To the discontented dreams walking through the dismal decadence of a generation’s misplaced sincerity, along the corners of empty markets and abandoned townhouses and drug-infested parks and housing projects, the blanket of eternity warms the contemporary chills of sadness along a stranger’s spine,
To the soulful singers and the tired poets, the dreamers, idealists, and the hobos whose dust clings to the ghost engines of locomotives of Southern melancholia, along the thickets of thorns coated with the blood of the Negroes and their unchanged magic and blood soaked karma, the America we know must confront such chilling histories,
To the woeful songs of the youth, spilling across the timeless waves of devolution and unspoiled shores of lost memory, the melodies churn with thunder within the basin of toxic sewage and the lifeless poets dare to dream the dream no man can find satisfying,
To the sun and the moon, the two entities in the sky passing by the horror all eyes wish to pierce with flame and melt the plastic Hollywood images of our time, with the serrated edge of a knife’s blade flickering like a silver jewel in the moonlight, where Hamlet’s laughter stimulates the rhythm of consciousness like the quickened excitement of a perfected sonnet to the empty epiphany brain of our reckless care,
To the mothers who long to smother their little boys and girls with the cradle palm and the warm breast, for her eyes weep at the chaos with folded arms and crooked necks, and to gaze at the unemployment lines are to follow the coiled stems of the snakes and the thieves, the politicians and their two-faced theories,
To the father’s who have lost their fathers to chance or depravity, to the neglected sons whose hearts must pump concrete with panic, their soccer ***** and toy guns have yet to be touched by the jolt of masculinity as the father climbs his mountain of abandonment and carelessly invokes the same demons that destroyed his father,
To the lonesome drunkards, the feverish crack dealers, the dismal meth-heads, and the 9 to 5 dead end workers, I shall greet them with a glass of enlightenment and reason, but their skin is far too thick to be punctured with the spike that shimmers on Liberty’s head,
To my generation of apathy, how unchanged the afterlife must be, for you know nothing of oblivion but you know everything about the technologically advanced systems of dishonesty, you utilize such things to mask your insecurities and dismal glares and vacant grins and fake smiles, but we pray for you in Time magazine and the newspapers hate both of us,
To the madness in every age, that horrid illness that touches the infant and the elder, that rapes the ****** and the ***** and pushes time and stops it, we have crawled far into the prison cell to escape the shadows that are our shadows,
To the innocence splattered on the sidewalk, the blood flows imagination twisted, images of the worse kind, marketed and packaged by the hands of those who work mindlessly in the factories of tyranny, who have wept at the clock longer than the clock has wept at them,
Who have played the guitar with ****** fingertips and poured truckloads of sweat into their musical dreams as the mirrors on the walls reflected a howling skeleton beyond the gates of Eden, who have slept with friends and a friend of a friend as the world turned them against each other by a simple twist of time,
Who have challenged the social order with a gesture or a pen or a bullet as the world broke out against the police and the Pagan feasts, those ragged Bleeker Street dwellers that mopped the Village with ****** hands and hopeful poetry, Simon and Garfunkel’s Sparrow died because of them, those misguided souls that turn their face from the *** who remind them of themselves more than their own reflection, bones, and mistakes,
Whose false impression we are admiring on the vacant walls of impossibility, where the nurturer and the wicked step-mother run circles around the fiction of truth and the books you shall never read but read anyway,
Who have walked the road no one else would walk, but crawled as they talked and walked as they barked beneath the haunted turns of memory wooded wandering, therein lies the hollowed caverns of abyss, the holes within you that turn out to be true, truer and finer than anything you could do,
Who have fought in the wars called upon by the unbearable static currents, those who have lost ears, eyes, fingers, and legs, the wheelchair bound poet in his muted expression, the condemned man and the electric chair, to the barber, teacher, priest, judge and his wife,
To the children at school and the dancing childless fool, who have witnessed death passing by, the lovers and isolated writers, even the aunt and uncles who sigh, we watch, we eat, we challenge what we greet, and the nameless shall remain nameless through the obscured faces of the shameless,
Undertakers reveal their hidden identities as the wealthy man’s child wanders in confusion, to the traveling blues men who have sold the man in the long black coat more than a few songs and strained strings of struggling strumming sorrow,
Painless pandemonium within the pipe-dreaming poets, who have watched houses burn in haunted hapless hoping, but the Nun knows not to place her loyalty with the **** and the sinful nature of our universe,
To the weakened hearts and the heavy souls, to the oversaturated handkerchiefs and the pain very few shall ever know, who have promised the great promise on a lonesome night and waited up for the end of the world as the world ended them,
Who have waited for assurance on the front of the daily newspapers, it is the soundlessness of ignorance that writes all these papers, and the ink reads black, glazed, political, right, left, middle, left, right,
To the editors in chief and the homeless firetrap, to the wrinkled feet caught on nails throughout America’s chest, the dreamers have dreamed and you shall all wake, to the findings of truth on every corner, to epiphany’s immortal idealized intelligence, the poetry written on dead-end walls and the forgetful shall remember what was lost,
This intoxicating fume of poetry caught, the flame of predication, and all that assuming has deeply wrought.