INT. BASEMENT, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM - 3:00 AM
TYLER and ALEX sit.
ALEX: I need to tell you something.
Darren Aronofsky rallies a childrens' choir in background. Ellen Burstyn hangs from the ceiling by her nails.
ALEX: I love you.
Hell opens its mouth.
CUT TO:
EXT. SCENES FROM THE RAPTURE – 3:01 AM
Hans Asperger and Lou Gherig ascend to Heaven.
Hans Zimmer and Bethesda Studios writhe on bedrock (now aflame).
TYLER: Are you sure?
Time stops.
Hell swallows itself centrally, assuming the shape of a living room.
INT. LIVING ROOM - 3:01 AM
All exit stage left and re-enter between couch cushions.
ALEX: Pretty much.
42 pianists stomp arias with their feet. A childrens' choir descends to Hades.
Charon distributes CharlieCards. The innocent are special guests.
INT. MY ESOPHAGUS, BRAINTREE – 3:01 AM
I am on the colledge.
I slip on LSD. I gain my balance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson turns his head 180 degrees and emerges from a leather suitcase. I am the lock.
Hell closes its mouth.
ALEX: I love you.
TYLER: Pretty much.
shops open.
merchants bare their wares in light
reflected off the lawns of Liffey esplanades;
a motley haze from ruined palisades
arcs up and yawns away its breath;
a sigh replaces salty air.
“You can smell the dirty parts of town,”
a woman whispers,
“when the wind shifts.”
soldiers march.
truncheons on the cobblestone of Parnell Square
gallop beside the boots of fusiliers;
the General and arrayed familiars
pass drink and wench by rifle’s width;
a priest waves.
“You can hear the water in the bay,”
he shouts,
“when the wind shifts.”
the wind shifts.
shirts convene in dwindling piles
along the sides of Muglin’s Rock;
Forty Feet of highland wall unfurl
and curtain swimmers
to Protestants, in bed.
the wind shifts.
street dogs stretch their haunches
barking up beneath the dying dusk;
shops’ clothes,
wistful on the racks of tawdry men,
go unsold.
shops close.
soldier, priest, and dog swim home,
bowing heads against the Dublin twilight;
reflecting off of churchyard walls,
arcing up into the absence of the sun,
when the wind shifts.
there was throw-up in the Paramount elevator.
the janitor (bad of english)
spoke in gestures,
and when the doors bared their stomach
I understood---
saw the acid-and-vodka
archipelago'd on the floor.
there was throw-up in the Paramount elevator.
the janitor (sopping)
said thehnk yuu
and tore his umbilical mop
from the doors---
motioning forward
for me to fill
the gap.
no, I said, thank you,
and, warily,
immersed.
there was throw-up in the Paramount elevator.
pawprints, smeared
trembling, in fives.
I rode---
to 7, onward,
in utero.
Holocene (for Allen Ginsberg)
I saw the best minds of my generation---
cool, confident, naked;
teenagers throwing cautious eyes up at the popcorn of high school ceiling tiles,
who toted bad habits around the scrapheap of modern education,
singing techno and emoting ethics from the silver drives of Macs,
who starved through lunch breaks between the mute havens of library bookshelves,
defacing Rubik's Cubes and wayward professors, in over their heads,
who held their arms high and laughed at the ineffable madness of
Lifting Their Skinny Wrists Like Antennas to the Senior Floor,
who backstroked through the cool irreverent Holocene of youth, hallucinating
PlayStations in pool parties and Cool Ranch Doritos in back-to-back sleepovers,
who fell, bleary-eyed and hopeless, beneath the Holy American Mess of gym class
football,
who broke, teary-eyed and alone, clutching the wholly American mess of mid-term
report cards,
of busdriver write-ups, and broken limbs and bad dreams and bad grades and break-up
text messages,
who, affluent and awkward and sober, sat up smoking Apples to Apples in the cold
subterranean underearth of basement hangouts,
who, bankrupt and confident and high, stood sipping salty tequila on the purple
moonlight theaters of backyard porches,
of backseat couches, and family playrooms and sports team dugouts and disciplinary
podiums,
who, in inebriate desert wanderings, explored each other's bodies beneath the orange
off-light of abandoned master bedrooms, from cuddle to kiss to fuck,
who, in the sunlight stopsign cul-de-sac labyrinth of suburbia, swung their feet into dusty
four-seat sedans and learned to drive,
who drove, to New York, to Boston, to Friendly's, and sat slurping ice cream in the torn
pleather feedingbooths of neo-diners,
who crashed, rolled on the wet green bosom of youth, and ruined BMWs, wiping the
crystal fog of hangover from their eyes,
who died, on long roads and long nights, in quiet unsung accidents atop the torch-lit
tor of Seventeen,
who mourned, spread quilts of memorial across morning lacrosse fields, and sang
microphone prayers over the dark sweeping hairdos of young apathy,
who floated, hollow-bellied and translucent, through the ethereal lunacy of high school,
and summer, and slumber, and joy, and youth.
they were perfect mornings,
when I’d lie in bed with my arms
running parallel to my headboard
and listen to the gutters chew runoff
in their sloshing way---
the water, I imagined,
not its usual blue
but instead teal-and-gray,
like hospital gowns
or the muted light that dripped down
on those days,
far heavier than the rain.
ash floats down and curls around
the pencil-sketch silhouettes
of New England trees.
it fills worn ruts in roads
and piles upon the asphalt plains
of suburbia, where above each neighborhood
clouds loom dark and tall
like sick tenements.
glass presses my face
and the faces of my neighbors,
who stand huddled in houses
staring towards sallow air
where a few hints of warmth
disappear behind flakes
of human transgression.
the sky flutters to the ground,
and drags down
neighborhood eyes.
my brother looks beside me;
does radiation smell? he asks,
cutting through the drone
of our street’s harmonizing generators.
I don’t know, I say.
daddy, dad---
dad, does radiation smell?
the throng of rain
catches car headlights -
holds them fluttering
against the insides
of its hands.
light from homes
stumbles groggy in the street -
faints, inebriated,
on rough-cut pillows
of cornerstone gravel.
October sighs -
contorts itself,
glowing dark and oppressive;
hulks in the light
of morning streetlamps.
October sighs -
gropes the displays
in foggy buses,
spins them around,
and holds them against
its chest, sopping:
a drunken father.
