New York City, Poems On Arrival
Notes On Arrival
March 1972
I.
Before the great dumbfounded
Strangeness within swooned of enormous monstrosities,
Ten million dangerous prickly moments had passed,
The glaring provocations of tremendously immortal joys,
The stormy high modern architecture and sullen strangers,
And the shuddering to the first mythical skirmishes
Of wild sensations that sought him out, gathering around him,
Their dizzying hypnotic visions and high-spirited illusory flash
Of atrocities, moral absurdities, waning crises, and ruined beauty
Sobbed in his head the loud loquacious ceremonies of the city,
So boisterous and all-devouring it made him tremble,
And brimming with curiosity the startled freakish streets
That sang and appeared ruinous in the downpour of light
The looking fresh upon new places,
Troubled by what trouble them, and pleased by what pleased them,
Gloriously brawling their wild thoughts in the melee,
And celebrated the disasters of grossly uncommon destruction,
The bad-tempered , the galloping glistening multitudes of judgments,
And weighing their judgments, feeling their pretty thoughts
And listening to them quarrel and cry and murmur,
Wanting it all, the sprawling goodness and the golden emptiness,
The multitudes of thoughts strangely mistook him for their maker,
And the droves of maddening impulses striking him,
Colliding inside him the impulses carrying him,
Burning in his throat, everywhere the lapping up of the last drop
Of happiness, inhabiting with their queer tongues,
Lingering, displacing his identity with the swiftly frantic loves
For which all their imprudent desires languished,
And suddenly he was the copious spectator and the public ear,
And entered their oblivions and pieties and unholy passions,
Along the narrow streets through which all their odd thoughts ran,
And traveled the damp unarticulated tremors,
So far along the budding fields of malady and pleasure
To the smoke and to the fire, freshly made of their inventions and
confessions,
Where anonymous they had secretly yearned
For absolution and the numb cold citations of truth.
And he noticed the smoky haze around some faces
And bright naked sinful light on other faces,
And suddenly from beneath each of their coats, a blue cloud emerged,
Rose upward and disappeared inside of him,
Where many souls were swirling in and out of him,
And ravaged him with their queer thoughts that leaped up in his mind.
He felt himself moving through the days and years,
The days, the years were spinning, tumbling in his head,
And the endless miles of time coming straight toward him,
And felt in his hands and legs the birth of generations,
Death and the unflattering exhilaration of death
And the secret passageways that led from the last moment
To the first tender moment, so greatly anticipated
Inside him, and the stark wise chronicles,
Narrow the present mines, narrow the wild faces
And their dark eyes, the thoughts so deeply passing through him,
The passageways which led him into the flesh of the crowds
Unmarked, yielding only when he fled into their faces,
Into their thoughts, so wildly and fiercely their workings,
The first thoughts crying out clearly distressed
And the last thoughts joyously singing of everlasting contentment,
And the dark thoughts, far back through the mazes of thoughts,
The beauty of a phrase, the tremulous waking of worlds,
The currency of their thoughts exchanged, paying with their lives
For the right to move about, swarming around him.
Each encounter a lovely fraud, and false as the other incarnations---
How many times had he left his body and became someone else,
The pilgrimage much more than a motion,
But a passion a feeling of a kind of friendly presence.
The many fires of its pleasures burned bright and gratification burst.
No vagueness or fault or foible had in its mind a destiny of this sort—
His first yearning was for the exactness of the contemporary world,
The one immediately playing the fierce music,
The uncertain boundless boundaries of unidentifiable truth beginning
To hurl themselves against him, and the unusual unreasonable ending
Perceived and yielding a lyrical sense of confusion,
The awesome structure of tall joys,
Stretched upward, the high excitement
And accomplished deeds having risen up,
So high and you could ride an elevator
To the top of the tall joys
And gaze down on the greatness,
The streets strands of light moving
In all directions, the city wrapped
In cellophane and drinking light
From a flask it kept in its coatpocket,
Roaring with laughter, its round belly
Jiggled, rumbled. The fierce cry
That rose from deep down from soggy souls,
The crowds a mysteriously sinister
Bemusement grinding away at the bottom
The automation and its little human engines,
The neurotic boom time, the collisions of lust
With the slap, smack joys, the whack, thwack atrocities
And impulses on top of impulses
And pushers of propulsion, the jabbering queer malls
Through which the human battering rams crashed,
The fear in their faces scrunched low, hiding,
Punch-drunk emotions, swinging bats and throwing rocks,
The lunge and the thrust and shove and jog,
The dynamic overstated willingness to cry out,
Accept the immoral pleasures deep and aching,
Enduring isolation and the unspeakable defeat,
Accepting the outrageousness and unshakable sobriety
Of their obscure joys, and deeply bearing indignities,
The anonymous gloom embraced and denounced,
Unraveling, ringing in his ears the many-tongued speeches
Of the worm-eaten faiths of the world,
With the unholy defiance and scorn,
The perpetual death-chatter
Like maggots on rotten fish eating the bloated pleasures,
The hucksters of the mighty fierce currents
That rise sheer and stark, swarm in and out of the faces,
Gaunt, deaf, denying the unplumbed abysses of their being.
The perpetual undulating temptations of lust,
The ambling smut shops on their way back from hell,
The glaring neon pigs with snouts to the ground,
Eating of our sins, the shriveled dead rats reborn
In the subways, the gibbering trains regurgitating
The corpses of quiet nights, their horrors made of dirt
And sheer turmoil, blown through the tunnels of love,
The ferret eyes of trains burning bright in the dark,
The roar born of loneliness, fear, doubt.
The fires of self-love lit and raging out of control,
The day shaped by the obscene cries of newspaper headlines,
Delighted by the rise of fears and leering at him,
Watching him, how his face was full of worms—
The silent epithets flung down into the gutter,
The dirt under his feet feeling the birth of a miracle
And the death of reason that rumbled up in his legs
Jumped into his face, ran its fingers through his wild hair,
Then bolted upwards, sprung from his ears,
The fierce animal truth that spread its crooked wings,
Lunged far off into the blue sky,
And around the world.
The city yearning silently for him,
And his thoughts amazed by the heartless love
That stopped its shrill quiet broken
And covered his fear with sores,
The flocks of hands reaching, grasping inside him.
The dark souls of windless nights,
Harsh, glazed with moonlight,
Birds skimming across the black sky
Of a dark pitiful night, something hidden
Suddenly exposed like the white thighs,
The tremulous legs and slender arms
Of an argument on stage at the strip clubs,
He imagined the quivering flesh,
The red lips quivering with philosophical thought,
The ankles flickering with wisdom,
The snug lady's slipper into which he fit his life--
The passions, the passing anger, the last letting go
Of the blizzard of sights, wild faces thrust upward,
Oblivious feet running, dancing,
Swirling along the great drunken streets,
The rivers of people, the waves of faces
Drifting across time, burdened by the cumbersome happiness,
Deeper and deeper into the clutter of madness,
Streets clinging to him like the burs of weeds,
The moments yellow and blue flaked,
The present moments orange and crimson
Like the leaves of some exotic place
Unseen and turning inside him--
Burned inside him, floating lazily upward into his head
And down along the cool thoughts
Where the hairy wild far-fetched dreams
Screamed and bared their souls bitten by love,
The wild solitude .turned round and there –
The bitterness stretched out of the dark, changed him.
Suddenly he was cold, brash, cursing himself,
Flung with fire, holding on the street all day long
Rain fell and fell as if it would never end.
And the wet white nothingness kept believing in itself
And water, water was seething
from a thousand holes in the street, spurting upward
The passions of wild wet lust and joy.
There came swiftly the fear dappled in gray and brown
The stems of joys and the steep overhanging embankment
Of the day, where people walked so carefully,
Fawn past upon this pimpled villain concrete,
Across the back of the city which was a great beast
Galloping toward something strange, the colossal,
Overgrown vast flat unimagined falsehoods
Wide as a continent, filled him with expectations,
His senses trembled, he was young man
And the sudden loneliness of the city
Closed around, isolated, discharged from all feelings,
He moved through the city and became one of the strangers,
One of the faceless young men, beating an invisible drum
And calling silently for love.
The Mad Pilgrims Quietly Quarreling
November 1972
A gray sky and the tumbling down starved joys,
And the swarming lively turmoil and confusion,
The first sputtering up of the city yelling like demons,
The morning light and its lovely skirmishes,
The murmuring tenderness rattling in the distance
And the lush roars ticking in their ears,
The warm fire thawing their cold feet
And the bitter cold morning air lisping
Its first few remarks, the scattering rattles
Of heavy armor, clinking through the city.
The crowds at once born into the world,
Up from their underground ships and passageways
Through the secret dungeons and dirty corridors,
Through the bellies of iron and mortar clad castles
And up, came up and gathered, wildly cheering,
The mad pilgrims, the crowds large and boldly roared
Of their sudden discoveries, surprised to find
The city so brightly born and the cold licked their faces,
The buildings cringed at their arrival,
The fierce strange invasions of wild-eyed hopes,
Their thoughts scurrying along the little wooden streets
That leaped up in the shop windows.
The scattering hours, the crashing looks of glaring eyes
And the battle for hope and consciousness,
The great crowds moved hurriedly toward the east,
Moving in and out of the buildings,
Searching for the one face--
The crowds always thrust into the world,
Nothing to say for themselves, murmuring if only once
The name of a street, searching for the one face
That they know, and the places moving as they move,
Always ahead of them, lost, and even if it was not there,
It would not be there. It would be behind them,
Or far ahead, or transparent the coffee shop,
The magazine stand flying about the city,
Fleeing across the boulevards like nomads.
The mad pilgrims quietly quarreling--
No matter what the wildness and its fierce nature
And the cumbersome duty attending the hunt
Would not persuade them against search,
For they were the crowds, the great crowds gathering,
The great hurrying crowds of Manhattan,
The crowds tightly drawn and closed ranks
Of the crowds and the crowds that followed the crowds,
And their blissful states of spiritual quest,
And each day the city was mad for the world,
Craving some part of it which was lost in the crowds,
Ravaged by their plush red souls,
Finding in them the great pleasures,
Impressed by their curiosity for love, for the queer toys
Of the mind, for the twilight of fears, dreams beaten
And hanged in Time Square, where death sang
And played the harmonica--fame working its false miracles,
Love shooting up in the alleyways, lust shouting
Its last farewells. The crowds marching,
The crowds with their odd clever desire for fear,
Dreading their births in the day's itinerary,
The coming into being of their glorious accomplishments,
Their aspirations and art and sacrifice,
Their large and unwieldy moods,
Their rich contributions to culture, their faltering fortunes
Or sudden rise to prominence, anticipated and welcome
Like birthdays or legal holidays, vacations in the country--
Narrowly avoiding bad luck, seeking out the one moment,
The great eyes of the crowd, the gathering crowd,
Their faces pale, frosted by the cold air,
Their spirits suddenly flat, empty, their hands calm,
Resting by their sides, mysteriously distant,
Their eyes clutching their dreams, their silence
Disturbingly scary, the loud shrill roars
Within them gathering, flowering inside their bellies.
The stragglers, the shrewd out of sight massacres of the spirit,
The unexpected thundering down and whirling up of treachery,
The hostile unbroken peace and prosperity of angel savages,
The hour and its crafty, cunning mischief raw.
The harmonious contentment soundly thrashed,
The broad-brimmed long-legged day,
The gray tumbling and rolling triumphant,
The cars stampeding through the streets like stray ponies,
The packs of wild dogs barking at Fifty-seventh street,
The ignominious, inexcusable panic, the vagrant regiment,
The rolled over dead waters of the spirit,
And the circling, swooping down gloom yelling like demons,
And all the time the furious fire burning in the buildings,
And joy has sprang out of the ground?
But some truth, or plume of joy to tickle their noses.
And turned loose upon the slain hopes the odd insolence
And defiant begging and boasting for the battle
Of the sad and happy moments who shall meet their deaths
So bravely in the morning's tender carnage.
The sidewalks rarely voluptuous or fantastic,
The crowds bursting out of the doors and the crowds moving past
And across and over the gray streets,
The crowds and their faces, the crowds always in motion,
But mindlessly hanging on each moment,
The first minutes dragged through the streets
The first hours and their painted faces.
The voluptuous whores of the clock and its minutes,
Raging of wild desires, making them famous,
The dry throaty laughter of fleshy minutes pink with lust,
And the less fearful darker stretches of time and timelessness,
Broken free of the piteous world, the crowd wounded by time,
The crowd strong, tireless, escaped the clock's plundering hands,
And outlasted the vast bare green of their last euphoria,
Which like a prairie stretched out across the tops of buildings,
Where they would one day follow
Across the wild blue mountains.
**********
Breathing The Wild City Air, Watching The Smiles Jump Down
Carefully mapping out the dangers of the street,
He walked along Fifth Avenue listening to their dark whispers
That fell upon his ear, the secrets filled him with their mysteries--
The noisy, frantic mad sounds of the streets, the sighing of buses,
And the low, sad moan of the thoughts. The sidewalks deaf, the sky magical,
Blue and pure of the sorrow of the contemporary world.
He could smell the love in the air, taste the loneliness,
See in the emptiness a vast boundless plane. He touched the emptiness,
The landscape of the city and its great barren chaotic swirls, and the
gurgling libido
Of strangers, the prostitutes standing with their shoulders squared to the
emptiness
And from their faces dropped a hard-edged sorrow onto the street,
And he felt heavy with the emptiness, the loss of spiritual radiance.
The fierce winds of earthy sexuality whipped around him,
Lifted his the bottoms of his trousers, flapping like wings.
The single emotion of sheer terror mingled with the erotic spirits.
The beautiful clouds of flesh and blood inside him
And their playful antics and dangerous hysterical godless truths.
Lexington Avenue overrun with ethereal, airy beings wearing brown suits
And yellow neckties that swung above their belt buckles,
Like bright shiny alter egos, the brutal, violent smiles
That climbed the skyscrapers and leaped down every moment
And kissed the fusty old cheeks of statues, the clocks on the buildings
Rummaging through the moments for some truth, chiming down
The last syllables of time that mean anything, coming up empty
The bare-headed iron meanings screeching their blessings.
The invisible trees of a great wood, the fish leaping up
And splashing down, teaching their lessons to the dead alleyways
Through which the ticks of the parking meters have fled,
Some crawling on their bellies, some flying fiercely past the dozing moments
In which gentle mischief and unearthly beauty. The flagrant crimes
Against the quiet. The brown silky smooth conversations
In outdoor cafes, and inside the cavernous delicatessens,
The splendid ballets of words. The faces in each table begging
For love and the cries of fire engines biting their ears,
The soft tender twinkling colored lights of their eyes
Staring at the rude sandwiches telling them how delicious
The world in which they find themselves and must hurry,
Hurry or they shall miss catching fire.
******
Manhattan At Dusk
August 1974
Tomorrow was a four legged animal, all that year it hid out,
You couldn't find it anywhere, and joy was an old bum in the gutter,
Drunk, old crapper, dressed down,
Three long months it beat the hell
Out of everybody who laughed, joy took their money, lived in a madhouse,
Took up with every rotten soul that came along,
Fed us and clothed us. The great sad funny Buddha,
Joy was running from something, talked wild, fighting with the cops,
Loved the rambling, incoherent streets, the way madness
Was part of the city, a significant force in the affairs
Of the city, a high-spirited educator, patron of the arts.
Joy asked those few impossible imponderable questions of us
And looked us squarely in the eyes.
Why couldn't they name a street after certain pathological disorders?
Madness Avenue, Psychotic Street, Stark Raving Mad Boulevard,
Schizophrenic Square, Manic-Depressive Street-- why the hell not,
Be cool and hang out with the iconoclastic fishhead mad celebrity boomers,
Then buzz off and kiss the magically hysterical moments—
Can't sing dance walk this city, this godless stoned heroin doll of delights
With its great landmarks burning up, damn hip brawling strange-faced fiends,
Crazy kicking down the doors of Harlem and screaming what they want to hear.
The hours all bastards doing smack and singing like Elvis
When you least expect it. The one good feeling inside trembling up,
Taking over, bearing down on sorrow, the beast that walked the city
Each night, and growled at everyone. When the sun came up,
The bones of strangers here and there. Tomorrow everywhere.
*********
Bronx, 10AM, And Love Was Running Madly Through The Streets
Summer 1972
The grand-opera along Riverdale, and the glibness of morning
Hunched over its thoughts barking like dogs,
And love was running madly
Through the sunlit streets and their bloody joys and enchantments.
The many frailties amused and glimmering--
The morning's gaudy red face and the tall buildings and their luckless
incoherent
Moments of prosperous joy that tremble up in the city,
The streets so poor and laughing wildly
At the gloom, rarely disturbed by anything they saw—
Unwavering and flourishing the gambling house, the brothel,
The crackhouse, the deathhouse, the dark prisons murmuring,
The broken down rat-infested tenements rolling their bones
Across the deep streets. A row of cathedrals wearing gold crosses,
The banks closing their eyes to the strange sensation of dying,
The libraries reading their obituaries, the sad faces of old delicatessens,
The playhouses filled with the dark of the middle ages,
The wild hysterical smiles of porno bookshops,
The lackluster lives of pizza parlors, and the green kiosks of newspaper
stands
Thrust mercifully into the belly of the day and twisted,
The blood has long dripped from the sky, and dried on the rooftops.
The crowds moving at odds with traffic and the billboards silently screamed--
The high-spirited, outlandish prayers that trembled up from the subway
grating,
And the cry of baby its only opposing argument,
The quiet moments boasting of its good fortune, jealous of the blue sky,
The gray dull monologues of the homeless
And the honky-tonk music of conversations,
Endless and without beginning, but in the ear, recollected of some faint
Impulse of truth and stretched the bounds of imagination by force,
Exploding quietly inside us, and nourished by the wild nervous excitement of
joyous Words, words, words, extraordinarily simple utterances and strangers to
the city,
So tenderly, so egregiously indigestible, and caught fire and burned in our
ears--
The cars murmuring their half unfinished sentences,
The day whipped smooth and spun brightly in the morning haze,
The dress shops and their crisply stated revolutions,
The sidewalks cunningly finding their fortunes at the corner,
The traffic lights glimmering on and off with no intent to maim,
The naughty sinning times of iniquity, its genius for wrongdoing
The greatly disturbed imagination, a depravity and obliquity
Of its foul mind, the nefarious thoughts that discredit the tears
Of the dead fears, the shameless joys crying out from the windows—
The dissolute vile puddles of blood, the dye that colors
The public face, quarreling loudly, debunking love,
Sudden, so harshly given to its grave, the city and its streets
All villains flung across Manhattan, mean streets with guns
And broken glass for street signs, the sun and the knife
In the back and the demoralization of the heart.
Famous thug metropolis of our time, unworthy, profligate,
Kissing the prostitutes each morning, celebrating greed
And its scurvy, counting your money, sex fiend and religious fanatic,
Evil-doing messiah, malevolent missionary praying for cocaine,
And eating your children, jumping out of windows and off the bridges,
Drowning in the Hudson River, the great reprehensible joy
Of infinite arrogance, the gross sinister worthless hell-born love,
Forgetfulness, anonymity and the last and first malevolence,
And the great American dumping ground for ambition
And dreamy-eyed quick schemes. Here, the artist struggles,
The ballet dancer stands in front of the mirror,
Pirouetting on her rigid toes, the city whirled round
By her beauty and grace. The actor auditioning
For the grave, the poet fumbling for his thoughts,
The pimps standing guard over their flocks,
The disgraceful faces of morning, and the infernos
Of sin that roll past on their to hell, clutching
Their coffee and buttered rolls. The diabolic sweet
Voices of profanity, the unloosened morals of streetsigns,
And the lovely shops of Fifth Avenue, bright, speechless,
Mutely enraptured by the impeccability
Of wide rivers of concrete and asphalt,
Swirling round the city, jabbering like gossips
And spreading the wildest rumors.
*********
When Mad The Moon Clanged Its Toy Drum
August 1973
Round came the ivory heart
Shining down on the prickly common streets,
When mad the moon clanged its toy drum
For the kingdom,
The most tender convulsions rose,
Rose from the folds of the fallen dusk,
And queerly played their three joys
That ran nimbly along the rooftops.
The towering sullen charms of streetlamps,
Blowing down the dark,
And the strutting griefs of night,
The little shops like lovers in their bed,
Clutching their stuffed toys,
The city and the nightingales of light
Singing brightly their merry tunes.
Ambition, rage, art—three mad children
Run off to the big city, starving, dying,
Asphyxiated by the loneliness,
The first cries of the evening turning
The streets green, and the cars
Bellowing like branded cattle,
The stammering psalms of buses,
The stillness that fell over parks
Leaping up in the windows,
The craft praise of neon lanterns
Firing their luminous-cheeked harpoons
At the backs of the fleeing minutes,
The streets littered with words,
The cheap thrills sliced like loaves of stale bread
And meted out to the crowds,
The heeding of the dark's call
And the rounding up of the joys
And putting them in their places.
********
Walking Through Central Park, 9AM
April 1973
In a strangely unmistakable way, the city with its habitual intimacy
And scarcity of gardens had an astonishing powerful leafiness to it.
The jungle proverbial in nature bequeathing such greenery
As to camouflage the human frailties of old abandoned buildings.
And between even our words there were patches of earth
And green grass, and when we came abruptly upon our thoughts
In the middle of Manhattan, relinquished the strictest, most intimate
meanings—
The ways in which the plant kingdom had possessed us, run through us
With its glaring magical obsessions, we sought out the recreation
Of a far different garden than the long, flat cement stems of our streets.
And perhaps long ago destroyed that immaculate garden within us
Lost with the corruption of innocence,
Not the lush virgin forests of our imaginations,
Or the majestic splendor of Eden with its gates clanged shut,
Nor the giant redwoods that stand tall in our pasts,
Darkening the days ahead with their thick branches,
But the simple green pastures of our kindness,
Rolling out of us as we moved about the city,
Dreaming, perhaps, conversing on a bus or train,
The unconscious pulling up of weeds, trimming the moments
And outlasting the spring by gently bending to sow the seeds
In the holes of our own earthiness.
**********
Playing The Garden And The Electric Reckoning
August 1973
Three times that day the sun had risen and set.
The cocaine sang in our heads its sad lyrical obscene ballads,
The heroin in our veins quietly danced the minuet,
And inside us the night's bright shore flickered in an orange sky,
And crushed the city under its brilliant glare,
Amid the dumbstruck moon-white streets and the passers-by
Flashed the first naked minutes of time, and all the love there
Was and had ever been was ours and we stood there,
Listening to the throaty whirled sharp denials. We watched the blue
Ghoulish dark pierce the soft, smooth flesh of emptiness,
And that night, when the sweet thunder rolled through
Us, we sang and the lyrics scurried like animals down the bright
Flames of the flickering holy light,
The great winds rushing through us and past
The reckless desires and over the wayward scuttled stillness,
Where storms go to die, and we came to the vast
Conclusion that our mental illness
As a nation was slight, and curable, and what we feared
Most was not madness, but the eyes of wild starved animals
That shimmered inside us and disappeared
In the most terrifying, deafening noise
Of our downward spiraling joys.
***********
The Books Sputter On Cold Mornings
The books sputtered on cold mornings,
The ancient engines of the middle ages
The old verbs and rickety adjectives chugging along,
Whirring profoundly, spit out gaseous fumes,
The mind ran tirelessly alongside.
Sometimes we had to rise early and push start the old sentences,
The rust-dappled heaps rolled sluggishly downhill,
And when rudely disturbed from sleep,
Would suddenly spring from their graves,
Gush and blither their gratefulness,
Announcing the most sacred truths in the crisp
Cold morning air. Or occasionally
We employed a muse--jumper cables,
The sparks of words flew up our noses
When we read, and started our motors,
Headlong we run around the city of words,
Drunk drivers, wildly enthusiastic.
We were all mechanically-inclined
And clamored for the bare stark sensibilities,
Needful of the tuning of our human motors--
The sloppy nature of assembly lines,
And the engines of one's generation powerful, high on horsepower,
Low on morals, introspection, far more the deliberate, entrenched pleasure
vehicle.
The diverse perceptions and intervals of rapture
Good for at least seventy years or more--
The beauty and piety of self-preservation,
The old world and its beneficent god of impractical discernment,
Rugged philosophy and clogged carburetors
Causing a pinging noise. And how many of us looked under
The hood and found someone sleeping there? And how often
Had the green light turned red as we approached?
An omen of immense proportions.
And who hadn't tooted their horn at death?
The all-important, all-knowing rearview mirror,
And looking back at the scenery of unintentional destinies,
Can we see the many smiling pleasures of our youth?
Spot the heartless brutality which marred our age?
Pick out from the leafy tree the red apple
That tasted sweeter than love's kiss?
The beautiful chrome callousness and FM radio
Humming their promise of immortality,
Gurgling in our ears Shakespeare, Dickinson, Austin,
Kierkegard and Schopenhauer and Freud.
The cigarette lighter and its glow of eternal truth,
The glove compartment where true love slept,
And how beautiful, how wonderful the scent of gasoline
That lavished our brain with such sweet madness.
----------
Chasing The Dragon
NYC 1970
The nose is the mouth into which all joys are born.
The white powder sniffed, and no sorrows have I to mourn.
The opiate streets are clean and well lit.
I am their king. The master of heroin and guru of good shit.
The minutes are all wild junky moments that cheapen my soul.
I am the Lord of Smack. Let the dangerous times roll.
I am the killer of all pain, and my thoughts run wild.
May all the goodness in the world be defiled.
Hang the innocent, burn the libraries,
Heap the bowl of my crack pipe burning--
I am the Messiah of wild cherries.
Around me all the planets are turning,
The stars shine down for me. The moon is my rock.
I bear the boredom of the world.
I am a martyr. I am the keeper of the clock,
The mystery that time shall never unlock.
I am beautiful and hideous. My secret is well-kept.
All of my possessions I have given away.
I am every child who has come into the world,
And I am every person who has left.
I am the first and the last day.
Holding my bones up to the light,
I see the flaws of the human race,
And none of you are vain or full of spite,
All of you are plain and so terribly bright,
You have too many thoughts in your brains,
And only a few wild horses are running through your veins,
And only an occasional mad man feels out of place,
Not once has the poppy ruled the populace,
And isn't that a disgrace?
*********
Walking Through Central Park, 9AM
April 1973
In a strangely unmistakable way, the city with its habitual intimacy
And scarcity of gardens had an astonishing powerful leafiness to it.
The jungle proverbial in nature bequeathing such greenery
As to camouflage the human frailties of old abandoned buildings.
And between even our words there were patches of earth
And green grass, and when we came abruptly upon our thoughts
In the middle of Manhattan, relinquished the strictest, most intimate
meanings—
The ways in which the plant kingdom had possessed us, run through us
With its glaring magical obsessions, we sought out the recreation
Of a far different garden than the long, flat cement stems of our streets.
And perhaps long ago destroyed that immaculate garden within us
Lost with the corruption of innocence,
Not the lush virgin forests of our imaginations,
Or the majestic splendor of Eden with its gates clanged shut,
Nor the giant redwoods that stand tall in our pasts,
Darkening the days ahead with their thick branches,
But the simple green pastures of our kindness,
Rolling out of us as we moved about the city,
Dreaming, perhaps, conversing on a bus or train,
The unconscious pulling up of weeds, trimming the moments
And outlasting the spring by gently bending to sow the seeds
In the holes of our own earthiness.
***********
Lincoln Center, NY Public Library,
The Books Sputter On Cold Mornings
The books sputtered on cold mornings,
The ancient engines of the middle ages
The old verbs and rickety adjectives chugging along,
Whirring profoundly, spit out gaseous fumes,
The mind ran tirelessly alongside.
Sometimes we had to rise early and push start the old sentences,
The rust-dappled heaps rolled sluggishly downhill,
And when rudely disturbed from sleep,
Would suddenly spring from their graves,
Gush and blither their gratefulness,
Announcing the most sacred truths in the crisp
Cold morning air. Or occasionally
We employed a muse--jumper cables,
The sparks of words flew up our noses
When we read, and started our motors,
Headlong we run around the city of words,
Drunk drivers, wildly enthusiastic.
We were all mechanically-inclined
And clamored for the bare stark sensibilities,
Needful of the tuning of our human motors--
The sloppy nature of assembly lines,
And the engines of one's generation powerful, high on horsepower,
Low on morals, introspection, far more the deliberate, entrenched pleasure
vehicle.
The diverse perceptions and intervals of rapture
Good for at least seventy years or more--
The beauty and piety of self-preservation,
The old world and its beneficent god of impractical discernment,
Rugged philosophy and clogged carburetors
Causing a pinging noise. And how many of us looked under
The hood and found someone sleeping there? And how often
Had the green light turned red as we approached?
An omen of immense proportions.
And who hadn't tooted their horn at death?
The all-important, all-knowing rearview mirror,
And looking back at the scenery of unintentional destinies,
Can we see the many smiling pleasures of our youth?
Spot the heartless brutality which marred our age?
Pick out from the leafy tree the red apple
That tasted sweeter than love's kiss?
The beautiful chrome callousness and FM radio
Humming their promise of immortality,
Gurgling in our ears Shakespeare, Dickinson, Austin,
Kierkegard and Schopenhauer and Freud.
The cigarette lighter and its glow of eternal truth,
The glove compartment where true love slept,
And how beautiful, how wonderful the scent of gasoline
That lavished our brain with such sweet madness.
----------
----------
Grand Central And The Strangeness Kicking In Your Bones
Summer 1972
In the purely queer stunned morning air,
The streets were all wild animals dancing in the fire.
The buildings were tall impulses murmuring the utterly mysterious
Riddles of human existence to the passersby,
And whose side you on? The first loud voices were asking,
The incomprehensible heart of the crazy wild day,
Cranked up from the depth of the city that one big crushing bubble
Blowing through your brain, and blazing with fire
The strangest paranoid delusion come up and bite you, eat you up.
Incomprehensible, wasn't it? Nice, bubble tender blowing through your brain,
Heroin crack love, swish through your head and please you,
The big blue sky come down and talk human mischief ecstasy,
The disheartening doomed demonic massacres of jumbled thoughts
Come at you, beating their drums, enticing, touching you up,
What's that thing you got in your big mama beating heart?
Rock music kicking in your bones, ferocious strange lizard voices,
Mighty malice, envy stumbling over the mystical minutes
Of a good morning, shamelessly done up in monstrous joys,
9AM, the pretty cannibals crawling through your brain, saying
"Baby, baby, what you got for dinner?"
The manic intensity passing though Grand Central
Just like any other commuter, only it got big feet,
And its head full of despair, a whole day of emptiness
Just for you, and it pale on one side and blue on the other,
Spitting in the street, talking to the devil,
Ready to throw up all over your new shoes. The sky's all pretty nice,
And the streets medieval bright skin and bones,
The second-hand smoke of burning buildings got up real early
And they writing their name down in your head and belly,
How do you like your day? Fried or baked or maybe
You so gluttonous time don't appeal to you?
The cars cursing you, the smelly dog of the morning
All terrifying bleakness, and mad remorseless vision
Come up to you and make that ugly face and what did it say,
And what's so disgusting it don't pay to sing,
If the streets don't take you down, the blue sky will.
----------
Greenwich Village, 1972
The crack was hideously sweet.
It sang in our nostrils, queerly like some prophet of old,
Shambles of glass, bits of ancient joy kissed our souls,
The modern world tumbled and spun freely out from our eyes,
Clashed briefly, rancorous with our ruinous passions.
We were awestruck and the malicious waves of euphoria,
Exploded and rang their chimes, the cheerful leaping of days
Across the minutes—first wrongfully rung of our innocence,
Then piously rung of our thoughts, and tenderly, sweetly,
The tumultuous fanfares, birdlike tweets in our hands,
And what was that holy clamor at the window?
All evening we waited for the stone monuments of truth
To leap up high over the city, and bear the great darkness--
Full of wild exhilaration, mindless, drug-crazed, eyes big, wide as mountains,
Our minds were shooting stars disintegrating in the pink blush of a summer
sky,
Our bones cried out in the shivering cold night,
Murmured the dead joys. Our hearts in the poorhouse, our ears petty thieves,
Our hands fearful to touch our faces, cheeks lost, stumbling, falling away,
Tongues stung by loveless years, the junky days screaming pitifully in our
veins,
Rock music made of the flesh of God, heavenly hell, self-righteous profanity,
The black sky brash wild smooth-talker moon, the tall flesh of dreams.
The senses shook and frazzled, the senses billowing loudly,
And puddles of light stream from our eyes, delightfully hot and scalding us,
A hole in our cheeks spitting fire, a great panic in the street
And born there the washed out bleating long-haired paranoid generations,
The madhouse of the world and the four seasons of paranoid psychosis,
Hello, we waved, we sang to them with naked bodies,
Four young men, three young women with holes in their arms,
Drinking red wine from a storm of restlessness, screaming, kicking down the
walls of our heads,
The great bullshit philosophical thoughts tinged with morose undercurrents,
Our genitals all mental deranged escapees from the insane asylum of the body,
And nothing more shallow had more sheer beauty and terror
Than these seizures which were holy sacraments from God,
The heart attacks were a message from our fathers,
All our words sweet apples spoiled on the ground
And stinking up the libraries.
The mouth and its many epitaphs. We were not so much fearful of dying
As we were fearful of missing the dangerous moments. Our feet were scorched
black.
Our mouths were open when they found us, and there was still a gale blowing in
our heads.
Ode To Opium
To the dead poets and artists,
To the crowds in the townsquare
Who believed I was the cause of their despair.
Who more worthy of blame?
Inside burns the eternal flame.
Heroin is my christian name,
The poor know me by secret name
And we have made love in the fields.
The rich call me to dine with them at odd hours,
I was a lonely child in a lonely world,
My dreams were wildflowers,
Playful, my heart beastly—
The world a jolly good fellow,
Held me close, drank of me, let me go
Among the dead and come upon
Its dreams like the lost cities
Of strange country. Skies red, the stone
Walks have I tread upon.
The veins that narrow led
Me through the wood, and against me
Every evil word said about me
True, more men I have slain,
More joy, slayer of pain,
Dreams for the world, cheap perceptions
Of the fantastic perversions and animadversions—
Death is but a tender kiss away,
A thousand unforgettable affections,
Let me turn your bed to clay.
You house if it be small,
Your mind and body feeble
There is a giant that lives in the needle,
The day more dull turns and wild novelty wanes,
Come climb the spire, the little church steeple,
Allow me to set fire to your brain.
Fumble for the door, there has come once more
The acutely conscious music so queer
It lends the temporal a translucent hue,
The old blind fear comes to cheer
Me up, and sense is senseless—
My life is timeless. Do not disappear
Into the far reaches of the hemisphere,
Set your soul free by loving tenderly
The dreams that bear you so far
That place with no meaning, nor escape
Up the ladder of fear into the clear
And time no essence or shape,
Lewd the swift goodness of my gait,
Dwell the nations long fallen,
Risen in my dream state.
----------
Madison Square Garden, 1972
LSD's stock rose,
We bought a thousand shares---
God's love had come cool upon the tongue,
All day, all day the bells of St Mary's have rung
In our bones. The holy ghost answered our prayers,
The world gave us its evil stares,
When we were played the Garden the devil came—
Rock and roll set fire to the streets, inside us the flame
Tickled, and after we died, found dead in our hotel room,
The world was never the same.
It became to careful, guarded, it lost its sense of madness and gloom.
Terror was everywhere, and even the politicians had wild hair,
The wild streets turned coy, the mad men in the Village assumed
The duties of public office, and nakedness was an aberration of despair,
What sorrow there was soon found joy,
Lust was timid, fraught with the comforts of home,
Literature went to the cupboard and found nothing there,
Music and Art continued their sordid affair,
Though the one did not dare tell the other what it was thinking,
The National Deficit was shrinking,
Reason had been confiscated at the Mexican border,
All of the world had grown fond of disorder,
The whole country was sinking its teeth into a juicy steak,
And no one thought the government could make a mistake.
The sun rose over the Manhattan streets and sang each morning
With a sweet voice that trembled; it sang the words that only it knew
And spun its light in the faces along Fifth Avenue,
And everyone was content, or so they led everyone to believe.
Such was the sudden rise to power of the New World order
And its uncanny powers to deceive.
----------
168th Street, 3AM, Riding The D-Train Over The Big Blue Waterfall
Summer 1970
The hypodermic needle pricks the skin
And the heroin bursts forth through the iron gates,
Scuttles through the stony vein, shouting for love,
And the sudden joy its sheer descent of a stream,
The wild currents of the ghostly river over the rocks,
The steep plunge down bed, the free falling thoughts,
The cool rapids of the mind and river dreaming,
The staggering height from which the cascading thoughts
Plunge, lilting down, splashing, their music bright and queer,
The streambed along the deep running consciousness,
The snagging on some thought biting sweet the bright fires
Of the water swirling through the veins the tributary streams,
The valleys of loneliness, despair, depravity leaping down a mountain,
The streams of joy suddenly glimmering, quarreling with the world
And the voices calling, the night and its stars and moon rumbling
Forward out of their hiding places in the body,
The great tumultuous lost secret that the fireflies hold,
The barking wild dogs of the intestines chasing after
The chrome license plates of runaway trucks.
The drop steeply in the pulse, the heart's masturbation,
The ejaculation of the bitter thoughts and the creamy white thighs
Of tomorrow, and the erosion of the day's edge, the rock bottom bed
Below the falls and upstream the wild torrents of decadence
Pissing in the skulls of the dead minutes, the ultimately diminished
Madness giving way to tenderness, dwindling in the rapids, and disappearing
And the riverbed dry, so parched the snakes crawl out, the fishbones shimmer,
Throw up their bright skeletons to the gray marble sky
And birds frightened by the quiet, call our their names.
----------
Time Square, 4AM, The Streets In Their Dark Rumpled Suits
The streets in their dark rumpled suits
And the night has many long sullen dark faces,
And one is heroin, power mad King of Time Square
And its power comes from its many gifts and graces,
How generously and faithful it attends to the body's needs,
And what is given us is the great dream of the unborn,
The ungovernable passion of the wild dream,
The teachings of Buddha and cheerfully torn
Loose the souls rise, look into death's eyes
And unselfishly the junkdealers reach out,
From their mouths the words fall,
O Heroin, great peacemaker, come
And bear to the streets
The prophesy of the blood, the faith of the lost,
Such mercy come upon us in our graves,
O Heroin, heed the needs of our poor souls,
Make us the wonders that you bring,
Carry us far away from this decade,
Let loose the great fire that burns in the stars,
And illumines the dark regions of the lost,
The countless sick, lonely naked moments we have lived,
Sudden may they wake in the gutter
And sing like a great choir, and Heroin
Like Holy Jesus touch us, kiss us
All inside, the revelations of your words
A gentle breeze that lifts the tall buildings
And tender whispers sweet like strawberries
The words we come to hear,
O Heroin, great goodness, teacher,
Give us what we have lost, and with us across
The vast green field of the night, let our thoughts
Be free and wild, at the gates of greedy miserly impulses,
Let us be merciful as the trees, be the leaves of joy,
May the world be devoid of pain, no twitch pull
The skull of the beast by a string along the street.
The currency of the dead nation their teeth, bones,
Scabs, empty bottles, the blue doubts buying only
A handful of love, the skin of a dead boy, ragged
Worn around a waist like a belt brings only a few cents.
A dry old penis will get you in the movie theatre,
A toe, a big toe, will astound the tollbooth clerk,
The tongue that hums a happy tune will make
The children dance. An ear will get you through
The turnstile of the subway. A nose is all it takes
To read a newspaper. A heart beating in the hand,
A sure way to please your creditors.
A mouth will open only the door that leads out,
An eye if it is not bloodshot will please a woman.
----------
Brooklyn Summer
What I remember was the shape of the blue sky
When it crawled under the house,
And smeared its face with dark moments,
And sniffed there the flowers of some hell
Cast under the floorboards, the shadows
Scented with apple blossoms, the lost love
Of a rat. The dark I reasoned had no cause
For imagination, its domain was mystery,
And the light was fact and fancy.
And under the house, the dark sketched
The future, drew with its bony finger
The circles the days took around us,
Little room for error, the faint cries
Of insects in the dark funny, sad, self-conscious,
A slight tinge of madness in the cool damp
Breaths of the dead bird the dog buried,
The quiet fiddled there on summer nights,
And with ghosts walked the deck of a ship,
The sea turned all to clay, sang the bleak hush,
Every the bottoms of things crying out,
The perfect pitched voice of night,
The childhood tale told with oblique words
So much more tender than the rain.
----------
----------
NYC Public Library, The Queen Of Quiet
There has come over me a quiet,
For which I have all my life been yearning,
It is a quiet that brings a holy hush over my bones,
Lights the streetlamps, brings the moon over the mountain,
Calls the crickets to gather beneath my window,
Spins in the yard the tender music of joy,
The stars shine down on the streets,
The dark filling up the houses,
Sleep falling inside the children,
And suddenly I know I am in love,
But not with anyone in particular—
I am in love with everyone,
I am married to everyone,
And my heart is many hearts beating
In many places. I burn with passion
For the human race.
And I am faithful. I am loving the world,
I am touching everyone and they are touching me.
I am kissed good night by generations of young boys.
They look into my face. They call my name. They are mad for me.
What have I done? Am I so beautiful?
Why does everyone look at me as though
I am what is missing from their lives?
When I speak everyone is quiet.
It is the quiet that needs me most.
And so I do not speak. I shall not speak
Ever again. (My voice will be the dark
That falls gently over the earth.)
And so I do not speak.
I shall not speak ever again.
No matter how much I want
To tell them I love them. The quiet is frail,
The quiet is wise,
And comes to me when I call.
By The Light Of A Cold Winter Morning
November 1972
Along Fifth Avenue, the crowds were hurrying,
A winter chill blew through Rockefeller Center.
Morning sunlight tumbled from the tall glass buildings
And spread its wings along the streets,
And there shimmering in the pavement--
The bright glow of a woman's face,
Happy, amused, laughing, mouthing the words
To her innermost thoughts. Her words burning bright,
Rising, a puddle there, a pure joyous cloudy,
Shaped like a portrait of an elegant woman,
And it moved gracefully, rose up, gathered itself
On one elbow, then a knee, pressed upward,
The oval face and bright red lips singing.
And suddenly, sprang up, the lady was flesh,
She smoothed her skirt, adjusted her hat,
Smiled at the city, wet her lips and sang
A lullaby that moved the streets to hoots
And joyful excitements, She waved her hand
And every inch of the city sang back,
Hummed, cried her name.
She danced, her highheels tapping
Along the streets, running up the sides of tall buildings,
Calling to everyone, singing, trembling, waving.
And all day wandering the streets, looking into each face,
Each face kissed by light, shouting in the shadows, cursing,
And at the first fall of dusk, the first coarse word of dark that fell
She stooped to pick it up and eat it.
Until the dark was thick, heavy and all around,
The lights leaped down to the street and danced in the faces of passers-by,
Moving inside them, feeling jealous, expressing herself as light sometimes
does
When it knows what it wants. The night wanting to kill her.
The depth of woman's emotions and feelings
Shown on the sides of buildings.
The light given voice, an outlet, now a voice singing, stammering, jabbering
To itself the hundred sad thoughts of a human being.
The feelings and desires of sunlight being the same as a woman's feelings,
Wanting to be held, touched, yearning for fulfillment,
Asking why, why, why, and wondering if every man was made of dark.
The streets uncountable lovers with easy reputations, the rude coarse streets
And their mad wild hands leaping and touching her.
Everyone taking her. She felt nothing, the dark was empty, the dark
Was cruel and cold and pouring into her face the false and cold
On her face, kissing her with no tenderness, so cheap.
And it did not matter to them she was lost,
And looking for meaning inside each, searching inside them
For the way, the flesh so dark, the bones so dark.
She brought her light anyway and her voice was a woman's voice,
Sweet and smooth, pure and it saved them,
And they didn't know she hated them.
They suspected nothing. They thought she liked it.
She who was shocked and strangely moved
By their coldness, as though it warmed her.
----------
***********
The Battle For Paradise, Bleecker Street, 2AM
The day has ended, bloom the night,
The dark that comes to fall
Gives rise to the mice that crawl
Out of their holes, and call
In the shrill voices
Like the extreme far right:
'Burn the books, light
The fire to literature, art,
And know the age of piety
Has come round.
The crimes of men abound,
The sinister dark disturbing
Ways of liberty have found
Their way into the dark regions
Of the heart.
Seek out the homosexuals,
The changing sex roles,
The phony intellectuals
Line them up and wash their souls.
Mark them one by one,
So we know them
And watch them run
Through the flames of hate
That we have lit.
The battle be for Paradise,
And we have won it.'
*******
Fire Ain't What It Once Was, Jump On Me, Baby
Last night the dimpled, paintless landscape of hope
Caught fire, raged through a cluster of Bronx tenements,
And nothing escaped the blaze, the nets caught everyone
When they leaped down, as they do each night in the jazz-blues dark
And that black baby sky wailing for its supper,
Swung down and beat its chest, woke up the neighborhood of Man,
Bleating the crack songs of dead days, crazy times
Loud, everything crooned big-time, the firetrucks shook loose
From their stations, sang the first bars of Do-Wop Daddy,
(Fire ain't what it once was, jump on me, baby),
And can't nobody sing around here
Without the sound of raindrops
Beating on the lids of garbage cans?
Madison Square Garden, 1970
The days were crazy, harsh and fanatical,
Oh, how we came to love the problematical—
The minutes were all punk rock singers
Spinning pistols on their index fingers,
Screaming the words that heroin whispered
In their heads, outbursts of blues and reds.
And when we got up on stage
And rage brimmed inside us,
We sang loud, we burst with fire and lust,
Shrill, brittle was the truth. We cursed the government,
Greed, power, corruption, ignorance, hate,
Which made us millionaires, Keepers of the Euphoric State.
The past filled us with a sense of disgust,
The minutes in their bright spangled costumes
Waves to us from the abyss—
Who had only a short time,
Soon our days would come to dust.
The last minutes made us feel terribly odd.
In our sleep, we all talked endlessly of God.
The century in our bones rattled on, the white sheet
Drawn across our long faces, the ugly barefeet.
The look of shock replaced
By the little dry smiles so bittersweet
The drums and electric guitars whipped
Us like dogs, how we marched to the beat.
Dead on our feet.
----------
Manhattan Beach,
In The Blue Coves of Love, With The Prickly Waves
In the blue coves of love, with the prickly waves,
Swirl the moonlit swimmers, each in their red armor,
The first morsels of the year come swimming,
All are the horseshoe crabs soon to doze, dreaming of jellyfish and red coral,
The evangelical age of octopus, the good humpbacked whale, electric eel
(Its brightly-lit escapades deny the existence of sin),
And when at twilight, the tiny blue bubbles of a time
Rise triumphantly up to the surface, and wake their leader,
She frisks the surface, eyeless as a gray sky,
Looks sternly off toward the west,
Where it all happened, and may come again,
Her excitement reason to wonder it has already occurred—
The glimmering coming of the prickly waves,
The wild enchantment, identifying the source
Of joy as a crested moon borne by fantail shrimp
Row through the waters of the night,
Tossed the bits of joy, blown high and coming now straight for her,
Giving her no chance to move aside,
There being no ultimatum given in the cool void,
But this last great quiet that rings in her ears,
And suddenly lifts her up high,
So high she tastes the sweetness of the stars.
----------
Hell's Kitchen And The Green Eyes Like Bird Nests
August 1972
The buildings restless, subtly tremble up
And when no is looking twitch, tremble
The light likes leaves blowing through them,
A wind and shimmering glow of a light from the past,
Eight Avenue moving, kicking up,
Jiggles the streets loose--
Childlike the city, the streets playful
Bone-cool and the voices in the street
Shrill with wings, ears, eyes a sense of dread,
And the city has a feel for the centers of things,
Suddenly running through my the street
A low rumble and a bus screeches tender love calling,
The head-on collision of soft murmurs,
The drunken wild streets with green eyes like bird nests
The streets like egg speckled, and the red morning sun
Edgewise poking through a hole in the sky,
The faces all leaf bright doors
The smiles dark quiet expressions,
The one great moment that comes into the city,
Scoots uptown, the cry of wooden horse,
The squeaking down in the belly,
The mad birds in the bones of the subway,
Trains flying through the dark of a quiet time
The streets like monarchs of despair
Crying out in the bright tunnels
Of our damp dreary hopes,
Listening for a splash.
**********
Greenwich Village, And Sleeping On Rooftops
In the dark heroin streets,
The years like mad men screamed
And the tall glass buildings trembled up,
The packs of wild animals ran through our veins
Flashing fierce eyes of bright colors,
The stars mumbled their joys,
The dark voices rang out and the days dropped
One by one. We slept one long summer
All night on rooftops, naked as starlight,
The music of cars below, the cries of crazy people
Down in the street, the rumble of trains whispered
Their incantations, bursting with revelations,
The dark past tenderly fell inside us--
And in the clouds that drifted above Greenwich Village
In the swirls of crack and hash and grass scented night,
Searched us out and made us high,
The curls of smoke sang, told us stories,
The joy was hiding out inside us. Our job was to keep it safe
From the cops. The mind we believed was best
Served by delirious outbursts, madness,
The psychological advantage of early dementia and rebirth
And wild art of the hysterical kind and its gray hoary smiles,
Grunts, brutish loud excursions into the far reaches
Of eccentric human behavior--
That path we had to hack for ourselves, bursting in our heads
The old bones that stood in our way,
The dead forests high thick with unreasonableness,
The animals and the last holy minutes, screaming, freaked out,
The lovely tender paranoid and psychotic lives that we led
In the dumbstruck modern world of explosions and nakedness
And the doomed unloved malicious goodness and mirth
That climbed out of our bones
And shouted for love and mercy.
----------
Night Falls On MacDougal Street
Saturday night is a strange country.
The quiet eloquent plays the streets,
The queer insects singing in their little rooms
Know well the stars and their tender wits
That bright shine down, and flicker in the trees--
Their words have no elegy, but playful run
Through the dark, and pierce the quiet,
Singing their sweet gainful mysteries
That make little cities in the yards leap up,
Fresh-made the excitement plunders itself,
Wide opens the gate of night,
The moon wakes, bright round beggar
That dreams find lamentable,
So much so they burn in his craggy face
And so light the old world,
And make of it a lovely place.
**********
John Lennon Darkly Spoken
The eulogy was spoken slow and dripping,
As a fish out of water, so words tremble with sorrow,
Their scales shiny, tails flapping the blue sky
Until it froths, the fins sharp like the queer teeth
Of a moment, the pitiful mouth, loudly partakes
Of the inner sanctum, dives deep down,
Leaps up into our eyes, splashing all.
Hurled down the currents of gloom,
The great round eyes gobble up
The last morsels of the world,
The gills twitching with the nimbleness
Of a pickpocket, stealing bits of air
From the dark flesh of our despair.
Wild flinching, the nervous reflexes,
Beg of us the last mercy,
The murky cloud of the water turn,
The fish wags its tail, slow it ascends
The river crying for the fish,
Its lament shining strands of light
That bathe the deep.
The pink meat of the fish its joy,
Its sorrow and wishes that only
It could live one more hour.
Its soul wooden and worth,
The corpses of a dream that died,
And weeping makes it so--
The memory of water, the face
Of the sun shimmering on the water
The sweet insects that come to feed
Its belly, their dreams tasting sweet.
***********
----------
NYC, 1972
The city of dark souls and endless streets
Has come over the ridge of a small town,
Come rolling down the hill like a great ship run aground,
And all day it has gone round, boasting of its many feats—
How once it lifted the nation on its back
And carried it home, how it built with its own hands
The Brooklyn Bridge, and how once it found
Ten thousand homeless children at its doorstep
And fed them, and how its goodness was bound-
Less and all the charges against it groundless.
Its greatness so vast and powerful, it cast
Upon the waters of the world the bread,
That the little fishes of the sea
Might one day come and fill its nets
And the New World's poorhouse
Divvy up its debts.
********
The City Like A Great Ship
Summer 1974
The winds blow hard down the streets,
Manhattan trembles up, cry, rolling,
Rocking back and forth, ceaseless its wild motion,
The rain-drenched streets gurgling
And so bright and shimmering of a storm-tossed sea,
The streets rocking, moving onward,
The city like a great ship--
The vessel that moves ceaseless,
Its long chase through the dark regions
Of the human spirit spurred on,
The back upon which rest the nation,
The burdens of faces, and the cargo of dreams,
Move so quickly the eye cannot hold on,
The buildings like tall masts, the crew at every corner
Swab the minutes clean, pure innocent the day
Turns, waves of tomorrow in the distance,
Rippled the quiet time, the loud spectacle of its voyage,
The great deck of the great ship of strangers
Watching the waters of the deep that curl round
The bright pools of light, and leap past--
The loud sea and its loud fish crying,
The lumbering granite walls pushing off.
----------
----------
Central Park West
April 1972
The sleeping homeless hours and the derelict minutes
That hugged the streets, rubbed off on the dark--
And the days and the nights all sleeping in the park,
Green grass giving of scents so wild the heart raced
And loneliness had painted on their souls the sullen incoherent remarks,
Last shouts echoing in their ears, tearing down the city,
The unspoken words that raged in their bones, sang that morning
The queerest music, the venomous surprises and good melancholy
The why of love, generosity slain by the terrorists of indifference,
And the priest of Doubt, the sacraments of holy frustration,
And the unholy pain of doubt, terror and sheer exuberance of falling
Down from our high loft desires, smashing the glimmering dark
That wrenched in our guts, bled of truth, hypnotic spun free of our joy,
Zeppelin was dead, love was loud, shrill, kicking down the age,
The lyrical sobbing of the streets made us strong. Hate was what the banks
Loaned the business world, what the stock market scrambled for each day,
Barking, howling the sudden forgiveness and never-ending creation
Of bashed out brains spilling onto the walls of our loneliness
The idle wonders of our time, bloodstained whirling blocks of the city
Spun round and round by the loud walls dragging their faces across the dark,
The integrity of misfits, their social evil and scruffy clothes
The crazy mushroom cool thoughts blowing through our heads,
The souls of subway trains, blinking mole-eyed in the dark mines
Beneath the city, traveling in our veins the joy, the cry baby sadness
Of youthful rage kissing and humping the dark days down,
All the mad excursions to and from the mindless lost musical interludes
Playing the sickness that everyone danced to, arguing with perversely,
The hotter 'n hell lust beating up the sky, flesh as fresh
And the minutes in which we sang, trying to make sense
Of its, screaming into our cell-phones the uncanny words,
The timeless clarity of our farewells sickening our stomachs
And the little cities rolling down our cheeks
And trembling in our words the first terrible truths,
And listening to the fierce shrill cries of the morning
That come forward out of the walls to devour us.
************
Forty-Second Street, And The Hour of Pornography
August 1972
Though the holes in their arguments one observed
The human souls wearing their pink nightgowns,
The red lips of half-dressed chesty ghosts pale,
The stained-glass emotions cold and dripping through us,
And there was a great curiosity to observe how they flourish
And for things outright withdrawn from us--
The fleshy landmarks of dishonesty tall as buildings,
The loud salvation and prohibiting the dissemination
Of their images the door-closers and cracked windows
Though which the fatal flaws came flying,
Screaming, exhibiting the passions of lusty gods,
The hierarchy torn with bare emptiness and erotica
Shoveled snow in the cold regions of the human emotions,
The mind and its madhouse trembled loose,
Then love was controversial, and death was a bore.
God moved in the faces of the balloon breasted model,
Fled through their eyes and sang in the street,
And the public endured the rumbles
And the uproar of great public discourse,
Until that moment arrived—
What was it the quiet was saying to us?
There, up there so high, there appeared
Flickering on the clouds, a great panorama
Not unlike the Sistine Chapel's Adam and Creation—
Etched indelibly along the blue sky, so crassly cluttered
With horrible images so tasteless and coarse,
An old man with a naked little girl sitting on his lap,
Women bound and being burned by cigarettes.
The nipples of men pierced with swords.
The women having sex with a German shepherd,
The repulsive private adult-only smut of loveless nations
The predators of carnal joys, sadomasochism, bestiality, vaginal and rectal
Fisting, eroticized urination and pedophilia.
The crazy mad porn culture of hysteria, sexless erotica,
Unsubtle, explicit passions of the astonishing disingenuous world
Of bestiality. The female buried in a potter's field of erotica,
The tasteless jests, the prevalence of loneliness, the devastating incongruity
That diminishes us all, lacking no discrepancies, more disproportionately
graven,
Hideously consumed by clusters of unnatural fears bearing their lusts
Through the streets, the sperm dried and clumped, evaporating, rising to the
sky,
And clotting until the light cannot slip through, the caked dark clay sky.
Astonishing the molesters, and the arguably polemic minimal credibility--
Savage discontent growing to such insurmountable heights,
The sacred arcane dark age in which we have been thrust,
Frightening us like a great thunder storm roaring down,
The baked clay sky dropping its mud, covering us.
*************
**********
Night In SoHo
In the heroin streets the mad men screamed,
Ran through our veins flashing eyes of bright colors,
The stars mumbled their joys,
The dark voices rang out and the days dropped
One by one. We slept one long summer
All night on rooftops, naked as starlight,
The music of cars below, the cries of crazy people
Tenderly called inside us--
The clouds that drifted in the sky above Greenwich Village
Swirls of crack and hash and grass made us high,
The curls of smoke sang, told us stories,
The joy was hiding out inside us. Our job was to keep it safe
From the cops. The mind we believed was best
Served by delirious outbursts, madness,
The psychological advantage of early dementia and rebirth
And wild art of the hysterical kind and its gray hoary smiles,
Grunts, brutish loud excursions into the far reaches
Of eccentric human behavior--
That path we had to hack for ourselves, bursting in our heads
The old bones that stood in our way,
The dead forests high thick with unreasonableness,
The animals and the last holy minutes, screaming, freaked out,
The lovely tender paranoid and psychotic lives that we led
In the dumbstruck modern world of explosions and nakedness
And the doomed unloved malicious goodness and mirth
That climbed out of our bones
And shouted for love and mercy.
----------
***********
The Streets Crazy, Wild Tell Me Why
April 1973
City, O city for whom there was no pity,
I was the great dope fiend, wandering your mad streets,
I wore round my neck a tiny glass bottle
In which shimmered a sliver of love,
Along the dirty streets I moved
Through the tendrils of the city's heart
That lead me into playfulness and sinfulness,
The grossly loving seriousness of commerce,
The emotional and sensual pleasure
That only an great city would yield to a lost soul,
Suddenly accepting me, strangely intimate
As though I was part of the city,
One of its main streets, and came up
Upon me and spoke so tenderly, I smiled.
The city suddenly turned dark.
And what had happened. But it had vanished.
The city had gone far away. But no, no.
It was inside me. I could feel the city
And it was hot and burning.
I had a fever and sweated like a pig.
My heart beat faster and faster.
The city had ran wild inside me,
The streets clinging to the top
Of my head. I felt like the tallest building,
That bit of rare love fell inside me.
I had somehow pleased the world
And the streets shimmered for only me
And clanged their rickety cymbals,
And I was everywhere.
I was beneath the streets, rumbling
Like the belly of a dying beast.
I was made of metal and fire.
I was the trains pounding along the tracks,
I was the great mind delving
Into the dark reservoirs of bottomless doubt,
And I heard all the hateful cries and pain.
I became the cries. I was the beaten down streets.
My life was long and flat and hard.
Broadway, and the streets crazy, wild told me why
They had gone mad, and why the dead didn't dream
Of the city anymore, and love was pretty,
Dressing up all fine, but hadn't much chance here.
Each inch of the city covered with the sinister scent
Of innocence and shame. My face was vast,
Hideous as a graveyard, but also if you gazed
At me through lovestruck passion I was stunningly brilliant
And begging for attention, forgetful, a little drunk,
The bits of heroin floating in my veins.
I was the skyscrapers and the bridges.
I was the little girl skipping across Forty-seventh Street.
The crowds moved inside me by such simple goodness,
Their fancies and ornate notions infinitely lavished
On me this vast place, all quivering and moving
Through me for the first time.
The bright red thoughts in my head
Turning yellow and blue and green
And making music which flowered
In my ears. I heard a jazz piano
And knew there was no greater thing
Than to walk along Broadway,
As the stones of joy struck me
In the face.