Forgive the night
And it's scattered ashes
It's morbid children
Casting lots for the
Bruised garments of a
Reluctant martyr
Satyrs and shaman
Sages and madmen
Derelict casinos
And broken boulevards.

Forgive the night
Fearless and feral
The desolate moon betrothed
To truant stars
That forgot to shine
And unanswered prayers
That forgot to die
Brooding orchids nodding
Towards an unresponsive sky.

Forgive the night
It's tapestry of shadows
It's soliloquy of loss and longing
It's conspiracies of silence
It's unrelenting chaos

Forgive the night
It's gospels of oblivion
It's prose written in curdled moonlight.

Forgive the night
It's orphans of Cain
Wandering, forever wandering
In kingdoms of perpetual obscurity
Carrying their mark proudly
As a ruthless crown.

This is the way of things here.

She's the most beautiful woman
     In the room
I lick the air as she passes
       Rife with perfume and subtle *******
Languidly, in soft sultry motions
       She moves like a cheetah
       With poise and deliberation
Like nickelodeon 1920  
       She goes about in flickering frames
Never quite as she was the moment before---
       now seductive
       now demure
       now flirtatious
       now unsure
                                
She moves effortlessly through
       myriad poses of amorous delight
All eyes stealing a lecherous glance
       without exactly looking

I feel the radiant fire
       Of her scarlet bodice gown
A sweeping, flowing train
       Following at her heels
A circle of pearls around her
       Long, delicate neck
       Borrowing their radiance from hers

Her hair a flaxen crown of glory
       Tickling her bare shoulders
       Like a rippling veil
Her eyes, lustrous azure
       Meeting mine for an infinite instant
       Speaking an unspoken nexus
       Of shared pasts and an undefined future
Sturdy haunches taut and tenacious
       Legs treacherous and long
       Leading me into a liaison
       With flowers and blood

Take me then, scarlet strumpet
       To moments of rapture and regret
       To nights that help us to forget
That the time is of transient embrace
      A defined time and propitious place
      To be repeated under a different sun
Where you lay waiting
      Sprawled beneath an indifferent sky
The absent touch of your paramour
      Reflecting in your eye.

This is permanent...

Her name carved into my flesh
Nights full of razor blades
And ******* out my lucky stars

Endless hours spent
In spectral dormitories of the soul
Sharing my bed with an unresponsive shadow

Fatal portraits and indecipherable mosaics
Of rusty blood and stale *****
And random hebephrenic blotches adorn the walls

...I don't remember doing that(?)

Failure to connect
Server not found
Session has expired

Take these moribund dreams from me
Bury them in the catacombs of my heart
With the rest of the headless children

Then bring me XL18 portable flamethrower
And my Swiss Army knife
So I can express myself with full poetic license

Have you ever witnessed catharsis
In budding roses of holocaust?

Have you ever witnessed self-realization
Measured in casualties?

...This **** is permanent.

Rosary clutched in stigmata death-palm
coughed-up contrition of flies,
saints of jazz
doo-*** prophets
scrying the future
from the crumbling platforms
of terminal subways
Desolate taxis
hijacked by hobo lords spewing dysentery,
harvest moon waxing
ever-expanding translucent womb
of hostile intentions left to die
Barricades of broken dreams
stockpiles of regret
"Remember the pox of '26?"
"****** your sister"
"Not a prayer--***** priestess ****-altar
in terminal subway"
"Believe it"
Desperate shadows
of neon slave-kings
flutter by like nickelodeon
stuck on 1920
New feasts in empty rooms
served by ******* children
of obsolete gods
Highways filled with
dispossessed shadows
harvested from toxic
curdled telepathic fusion
of soft spiritual resonance
upon flashback landscapes
Jew street-vendors
hustling new flesh
for old scars
New breeds of
the same old crooners
gurgling asymmetric odes
pining over angry youth
and necromantic daydreams
Hostages taken by silent armies
Locust women nesting
virulent seeds in catacomb brothels
Starlight suicide casts silhouette
upon hungry playgrounds
Cruel magic, discarded taboos
fetal totems
Piano plays itself
in spectral ghost town saloon
Iridescent window fragments
of hollowed-out Mardi Gras trailer park
Lazy wolves move
in slow maddening orbits
The meandering scent
of virginal ***** girls
strewing violets with hymeneal joy
The final trumpet
bleating agony of soft pearls
like death needing a friend
Now the seals the scrolls the bowls
and diaries of Hebraic nightmares
"Remember the pox of '26?"
"I'm tired"
"Do you remember Heaven's frozen depths?"
"Can't feel my legs"
"Perilous matrimony
dowry of blood and skin--rest now"
the last of our tears
fall into Hell as rain.

It should make me bleed
It should make me feel uncomfortable in my own skin
It should take me where I don't want to go
Into the darkest corners of obsolete dreams
It should stir the old gods to life
And awaken the slumbering spirit of the race
Spare me your numb sentimentality
And windows into your flaccid memories
Bring forth your demons and their hell fire
Wield your pen like a knife to my throat
And make me feel alive for even a few minutes
Speak to me the words of a new faith
Sing to me forbidden songs of new ceremonies
Invite me into your darkest corners and show me your horrors
Let us barter on the black market of thoughts and ideas
Let us reinvent the myths
Speaking new worlds into being
Let us be gods for a time

Through a rusty needle in my vein--
  My kingdom come
From the smoking barrel of a gun--
  My kingdom come
Dropped from the ****** backs of a ****** of crows--
   My kingdom come
Riding the slick, sweaty backs of rats--
   My kingdom come
Raining down in tears from a blood-stained sky--
   My kingdom come
Dripping with fire from a legion of mangled stars--
   My kingdom come
From her torn maidens head in my palm--
   My kingdom come
Rolling off her swollen breast--
   My kingdom come
Falling upon the daggers in my eyes--
   My kingdom come
From the bottom of a pill bottle--
   My kingdom come
Galloping upon the bare backs of four frothing nags--
   My kingdom come
Bore upon the bowed back of the Mutant King--
   My kingdom come
Searing, seething in harnessed surrender--
   My kingdom come
Upon the breeze of a falling hammer--
   My kingdom come
In the sweet taste of *****-
   My kingdom come
Laced in her morning breath--
   My kingdom come
Upon the wings of stale incense--
   My kingdom come
Nestled within the stain of fermented grain--
   My kingdom come
Coursing through my virulent, rebel blood--
   My kingdom come
Crystalized in the budding dew drops--
   My kingdom come
Perched upon the peak of the blossoming roses thorn--
   My kingdom come
Dripping from the ******'s flaxen quince--
   My kingdom come
Upon the blushing pilgrim's lips
   My kingdom come
Over the peaks and valleys of her form--
   My kingdom come
Stepping upon the bruised backs of the meek--
   My kingdom come
Rising out of the ashes--
   My kingdom come
Erected in my image--
   My kingdom come
Advancing to the rumbling fanfare of Gabriel's trumpet--
   My kingdom come
Unleashed like fever and plague--
   My kingdom come
Drawn and quartered before the mobs ill council--
   My kingdom come
Reflected in the shifting scales of serpents--
   My kingdom come
Through the obscene prayers of ******--
   My kingdom come
Dawning from the wreckage at Zarathustra's heel
   My kingdom come
By the conspiracy of orphans and dregs--
   My kingdom come
In the shadow of a renewed covenant--
   My kingdom come
As the sun creeps 'neath the rolling hills like a stealth criminal--
   My kingdom come
When the night has spent the last of her stars--
   My kingdom come
As the tattered firmament collapses in defeat--
   My kingdom come
Swinging like a pendulum 'neath the gallows--
   My kingdom come
Oscillating feral and naked 'round the Maypole--
   My kingdom come
Through the splintered window and wormwood door--
   My kingdom come
Healed by a flock of mutinous angels--
   My kingdom come
Across fallow fields of endless longing--
   My kingdom come
Smuggled into seedy ports--
   My kingdom come
Upon the cusp of a gathering storm--
   My kingdom come
In relentless, unbridled harmony--
   My kingdom come
In any form, immaculate or deformed,
let my flesh fall and become undone--
   My Kingdom come

She left her flesh
At the foot of the bed
Her carnal virtues laid bare
Her raven hair
  Her mourning veil
Licking at her naked, pale shoulders
Her sumptuous, full-moon *******
Watching over her smooth,  flat abdomen
Her *******  
Concealing long-wounded virginity
Her legs, pillars of marble
Moving in slow, sensuous strut
  
Dark mistress, keeper of my silent desires
And exquisite nocturnal corruptions  
She bends to my longing
Piercing my lip with her vampire tooth
With witchy fingers she caresses my face
Her darkness reaching out to mine
Her breath smells of cadavers  and lust
Her ****** blushing lips
Stealing my inhibitions
And whispering alchemical ****** allures
Drawing me further into her sensuous shadow
  
Fair-faiced succubus  
Trailing a black frock of venereal sins
She falls upon me
Playing out her nightmares  
Upon my malleable flesh
Her cold hands moving, searching  
Finding what her desire demands
  
Bare back and free she mounts
Riding us into her endless oblivions
The night is her witness
As I am lost in the violence of her moving
  
Dropping the reins  
She reaches for the sky
A convulsion, a shudder of abandon
She  cries out like a wild banshee
As I release my moribund seed into her pallid womb.  
  
Like morning mist
She evaporates into my daydreams forever.

Beyond my door
Nothing but dark quiescent
Corridors of silence
Cardboard walls locking in
Each to his own nightmares
Men jerking off to senile fantasies
Lady Luck crouching in the corner
A blushing malignant smile on her lips
We choke on cigarette smoke
Coughing up long-expired dreams
Onto a sagging mattress
Marked with cigarette burns
Dry *** and stagnant wishes
Sometimes on Saturday nights
Comes the sound of a woman's voice
Visiting somewhere off the corridors
A weathered ***** costing a desperate Romeo
His last $10 leaving him
with no money for wine or smokes
Trading his motley comforts
For the only companionship money can buy
No sounds of *******
Not even a $10 *******
They just talk through the night
Reminding him and the rest of us
What it was like before it all went wrong
I barely recall the sound
Of a woman's voice most times
Their breathy candor
Their lilting speech
Their throaty **** sounds
I think of the years that have passed since
And my room grows colder
The walls laugh louder
Her voice fills the corridors
Reminding us that we are
Disconnected from the world
And its amorous gardens of delight
Eventually she departs
And all returns to wounded normalcy
The merciless sound of nothingness incarnate
Endless corridors with rooms
Housing cigarettes cheap wine
And men who have forgotten how to cry.

Sifting through the wreckage
Of yesterday’s meltdown
Like returning to the scene of a crime

The last of me
Outlined in chalk
Thoughts of her
Still running down my cheeks

Scars on my arms
No hesitation cuts
Each wound precise
Every **** deliberate

Her name
Carved into my chest
Just over the heart
Slashed in phlebotomic shorthand

My vacant eyes
Reflecting her
Searching for her
Reaching for her

Eventually I will stand
Covered in dry blood and dust
Cigarette burns and rust
Loneliness tinged with bitter sorrow
Only to fall apart once again tomorrow.

Of the horns I am
Of the horns I remain
Slouching across fields
Of **** and ruin
Crouched beneath
The reeling sunwheel
Upon a mephitic breeze
My prayers go out
Like a harvest of rats.

Of the rusty rails I am
Of the rails I remain
Hobo shaman
Black-clad vagabond King
Black marketeer
Of a paradise misbegotten

Of the bottomless pit I am
And of the pit I remain
My lilting choirs of Armageddon
Sung on lyres strung with flesh and wire
Summoning my ******* sons and brute creations
Shat from feculent wombs of excrement
I stand insolently against Gabriel's hollow trumpet
And Michael's jaded blade
Soon to be bound in perpetual night
My assassins are on the wing

I inherit the earth
Upon the backs of the meek
I am legion
For I am many.

Choke on my own blood
As I scream myself to sleep
Smothered by unanswered prayers
And parched desires
Like a ****** of crows
My devils circle above me
Awaiting the steaming carrion
Of the remnants of my heart

My sorrows countless
The only ones that shall
Share my bed this night
Assemble and lay their traps for me
As my sequestered soul
Wanders the nightscape
Seeking her out
But finding only the hooks and snares
Set by my conspiracy of demons
Waiting just behind the lids of my eyes

I do not dream...
I fall
I do not sleep...
I die
This bed of nails a coffin
These musty sheets a shroud
Tasting nightly deaths
Condemned and cast out
To the sun cracked wastelands

Lay no stone
To mark this unholy site
Scatter my ashes
Over her homeland
That I may finally know her
As her sweet breath
Stirs the dying embers
Of my spirit.

Terminal landscape of necrotized cities
Grey spectral sidewalks ending in splinters
Streets paved with gravestones
Roving children reared upon barbed wire dreams
Their hollow teeth filed down
And stilettos in their boots

A malignant sky like an open wound
Bruised with an exhausted moon
Skyclad women
Wanton and feral
Spilling syphilitic nightmares
Within vacant doorways
High priests of unconstituted religions
Spelled out in cuneiform shorthand
Myopic prophets foretelling wars already lost
Prognosticating futures already passed

Dead end highways congested with traffic
Neon lights leading nowhere
Muted streetlights casting shadows
And always the unrelenting silence of inevitability

This is how it is.
This is how it ends.

Dig it---
Midnight
Clap-board border town

Myopic camera zooms in
Like crosshair eye

Skin like weathered saddle bags
A belch of crows over-head
Murderous wing
Tilting & lilting
In random unison
Shifting in a pale, parched sky.

Time passes like horses
Leading a black maria.

Dig it---
Midnight
Saloon lights
Sounds of cat houses
Beautiful thieves in attendance

Twelve hours to showdown
Whole town will be watching
"Bring your guns Johnny boy-
There's gonna be trouble ".

Rudimentary gunslinger
In a cardboard hotel
Gideon Bible open to Mark 5:9

Fast forward

Catacombs
Nursing homes
She rises like curdled sunshine
Ivory ribs rip at her side.

Outdoor cinema
Pageant of crosswalks
And the commune of sewers
Subway platforms
Infinity of rusty rails

Dig it---
Bangkok bordello
And the stink of ****
***** daydreams
Yellow fever nightmares
Blood dawn rising
Upon lurid fingers
And the still breeze
Hanging like conjugal sweat
Never to awake in my own skin again

I’m only as strong as the drugs I'm on.

Walking these streets
My feet stick to the pavement
Wet with blood and ***

The air thick and stagnant
Settling in the lungs like ash
All around are seas of broken glass
And scattered shards of dreams

Children with vacant eyes
Playing at gutter wars
Their miniature armies
Filling the night with screams

Teenage existentials
Nursing junk habits
Prepubescent mothers
Trading food stamps for ****

Beggars with cellphones
Pacing the medians
Pigs in blue getting head
In silent stairwells

Boarded up windows
Keeping secrets in
And all hope out

Silent mills
Desolate railroad tracks
Stretching forth to nowhere

Boulevards of desperate shadows
Vacant lots and empty playgrounds
Burnt out tenements
Foreclosures and yellow tape

Slouching back to my room
An overflowing ashtray
And walls that sigh
All night long

I settle in, laying back on my bed
With its familiar creaks and groans
Thinking of my far away love
Who will someday lift the darkness from these streets.

In this room...  
It's blistered cardboard walls  
And a monotonous bulb
Guttering above me  
Like a flickering 60 watt sun
That forgot how to shine  
  
Surrounded by the scent  
Of stale cigarettes  
And the scattered remnants of nightmares  
Footsteps  outside my door  
Disembodied fragments of men  
Scurrying down infinite corridors of silence
  
Leaning out my window  
Into the sprawling urban night  
The wafting bouquet of garbage  
And the relentless symphony  
Of sirens and screams  
The ****** on the corner  
Pacing her purgatory of sidewalks  
With absent feline grace  
  
I light my last cigarette  
Burning my throat and stomach  
Blowing smoke rings of oblivion  
Towards the bulging cracked ceiling  
  
Scrawling desperate verse  
To a love in a far distant place  
Wondering if she'll ever reach me  
Amidst this wreckage and ruin.  
  
One day they'll find me  
My silent pen in stigmata death grip  
With nothing but tattered notebooks  
And scattered throwaways  
To mark my earthly sojourn.

These four walls
Cold, hostile
Giving no quarter
Closing in like an angry mob

Coming to terms with the alchemy
Of silent desperation

Four walls
Sweating nicotine
And runaway dreams
Moist with tears
And broken hearts

Pacing the floor
A path well worn
The wreckage of myriad regrets
Falling from my heel

Four walls
And two windows
Looking out at
More walls still
An endless array
Of hope fenced in

Four walls
With eyes in them
The eyes of rats
Shifting and senile
Marking my every move

Four walls
The sum and whole
Of the universe
Mensurable and incarnate

In here
Where the air is thick
With smoke and daydreams
There is but one option
Facing existence...

...use once and destroy.