie ourselves with ropes of sand.
WHAT YOU'RE DOING WITH ME
He keeps you in Cadillacs
You feed on haute cuisine
And he knows some dirty secrets
To keep your business clean
While you're living in side a mansion
Got the maids and the servants too
The walls are one way mirrors
Reflecting me and you
Cause there's just one thing that he don't see
And that's what you're doing
That's what you're doing with me
A dozen long stemmed roses
Greet you at every dawn
Hand cut by the gardener
Who trims your emerald lawn
While you flutter like a nightingale
In the jewels of your rage
Lips as hard as porcelain
Smile at the day's front page
He's got lots of private eyes
Watching our every move
Snapshots pizza pieces of a puzzle
What's it gonna prove?
My heart is as heavy as a rock inside my chest
In a town of stone where a lie is blessed
I'm reaching for something that’s always a step away
And love is something that somebody else will say
There’s nothing good or real for me tonight
I think of you, what did I do right?
Now all that’s living’s dying in my sight
But an empty world is broken windows.
And birds in flight.
The night is sweet, and there’s not a cloud.
Just the kind of night that would bring us out
I'm walking in circles inside an empty room,
And laughter echoes in love’s tomb.
There’s nothing good or real for me tonight
I think of you, what did I do right?
Now all that’s living’s dying in my sight
But an empty world is
And birds in flight.
There’s a sound like a cricket in a box.
The melody winds through the locks.
It’s a strange and certain uncertain song:
The road that it travels is so long.
There’s nothing good or real for me tonight
I think of you, what did I do right?
Now all that’s living’s dying in my sight
But an empty world is broken windows.
And birds in flight.
A SONG FOR MY FIRST LOVE
(FOR C.C)
WE'VE ALL HEARD HOW IGNORANCE IS BLISS
BLISS IS SOMETHING THAT I SORELY MISS
THE DAY I HEARD ABOUT YOUR SUICIDE
A DAY I TAUGHT MY FEELINGS HOW TO HIDE
THERE'S ONE THING I WILL NEVER DRESS IN LACE
THE BODY THAT YOU WORE BENEATH YOUR FACE
THE BODY THAT I NEVER GOT TO HOLD
THAT BODY IN THE COFFIN IN THE HOLE
THEY TOLD ME HE'D BEEN RAPING YOU TOO LATE
FOR ME TO LIFT A HAND AGAINST YOUR FATE
A PIPE THE CELLAR AND A LAUNDRY ROPE
SUCH SIMPLE THINGS ANNIHILATED HOPE
FLOWERS AT A FUNERAL ARE SWEET
CUT DOWN IN THEIR PRIME IN SUMMER'S HEAT
THEIR PERFUME WITH THE RISING FRANKINCENSE
HOLDS THE RISING RAGE BEHIND A FENCE
HERE IS SOMETHING YOU WILL NEVER KNOW:
THAT PARK WHERE WE BUILT CASTLES IN THE SNOW
THE ONE RIGHT BY THE CENTRAL RAILROAD TRACKS
THE ONE WE USED TO GO TO RELAX?
THAT'S THE PLACE WE TOOK HIM HALLOWEEN
THE VERY TIME WHEN TREES HAVE DROPPED THEIR GREEN
WE GOT HIM DRUNK AND TIED HIM TO THE TRACKS
THE PLACE THEY CURVE WHERE BRAKEMEN CAN'T RELAX
WE LET HIM SCREAM AND BEG US FOR HIS WIFE
SAID WE WERE ONLY KIDS AND THAT WAS LIFE
BEGGED IF WE WOULD JUST GIVE HIM THE CHANCE
HE'D NEVER CHAPERONE ANOTHER DANCE
THE NEXT DAY THERE WERE QUESTIONS ALL AROUND
THE PAPER SAID THE HEAD WAS NEVER FOUND
THE COPS SAID IT LOOKED LIKE A SUICIDE
THE RAILROAD BUILT A FENCE AND PAID HIS BRIDE
I STOPPED BY OUR OLD TOWN JUST YESTERDAY
I HAD TO PAY A VISIT TO YOUR GRAVE
TWENTY YEARS HAVE FALLEN IN BETWEEN
THE END OF EVERYTHING THAT'S NEVER BEEN
THE WIND WAS HARSH THE GRASS WAS OVERGROWN
WE HAD NO MONEY FOR A GOOD HEADSTONE
I SCRATCHED THE MOSS AWAY TO SEE YOUR NAME
AND PRAYED TO SEE AN ANGEL WHO NEVER CAME.
LOVE'S A WORD THAT WRITERS ALWAYS USE
WRITERS WHO CAN RARELY LOVE IN TRUTH
AND I WONDER WHAT HAD LOVE TO DO
WITH WHAT WE HAD FULL BLOSSOM IN OUR YOUTH.
Ecstasy-when love comes together
Now the agony-watch it fall apart
Agony can’t crush to stone
The soul that drives your heart
That knows that every breath is a chance we take
From the cradle to the grave
Every moment makes and breaks us
Who can count the ways?
When you light your light
And burn to glass all your castles of darkness
Better light your light
Down the street with every beat of your heart
Let the bitter lips pray it’s all in vain
A torch is twice as bright when it defies the night
Light your light
In your eyes a thousand heavens
On your lips I see their gate
Mysteries are true forever
Love will break the hands of fate.
Hope is nothing but a tinsel prince
Until you’ve grappled down despair.
Love for us is eagles’ wings
I’ll see you in the air.
When we light our light
And burn to glass all our castles of darkness
Better light our light
Down the streets with every beat of your heart
Let the bitter lips pray it’s all in vain
A torch is twice as bright when it defies the night
Light a light
Rivers deep that flow together
Find each other in the sea
There’s a mansion in my heart
Built where you will always be
We walk hand in hand
By the dawn’s early light
The nightingale’s packed up
His tales for the night
The shoes of a fisherman
Pass the lurch of the drunk
Can anyone show me
These souls‘ lost and found?
God knows where we’re going
So don’t look at me
If we’re just a kiss between the sky and the sea
As we enter the ocean they’ll be back on the shore
Waving the stumps of their dreams
And nothing more
These gleaming towers
We throw blind at the sky
Drive us to concrete
By the whites of our eyes
The lips of the air
Bleed sirens of sound
We’ll slip away
Like angels unbound
God knows where we’re going
So don’t look at me
If we’re just a kiss between the sky and the sea
As we enter the ocean they’ll be back on the shore
Waving the stumps of their dreams
And nothing more
Heaven’s a place
That must be anyone’s
Everyone’s birthright
By violence or grace
They knock on the doors
And make lots of calls
But who can conceive
Of heaven with walls?
God knows where we’re going
So don’t look at me
If we’re just a kiss between the sky and the sea
As we enter the ocean they’ll be back on the shore
Waving the stumps of their dreams
And nothing more
I haven’t had time to be alone lately
To think about you and listen to the raindrops
To think about you and think about me
And how we made the time stop
The world we live in is a public place
Like a wishing will inside a market place
But how could a wish or a dream be true
If it had to be real without you?
What did I say? What did I mean?
The meaning was something somewhere in between.
What could I say?
What could I do?
But swallow my pride and tell you that I love you?
I look inside my soul and touch your hand
And now love’s lost acres turn into a promised land
You can bargain for gold, you can die for fame
It’s all just dice in a Monopoly game without you
Your hand reaches out to touch my lips
There’s a taste of ice on your fingertips
Looks like you’re packing for a long trip
Remember what we’ll have to forget.
Think of all the kisses that were salt and sweet
And whispered promises in naked heat.
Why make the memories turn bittersweet?
Remember.
It’s a sad lie that keeps us from feeling good
And why deny we did the things you shouldn’t be doing
They say you shouldn’t be doing they say they say
Love makes us do it anyway
Tnight is soft and the leaves are sweet
Love’s laid a banquet where we both can eat
Why stand staring at it white as a sheet?
Remember
Loading up the banks
Seemed to last for ever
Building guns and tanks
To crawl the world forever
We only eat the best
It shines on gleaming tables
Throw away the rest
We waste because we’re able
We’re raping the gutters with fat hands
Raping the oceans and lands
Like we’re the winners.
HOLE IN CONTROL
Red rivers of steel
Glow where the darkness has won.
They flow through the fields of the miners
Down to the sea of the gun
How many visions have to go unseen?
There’s a hole in control, not a soul
On your screen. It’s just a hole
That’s in control.
Blue lips t the dawn
Grin as a joke goes unsaid
Boots laced in haste this morning
Are stripped from the feet of the dead.
How many visions have to go unseen?
White bones on the beach
Dressed in tatters and rags
Live in the lessons they teach:
Death is a weaver of flags.
How many visions have to go unseen? How many?
There’s a hole in control, not a soul’s
On your screen. Nothing but a hole
Is in control.
There goes the human in the human being.
Another million dreams extinguished
Clock alarms their fire hose.
A million voices curse the sunrise.
Naked loathing finds its clothes.
Lives we lend without our interest
Are in service of until.
The final count will cheat you.
You knew you’d know it will.
LOVE MAKES LIARS OF US ALL
Vampire dawn, pale creeping light
Draining the blood from the corpse of the night.
I slip on my clothes, my skin starts to crawl:
Love makes liars of us all.
Ambushed by sunrise, she glows in the gold.
The time that we stopped wants the hours we stole.
Hollow excuses, a telephone call:
Love makes liars of us all.
Lips trade in kisses for transparent tales.
Tongues hiss deceptions to cover the trail.
Hearts turn to hammers and nail down the lies.
Beauty is nothing but ugly disguised.
She parks the Porsche next to the Benz.
Talks about talking all night with her friends.
He nods his silence and stares at the wall:
Love makes liars of us all.
He calls at five, says the day has been hell.
The boss is a horror that words cannot tell.
A woman beside him laughs in the hall:
Love makes liars of us all.
Sweet is this suite in the hot sheets hotel.
I watch the TV and wait for the bell.
My heart is a soldier condemned at the wall:
Love makes liars of us all.
AMBITION LEADS THE BLIND
I stumble through your front door
Almost bump into the first to leave
You’re all dressed up to almost half-past naked
Got your golden boy accessory
Bare the grin you learned from miles of mirrors
And paparazzi popping shots
I raise a smile like the tattered flag
From somewhere hope’s tied up in knots.
You caught me on the terrace
Feeling smaller than what passes for talk.
Love’s some beggar floors below
Where insects seem to walk.
What’s a bone of attempted kindness
To the dog days of summers past?
Isn‘t love like this ice cube
Melting in your cocktail glass?
But can someone tell me
How am I supposed to teach my heart how to lie?
Lie still each time you walk by?
With every beat it marks another step
We take along a trail that only leaves
Ourselves behind,
Where love can’t fail to shine in vain.
But then there’s ambition.
You flutter off to work the room,
The butterfly we’ll both call free.
Charm that new director
Your agent says you have to see.
We part with party parting lines,
Gonna shoot again for lunch in May.
If God’s a tinsel garbage can,
We’ll both be saints someday.
IF
So if I sleep with you,
And wake before you do.
Sweet dreams behind your face
Outside of time and place
Up through the daylight’s gold embrace
Where air and angels interlace
An ecstasy more than anything
That a lover ever dreamed before.
And when I’m kissing you
If I break before you do
Lips locked on empty air
Or lost inside your hair
A gangplank sailor’s fumbling kiss
Sealed in the ocean’s humbling mist
The salt, the foam and misty cliffs
Nothing less than an ecstasy
Better than anything
That a lover ever dreamed before.
Time’s the assassin that kills in pieces per day.
The hand on the chisel knocks the stone away.
Love is the artist
Who carves deep in the stone
To find the soul, the diamond, and the dazzling light
That was there all alone.
So if I marry you,
I hope I die before you do.
So when I see death gring
I can dislocate his chin
He’s going to need the room
To ram a lover’s lifetime in
Want to see him choke on the feast
Where strength and sweetness win
Want to see him gag on my soul
Until he vomits me right up to heaven’s door.
And I’ll be waiting for you baby.
Just like I’m waiting for you here right now
Outside this fancy Chelsea restaurant
And it’s getting cold outside
I feel the wind cutting into my kidneys
Like a knife.
See, I forgot my overcoat
I didn’t want to be late
Got my best suit on, though.
But you know how it is
Can’t afford more than one
And it’s a summer suit
On a cold spring night
The kind where lovers grab
An extra cover
But they know that summer’s coming
And soon their bodies will
Be wearing nothing but sweet summer sweat
The kind you got long after midnight.
All that separates us from the stars
Themselves except for the air we breath
On a tiny grain of a planet
Ninety odd million miles from a star
That at its brightest
Seems like a grey shadow
Next to the light we find in each other’s eyes.
Still I’m wondering
As a taxi’s honking by
If it could be possible
That the hot neon light across the street
Could be holding truth in its promise
That as advertised
If I just walk through the hammering traffic un-obliterated
I can come in, get warm, and truly get
The world’s finest cup of coffee
For only six dollars and sixty five cents?
FRUIT INSIDE THE SEED
I was born in a wave of nostalgia
Whatever happened to original sin?
The sign where they locked the gates of hell
Reads no hope worth abandoning.
I'm the ape in your concrete jungle
Where the bananas turned yesterday.
When the vets from the oo came to get me
I had already wasted away.
I'm the ghost in a pauper’s graveyard
That the banks already bought and sold.
Nameless bones buried in rags
Now worth their weight in gold.
Every soul is the soul inside you
Every life is what the soul has dreamed.
BALLAD OF THE SEEING EYE DOG
Overflow that doggy bowl, give me time, I’ll lick it clean
But here comes the collar round my throat, and a chain for company
Once more through the labyrinth, each step insults our soul,
Why must I, your seeing eye dog, lead us where you‘re told?
Today we need the subway, directions left and right
God knows I hate that stinking pit, thank god you have no sight.
Imagine legs like prison bars that rise from aching soles,
Tell me, why must I, your seeing eye dog, lead us where you‘re told?
We find the place called office, his master‘s voice is grave.
He asks, "Did the dog defy the orders that you gave?"
We missed two weeks appointments, sweet springtime took control.
Why should I, your seeing eye dog, lead us where you‘re told?
What‘s that keening whimper, like puppies locked out all night?
What‘s that mean? "Give us one more chance, I swear he‘ll get it right?"
His master said, "We must destroy the dogs We can‘t control."
No more will I, your seeing eye dog, lead us where you‘re told.
It‘s off to doggy heaven, the needle finds the vein.
No more collars round my throat. No leashes to constrain.
Just one life long riddle that dogs my canine soul:
Why did I, your seeing eye dog, lead us where you‘re told?
Yeah, well. No use crying over puked Alpo..
Pretty cute poodle they got shaved over there.
Wonder what she’s doing later.
Hey, is there a fire hydrant and a newspaper handy?
I have an awful overpowering need to use the facilities.
Hey, I can‘t get up! Somebody want to give me a hand here?
Wake up, guys! Hello!
If you don‘t take me out real soon it‘s gonna get mighty messy around here.
Oops. Oh hell. So much for death with dignity.
Somehow I don‘t care as much as I used to.
Guess it‘s somebody else‘s problem now.
Hope I left you with some nice memories.
OCEAN EYES
Now’s the time when ghosts gather round
It’s a bar at the stroke of midnight.
Dried up souls afraid they might drown
In oceans like your eyes tonight.
Ocean eyes, black pearls wait for me
To dive down as you swallow me whole.
All my doubts dissolve like salt in the sea,
Dancing goes my dolphin soul.
Starfish stranded past the shoreline
Wait in vain for tides that will not come
Souls seeking safety on the high ground
Ache, bake, suffocate in the midday sun.
Closing time, night calls it a day.
Our drinks stand warm and ignored.
Hand in hand we’ll both slip away
To oceans deeper than before.
I HEAR ANGELS
Golden ripples from the candle flame
Wash our bodies in love’s holy name
Why must envy call this lust and shame?
May the innocence they left behind
Catch up to remind them.
Naked as we are, we rise reborn.
Souls unbuttoned from the skins we’ve worn
Roses’ sweet aroma has no thorn.
Rifles in the distance
Horror feeds on horror for existence.
1939
I know a lot about material things
I save my faith for the banks.
The fingers on my hands are covered with rings
All of my waiters say thanks.
Every day when I open my door
Fraulein Luck comes by to knock
Tomorrow and Berlin are both mine
I’m looking fine
In 1939
My life report card is a vision of A’s
I like to do as I’m told
My new director just gave me a raise
I'll sink the money in gold.
I swear by the office lights
That keep my skyline bright.
There’s no happier man
Than I am tonight.
My secretary saves a sweet smile for me
Her lips define cherry tarts
She’s proud to be my private pleasure machine
I kiss those sweet lips apart.
THE BIGGER THE PICTURE
There’s a couple of cold fingers running up my neck
Like a desperate hand from a sinking wreck
They’re racing like dogs all around the park
But who smells the fires burning in the dark?
The bigger the picture
The more frightening the movie
The bigger the picture
It gets terrifying
Dawn’s lonely lunatic raves at the sky
I shuck him some change and walk dumbly by
But I face my boss like a lamb at the slaughter
I see my hands at his throat and his head under water
To see it all with all the pain
The beggar’s palm and the sick disdain
Of being one step above another human being
On a kicking order
Where we work our jobs like modern slaves
And know someday is gonna find us in an early grave.
MORE
Who’s that knocking on my front door?
I don‘t really wonder what the knocking‘s for.
More. Your wolf is hungry at the door
It seems like it was barely half an hour ago
I heard your silky whisper, whisper, baby slow,
But now it’s more, and you’re as hungry as before.
For all the hunger and all its lies,
More is all that’s left a heart and soul disguised.
Love is all, and it takes nothing more.
You know you heard it before,
Giving’s all we’re really good for.
My neighbors are talking about a car alarm;
My lips are sealed regarding your vocal charms,
And still it’s more. Don’t have to knock your knuckles raw.
Champagne and lobster in the restaurant
You said an artist couldn’t buy the kind of lies you want.
You know there’s more. Something you’ve chosen to ignore.
Paint me in colors of diplomacy
Your lips make my serpent tongue a go-between
You yearn for more, but feeling empty as before.
What‘s it like to crawl back to your marriage bed?
What’s it like to wish that he was me instead?
The cash on the bureau in the envelope
Flutters down like feathers from the wings of hope.
Sometimes I wish that I would burn the green
Sometimes I wish you never rented me.
HEAVEN
It’s the middle of the night.
Drinking bourbon at your place.
Heaven is a package
That takes up little space.
Black around the eyes.
Your lipstick sickly red.
Heaven is so hard to find,
Locked inside your head.
A luminous grin
A frigid laugh
Delicate skin:
Heaven. It must be heaven,
Fading into a glassy stare.
Heaven. It must be heaven.
Fading. Is it there?
An overcrowded sidewalk,
The faces feed your eyes.
Heaven is your hunger:
Eat some paradise.
Innocence is blessed
Meekness crawls your earth
Heaven was a weakness
The price is all it’s worth.
Is it all a movie?
The reels go round and round.
Heaven is your ending
That opens underground.
Heaven is your hunger.
Keep it well disguised.
A luminous grin
A frigid laugh
Delicate skin:
Heaven. It must be heaven,
Fading into a glassy stare.
Heaven. It must be heaven.
Fading. Is it there?
How‘s the padded coffin?
There‘s no need for clocks.
And heaven is the clicking
Of all your little locks.
THE WINNERS
Loading up the banks
Seemed to last forever.
Building guns and tanks
To crawl the world forever.
We only eat the best,
It shines on gleaming tables.
Throw away the rest,
We waste because we’re able.
We’re raping the gutters with fat hands,
Raping the oceans and lands
Like we’re the winners.
The earth’s womb opened wide before us.
What have we done?
Nature sings the butcher’s chorus
Victims run.
DANCIN’ IN THE RUINS
Tomorrow will be someone’s yesterday.
Everything we see just fades away.
There’s sky and sand where mountains used to be.
Time drops by seconds to eternity.
But does it matter that we turn to dust?
Turn and turn and turn we must.
I guess I’ll see you dancing in the ruins tonight.
There’s laughter where I used to see your tears.
Psychic smoke and mirrors, waste no fear.
There’s nothing pure or sacred in our time.
Tonight we spend together is no crime.
But does it matter that we turn to dust?
Turn and turn and turn we must.
I guess I’ll see you dancing in the ruins tonight.
Like marble statues all with gold inlaid
In castles built of silence let us pray.
The death head’s grinning down inside flesh
Lies trapped within a maze of tenderness.
But does it matter that we turn to dust?
Turn and turn and turn we must.
I guess I’ll see you dancing in the ruins tonight.
SEA OF DREAMS
Don’t punch a ticket for far away
Or seek a pirate’s treasure cave.
Any time or anyplace.
On a sea of dreams.
There’s a perfume in the air.
I turn around and find you there.
Anytime or anywhere.
On a sea of dreams.
On a sea where love is born of light and sky.
On a sea we sail together,
You and I.
On an endless field of grass
Timeless moments never pass.
There’s no such thing as slow or fast
On a sea of dreams.
HOT PLANET
Little signs of life today
No children play
The streets are bright, but quiet and deserted.
Beasts unburdened eat their hay.
No work today.
In fields of heat the wheat’s unyielding.
In a land of orange suns and yellow horizons
The daylight is dusty and red.
It looks like a red hot planet.
Outskirts tell no fairy tales,
Deserted trails
Of uniforms and rusting hardware.
No one knows the reasons why the sunlight’s crying
Sends parching tears to fall
On drying ears.
In a land of orange suns and yellow horizons
The daylight is dusty and red.
It looks like a red hot planet.
Still the people carry on, the garden gone,
Adapting, striving, redefining.
Somewhere underneath the stars
Scattered guitars
Are fingered by the wind.
In a land of orange suns and yellow horizons
The daylight is dusty and red.
It looks like a red hot planet.
SOME UNLUCKY ONES,
AWAKENING FROM THE GREATER ILLUSION OF A DREAM
ARE DISABUSED OF THEIR LESSER ILLUSIONS.
THEY WANDER LIKE ASTEROIDS
AMONG THEIR NOW ALIEN PEOPLE
WHO SEEM LIKE SAVAGES CLUTCHING IDOLS,
PRAYING TO A GOD OF GOLDEN SQUIRRELS.
CLARITY
There is no end in sight
To violence and illusion.
There is no end tonight
To combat and confusion.
It is not sanity
Devotion to political.
It just serves vanity
And economic vehicles.
In time some things we will never know
With clarity.
You are my clarity
Emotional and physical.
We can be the final key
To unlock a better world.
It’s hell or heaven here
I has been a world of fear.
Think how sunlight treats the air
Like perfume clouds can wear.
In time some things we will never know
With clarity.
NO REASONS
When old men sit and talk
Full of drink and disgrace,
Hunched over beer
And the weight of their rage
Tell me that the time
Was once a better place,
Their tongues flick at the flies of history
With no reason, no reasons at all.
When young men dream of fire
And the end of the world
Stalk the streets of wreckage
Their sneers artfully curled
High in hopes they will attract desire
They mate and they dance
In the driest of heat
With no reason No reasons at all
But the radio and the friends I know
All tell me that they live from day to day
Is it alibis? Is it compromise?
Or nothing but a bright disguise
While we look the other way?
A baby lies neglected
In a filthy room
The television’s just blaring out
Saturday cartoons
Mom and Dad in darkness
At the edge of noon
In the shadows time plants dragons
With no reason, no reasons at all.
PLASTIC HORROR
Twenty five years of destruction
Compressed into a vacuous stare
Twenty five years of catastrophe
Contract into the spikes of your hair.
How could we now?
What was the signal?
Who could decode a meaningless signal?
Plastic horror shows-
Performed in darkened theatre rows.
Celluloid strips
Freeze the forms of bleeding
Twenty five years of illusion
Summed up in the lies we speak
Twenty five years of confusion
We wreck the paths we seek
How could we now?
What was the signal?
Who could decode a meaningless signal?
Plastic horror shows-
Performed in darkened theatre rows.
Celluloid strips
Freeze the forms of bleeding
Millions of years of motion
Nobody seems to move
History is a butcher block
What does it prove?
How could we now?
What was the signal?
Who could decode a meaningless signal?
Plastic horror shows-
Performed in darkened theatre rows.
Celluloid strips
Freeze the forms of bleeding
THE QUALIFYING POINT OF POETRY AND PROPHECY IS THAT THEY NEVER FIGURE OUT THAT YOU WERE RIGHT UNTIL IT IS TOO LATE.
TIME WOUNDS
You say that he stabbed you
And turned the knife
Left you lost in some wreckage, honey,
Said, that‘s life.
You kept to yourself
And did not speak
But all your thoughts could do
Was leave you weak
You can’t protect your heart like a precious stone.
You can lock it up, but it’s useless alone.
The tides of emotion turn a burning wheel.
Time wounds, but love heals.
Our world fills with human pain
It’s no wonder
That you want to hide away
But a lonely room
Crowded with your mind
Will be the coldest place
In the world you’ll find
You can’t protect your heart like a precious stone.
You can lock it up, but it’s useless alone.
The tides of emotion turn a burning wheel.
Time wounds, but love heals.
DIVORCE IN A FAMILY OF MAN
A clown in a uniform clenches a fist
Says some innocents don’t exist
Black, white, or yellow
The blood flows red
And the stories are silent
On the fields of the dead.
But the sky is still blue
And love takes root right where it can
Still looks like a butcher block to me.
Divorce in a family
Divorce in the family of man.
A mob goes riot and something takes hold.
Whatever it is, it ain’t got no soul.
Crucified ambition’s insecurity
Now polish up the liar
For an empty screen.
But the sky is still blue
And love takes root right where it can
Still looks like a butcher block to me.
Divorce in a family
Divorce in the family of man.
Butter up the bullets for the sacred cows.
The order of the day is don’t ask how.
We’re killing each other, call it self-defense.
Now hate’s more common that good old common sense.
But the sky is still blue
And love takes root right where it can
Still looks like a butcher block to me.
Divorce in a family
Divorce in the family of man.
AN IDIOT GRINS
The cruelest month comes scratching in
Like some abandoned accordion
The officer in charge of fate
Complains the prison’s open late
There’s nothing left to do but smile
We take a backseat for a while.
As an idiot grins the endless song
It is not sad it is not long
An idiot grins the endless song
But who’s to say it’s right or wrong?
The battered buds of singing spring
As usual come whispering in
I’m just another child of grief
Come join me while we pray relief.
The silent seeds of yesterday
Still yearn to feel the breeze of May.
As an idiot grins the endless song
It is not sad it is not long
An idiot grins the endless song
But who’s to say it’s right or wrong?
The whores of industry sing rich and bright
Promise all of us a golden night
What in heaven will they know
Bathing in an afterglow?
The streets of Hell, I’m sure are laid
With bricks that baked in Eden’s shade.
As an idiot grins the endless song
It is not sad it is not long
An idiot grins the endless song
But who’s to say it’s right or wrong?
Yours, Mine, and Everything
I never was a man for sleeping
And I felt the promises I wasn't keeping
Never thought I'd ask for much
My heart forgot the ways to speak
Hearing the cars and the buses groan
People fighting over rooms of stone
Never thought I'd ask someone
To come and live as one with me
But it's a hard world and we're scarred girl
There's nothing we can do about that
But when we care, baby, we will share
Yours mine and everything
Want to show you what true love brings
Yours, mine and everything, baby
I never was a man for faking
And I always hated it when I felt mistaken
Because you are all I need
You don't have to act with me
I'm not here to use you blind
And I got no clever plans in the back of my mind
Baby I know you can be
Closer than I am to me
But it's a hard world and we're scarred girl
There's nothing we can do about that
But when we care, baby, we will share
Yours mine and everything
Want to show you what true love brings
Yours, mine and everything, baby
Dreaming (Colorless)
In the bar you hear a lot of talk
About the big lies and the plastic smiles
But in the back rooms of their minds
They want it all for just a little while
Reaching for the finest things
But the emotions are brand X
Like a carnival of broken dreams
And silver plated sex
You can blame it on the big TV
Or blame it on society
But then I look at you and me
Watching it all so vacantly
Just dreaming
Dreaming those dreams
Check out the preacher with his hand out
For the checks from the chosen few
I guess that Bible beggar’s bankbook
Must be full of holier than I owe you’s.
The perfume of his mob smells to me like Eau De Blood
While a mystic with no job
Sees his visions in the mud.
You can blame it on the big tv
Or blame it on society
But then I look at you and me
Watching it all so vacantly
Just dreaming
Dreaming those dreams
It’s the same with drugs for children
Go watch their mothers
For the act of birth
Now bright lights and surgical steel
Turns into the new wet nurse.
We advertise some progress
In the battle between pleasure and pain
Replace it with illusions and we’ll never feel again.
You can blame it on the big TV
Or blame it on society
But then I look at you and me
Watching it all so vacantly
Just dreaming
Dreaming those dreams
NEW MOON KISSES
Sunset’s like a slot machine in Vegas,
Can all the time we spent be ever saved?
I’m taking a twilight walk among the idols
To dig my heart a little grave
But then a new moon comes down and kisses me
Fresh from her cradle in the sky
A perfect new moon comes down and kisses me
Bathes me in the shadows
Of her light
The walls are coming in to crowd me now
Memories of you float through my mind.
I’d reach if I could touch you
But a distant mirror is all I find
The stars have fallen into my ashtray
Leaving grey, not silver, stains.
They seem to rain in acid whispers
To etch our hearts with pain
Lakes of Glass
Does it ever cross your mind
The kind of lie it is?
Day to day your mouth and an empty spoon?
Does it ever cross your mind
How the anguish makes you feel colorful?
How close will we walk with ruin?
Lakes of glass behind your eyes you follow
Lakes of glass lakes of glass
Things that might have happened
Rarely haunt you
What you see is all that you believe you get
It’s a constant battle for a bean count victory
That leaves your mind with nothing
You can count on to regret.
Lakes of glass behind your eyes you follow
Lakes of glass lakes of glass
Does it ever cross your mind
That this is unnecessary?
Day to day blowing gas into illusions?
Does it ever cross your mind
How you’d be ruined if you got all you wanted?
You’d have it all before you learned how you could use it.
HAVEN’T BEEN IN LOVE (FOR A LONG TIME)
The moon is calm tonight
I’d bare my soul in the silver light
Cause there’s a new emotion in my heart
Are we something that has ended,
Oo a perfect start?
The air is sweet to me
The night birds choir sings in harmony.
Sweet confusion overflows my heart.
Can we build a life together
When we’re worlds apart?
But I haven’t been in love for a long time
Still I’m thinking of you
And looking at the sky.
The night is quiet
And I haven’t been in love for a long time.
I can almost feel you next to me
When I close my eyes it’s you I see.
They tell me loneliness must learn to wait.
Aching just to run to you
But our hearts’ at stake.
Silent stars cannot say
The mystery deepens in a thousand ways.
Is it just a siren‘s song?
A bait to cast our hearts head long?
DIAMONDS IN AN HOURGLASS
When you try to count the grains
You pick up from the sand,
Each one full of moonlight
Gleaming in your hand
Rainbows dance and never take a stand
Like diamonds in an hourglass.
Tonight I see your eyes in mine
Like diamonds in an hourglass.
Each time I kiss you, I taste a precious wine.
Never knew a vintage
Could ever age so fine.
Diamonds in an hourglass
Once we’re gone
We’re gone so fast.
So fall with me cause fall we will
But we can fall together
And be together still.
SURFIN‘ IN THE SEWER
Squeal like pigs, going to the slaughter.
Rush like rats, into the water
We keep pretty and clean
Surfing in the sewer.
Subways bleed us every morning.
The earth is dying
And we’re yawning.
We keep vicious and lean
Surfing in the sewer.
Look down stream where they vomit and bleed Down in the sand by the poisoned water Mechanically free, alone in their trees Wasting and tearing the land that they toy with
STANDING THERE
HOW DID A SILVER LIGHT STEAL AWAY THE NIGHT?
HOW COULD MY HEART ESCAPE TO BEAT IN PLAIN SIGHT?
WHO CRIED NO WARNING NOT TO HOPE FOR YOU
OR PLAY THE FOOL AND STARE WHEN I SAW YOU
I SAW YOU STANDING THERE?
IT WAS AN INSIDE JOB DESIGNER JEWELS TO ROB
A MILK RUN SET UP BY THE GLITTER MOB
DIRTY CARLOS SAID SHE’S JUST A RAW RECRUIT
WITHOUT THE BRAINS TO STUFF HER UNDERWEAR
THAT’S YOUR ASSIGNMENT AND SHE’S JUST STANDING THERE
HE SAID THE MOMENT’S COOL SO GET HER BY THE POOL
I GOT MY FOUR BEST GIRLS PLAYING THE GUARDS FOR FOOLS
I GOT HALF A MILLION CASH FOR YOU
DO YOUR MAGIC IN THE MIDNIGHT AIR
SHE’S ALONE NOW, AND JUST STANDING THERE
A PRO’S ONE MASTER IS HIS MIND
FEELINGS RULE A WORLD YOU’VE LEFT BEHIND
A WORLD I SWORE I’D NEVER MISS
DID SHE STEAL IT BACK WITH JUST ONE KISS?
I SMELLED AN EASY MARK AND SNAKED IN LIKE A SHARK
GOT YOU OUTSIDE ARMS AROUND YOU IN THE DARK
MY FINGERS FOUND THE NEKLACE CLASP
I KISSED YOUR NECK AND STROKED YOUR HAIR
LIKE NEW FOUND LOVERS ONE SHADOW SANDING THERE
DIRTY CARLOS SMILED, SAID "THAT TOOK YOU AWHILE.
DID YOU HAVE FUN TAKING CANDY FROM A CHILD?"
WE TOASTED TILL THE EYE OF DAWN PROVED IN ITS SPOTLIGHT GLARE
THOSE WERE FIRST CLASS FAKES THAT YOU WORE STANDING THERE.
I see my waitress Dee
Make an awkward start
She smiles, I feel a knife
Slice through my heart
And then she asks where do you want to sit?
As if she doesn’t know.
I say the usual. By the window.
At a table for one under the moonlight
A table for one
A table for one I can almost see you there.
At a table for one
Which is the empty chair?
The bistro’s charm seems packed and gone
Is there a trace?
A distant smile is painted on my face.
I wonder what am I doing here
Breaking all the plans I made
I can go anywhere
To watch your memory fade
I drain my final glass of wine,
Pay up, and leave.
A ghost of love and all its joys achieved
I see a shooting star streak by
As quick as it is bright
I breath a silent prayer of thanks
To an angel in the night.
We cannot allow the occupation of our borders
By your sense of territory.
If you persist, we will give the orders
That are necessary.
Significant deterrent:
A cracking in the sky.
Significant deterrent:
Must millions die?
Recent dispatches indicate that unemployment
Has presented problems.
We propose a perfect liquidation
With a universal solvent.
Significant deterrent:
I’m melting in the heat.
Significant deterrent:
Shadows on the street.
We are basically peaceful men.
There are no butchers here.
Our movement will be an obligation
Our consciences are clear.
Significant deterrent.
Does it have to be this way?
Does it have to be today?
It’s a stainless night.
We coil together
Naked as snakes in the soft grass.
Breeze caresses flesh
Bathed with the musk of the moist earth,
Flesh caresses heartbeats,
Heartbeats surge blood over the flimsy dikes
Brains build against
Wonder and terror. .
Hands let
The zephyr shape their flutters
Fluid to the bone.
Hands endless at the fingertips
Mistaking your flesh for my own.
And then the shock of seeing separateness
But lingering wonder.
Love teaches our eyes their blindness.
You trace my ribs
Evanescing hieroglyphs
For the cavorting ghosts of the afterglow.
A breeze gasps and a branch snaps.
Across the lake, a bedroom window rumbles open.
A sudden vomit of urine yellow light
Zig zags gold from wave to wave
Atop the black muttering water.
A shout of baritone outrage,
A shriek of soprano disgust,
A thick clunk
And a shatter.
The short, malignant opera
Closes with a hushed chorus
Of indecipherable lyrics expressing
Unmistakable recrimination.
The obvious wrapped in an attempted enigma.
And so another of love’s silent feasts
Eats dessert from a clattering garbage can
In the alley of the ripeness of time.
The sky is ebony clear.
January’s vast crystalline heavens
Stopped by for a peek at us mid-August natives
In our indigenous balm of sweat, come
And pre-orgasmic oils.
The oils that never come in barrels
The oils that are all value, and no price.
Let me kiss your eyes the way you ask me to
Before you open your lips.
Feather tongue the back of your neck without your ever asking.
Lazy timeless kisses
Ever the explorer of the infinite pleasures
Crammed in the time tormented
Island of your flesh.
Look up a moment at the velvet spangled
Constellations.
Count the stars
In any cluster
And as you count there
Are always a few more than what you saw moments before.
I would be all that and more for you.
The stars that fill our eyes
Portend galaxies in our souls.
Sad as passion may seem in the remembrance
Let this memory battle the pitiless oblivion to come.
There’s Something about an empty auditorium.
At least that’s what I tell myself
The basketball hoops
And gaudy yellow cinderblocks
You can’t help yourself
Seduction by echoes
Stark hardwood reaps
A chorus of crickets
Two hundred unfolded folding chairs
Stand at attention in four trolleys
And await the drunken janitor
Fresh from an extended lunch
Annoyed he has to work overtime
I sat down to noodle on the immaculate
Antique Steinway.
No artist here. I suck.
Nobody laughed though.
Frailty
Popped up
Like an erection
At a wake.
Unacknowledged.
Lost somewhere beneath my doodling incompetence,
Fingers’ fandango dances onward,
I quiver with disgust at my lack of melody.
Panic at all the squandered possibilities
The squalid homogeneity of each articulated nothingness
With a death’s head chuckling reflections
On how this complex of my chemistry and life
Suffocates it.
My ears like a kitten with a paw nine penny nailed
To the harsh echoing floor.
Performance analysis my only performance:
Awkward dancer and misshapen dance.
INDIFFERENT, BEAUTY DANCES FOR DIFFERENT EYES
1.
Our conquerors have posted forbidden philosophies
In the market square.
Most of us are illiterate
And needed to have them explained to us.
Now we are interested.
The young are smuggling them, of course.
Two teenagers were hanged just last Thursday.
Three days left to swing for vulture sentries
On the pre-fabricated Aluminum gibbet.
Their funeral chant the hum of contented insects.
The fathers cut them down in the middle of the night.
The commandant wants them arrested, of course,
But stays too drunk
To follow through on the paperwork.
No one has been able to make any sense
Out of any of the texts. Of course.
They brought some to me.
The old teacher, old soldier, thrice married,
Father of eight sons, all dead.
The man who never ran, but whom bullets avoided.
The man who laughed at death,
Whom death condemned to outlive all.
They made no sense to me, of course.
Alone on this isolated farm
I watch the bloated sun sink again
Into sordid purple clouds
Edged in smoky orange filigrees.
My one eyed mangy cat sits like an onyx sphinx
Mysterious beyond any engraver’s art.
Her scabrous head swivels that inscrutable eye
Over the patchy yellow grass
Out here in the highlands.
The soil has joined her tillers,
And abandoned all resistance.
Five years of defoliation
In the name of conventional war-
Once luxurious and fertile,
Now sandy and blistered and home
To ten odd thousand parasites.
Let's not talk about the children.
Born deformed beyond recognition:
Strangled and buried
Or preserved in specimen bottles.
A proud legacy for our victors.
2.
From his atelier deep in the bowels
Of fashionable Soho, Joe Zuba,
Zen master of electro-digital performance
Expounds synesthesia between Galois vapors
Curling in self similar iterations
To the apostles of the new success:
"The Feng Shui of the new knowledge
Only underscores the urgency
For its atomized encryption.
Our reincarnated Renaissance, born of moronic violence
Unprecedented in its magnitude and lack of dignity,
Projects these values onto the architecture
Of branded mega-consumerism.
The herd is born to consume, defecate and die.
It is not the earth that is overwhelmed
By the human population,
It is the human mind itself.
There are no levers to answer purpose.
What could possibly be the purpose
Of all these jewels in the crown of creation?
The only option for the mass mind is mass narcosis.
Religions had this point by the Twelfth Century.
Maimonides, Averroes, Acquinas,
All expressed in writing the idea
That religious ritual and spectacle was a sham.
They also agreed it to be a necessary one.
It kept people off each others’ throats.
To those who express the fashionable view
That religion is the source of the horror,
History is one bucket of bad news.
It was an inadequate and now obsolete
Bandage.
Too many people with too little to do
Has played a fundamental role in the entropy of every civilization.
Stupefaction is essential to control the unnecessary.
Rhetoric was originally intended to slow the decay.
Verbal technology to sway the masses.
In its finest forms, like Baroque sermons,
Common language can turn all gathered minds
To divine notions.
The King shares an experience with the peasant.
But in the pressure cooker of hyper-technology,
Perversion becomes the rule.
Look at one balled Hitler and his youth rallies.
He was a seminal rock star.
Light shows, amplified rhetoric,
A hollow pseudo catharsis of demons,
Rendering them all the more powerful.
The self hatred of the mob is directed
With the ease of a gardener’s water hose.
They hate what they are told to hate
In a Faustian pact to avoid the pain
Of understanding what they hate about themselves.
This is where those tedious, ox-headed,
Puritanical Marxists made their contribution
To the twentieth century river of massacre.
Russian leaders killed more Russians than
Hitler ever could.
We hacked this out back in Yale in the seventies.
Heh, heh.
Take warning from Shakespeare.
Even a little freedom can drive
The groundlings to riot for shackles,
And topple a great man.
There can be no freedom
Without disillusioned knowledge.
How many, even among us,
Can bear the horrific certainty
That every human gesture, no matter how refined,
Comes bathed in an historical ocean
Of massacre and atrocity?
Unspeakable savagery in the cause of civilization,
Imposed on the masses by the masses,
So a few can live well?
And who among us dare disturb such a universe,
Or solipsistic microcosm,
By which we live so well?
The future lies in the past,
Upping the stakes in the oldest lies,
Enhancing an electronic artifice so sophisticated
That it feeds on the most primal emotions.
We have an electronic invasion of the Limbic System itself.
Circuitry extends the reptilian brain.
Art is the tentacle of that invasion.
The artist’s body itself will become the ultimate
Author, overriding the tinsel of the mind.
I’ll close our symposium
By answering the original question posed to me.
I arrived at the sonic timbres unique to my latest
Best-selling recording,
Through a fractal iteration algorithm
Applied to several sampled gaseous pulses
From my upper colon.
Perhaps my next frontier will be
The Gall Bladder."
Monday morning rain, my coffee almost drained
I join the bone and ash grey faces waiting for the train.
Walls of chrome and glass, where make-up fails its task
Stark florescent chisels hammer shadows on the mask.
Hope, my bird of prey,
The hunt is on today
Lend my heart your eagle eyes
For miracles in grey.
Hope, perhaps betrayed,
Or lost along the way,
Lend our hearts your eagle wings
For miracles in grey.
Shards of dreams retreat, our eyes locked at our feet
Windows to our starving souls gorge on poured concrete.
A daybreak sparrow sings of paltry passing things
Armies of blind puppets clash to pillage better strings.
Wrapped in skin’s embrace her skull owns endless space
A universe behind the eyes of every haggard face.
It’ll serve them right to suffer,
I hope they die broke and alone:
A best friend who is two-faced
And a wife who’s slutty when she’s stoned.
When I woke this rainy Monday
All my credit cards was gone.
Didn’t need to speed dial Sherlock
To know who did me wrong.
Red’s the face of anger
Orange says it’s Halloween
Yellow coats the coward,
And envy’s always green.
Blue’s for those who suffer,
Mercy drowns them in our drinks.
What color could own pure disgust?
I’m positive it‘s pinks!
I pour my last Rice Krispies
Chuckle ‘bout their big mistake.
I know that woman all too well,
All the credit cards were fake.
My phone rings at eleven.
Yup. She’s calling me up from jail
Too bad she’s so damn good in bed,
She knows I’ll post her bail
I was tripping on the corner
Somewhere Forty Second Street
I idly kicked a tentacle
That was winding round my feet
Then it snaked up through my collar
Stared with one blood shot eye, and said,
You called? I’m at your service,
Master, don‘t be shy.
What’s the use of pretending
In a world you know has gone so wrong?
Sometimes the truth gets ugly.
Pray God your ugly is strong.
We stopped to visit the museum
Full of reptiles, echoes, and bones.
My friend was lurking in my jockeys,
To the world we looked quite alone.
I only paid one admission.
Couldn’t look the guard in the eye.
But suddenly he winked at me
And something moved by his thigh….
Was it hope’s final gagging
To think it was mine alone?
Sometimes the truth gets ugly
Pray god your ugly is strong.
A star studded party
At a hot club downtown.
Equipped with the kind of thug doormen
Who bounce my kind around:
The poor and the clueless
To glamour and trend,
But he just opened the velvet rope and said,
Hey, buddy, you’re comped with your friend.
A voice from a camera shouts,
How‘s it feel to belong?
Sometimes the truth get’s ugly,
Pray God your ugly is strong.
PRAYER
Luck‘s been good to us so far
Looks like luck‘s the only god
That‘s kept us what we are.
Luck‘s been holding out so far…
For all the bullets aimed at us
That killed the friends we left behind,
If we‘re the fittest that survive,
Fate‘s a tailor who is blind.
Who‘s been banking saving grace?
It took more than yours or mine
To save us from that place.
Rob the savings banks of grace.
Could God have been so bored today
To tell old Satan to get a laugh?
The ones that we saw die today
Were better men by more than half.
Parson come and ring your bell
Vultures dive in for the feast
Where heaven‘s groom takes virgin hell
Rabbi blow your Shofar well.
Ten thousand years of prayer
Shriek up from battle‘s reeking floor
All your different true religions
Lie the same and wink at war.