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Can't freeze a caludron with only witchbone and cigarette dreams.

No sir; I live in the city not a
surreality.  The smoke can kiss my collarbone, not my vexed mind.

The only thing I am is the color of lightning and all I have to offer is my glass.

As in hour, not luminous wine.

                  ....

There is a chandelier
Within my eyes
And only you can
Flick the switch

Hobbling over rock and dust,
The Nameless winces with every weary step.
His soles scorched and torn
By the unaccustomed roughness underfoot
The jagged teeth of a prickly piping earth.

Alone he makes his way
With tiny treads towards the dying dusk.
Fatigue dragging at his limbs
Bowing his neck to leave eyes downcast
And unfocussed; seeing naught but blurs and
The swirling and swaying of the trembling past.

A city:
Grand buildings stretching as one toward the sky;
Great lions waking from their feast and basking
In the brilliance of noonday air.
The bustle of flesh coursing about their purpose
The tight press of bodies all around
And the chatter and the natter and the laughter and the anger.

And then the silence.
The fear and the glares.
The hunger
And a guilty aversion of one’s eyes.

The shattering of glass
The raising with fire and boot.
And the stealing of Names.

And now here he trudges.
With tiny treads and into naked night.

Preludium, or, *what has gone before:
A man makes his way, alone,
Through rocky ash and bluff,
His feet a mass of ****** scabs
His throat gruff with rust.
In his savage thirst he sees, delirious,
The City from whence he flees;
The City that stole his Name.

Furious! O righteous hate;
Bubbling! Consuming! Melding with his haze of pain:
Fickle Justice! Intangible Law! Humble Equity!
Alien words for an alien time
That has quickly descended to muck.

But we must leave this Nameless nomad
To his dark visages, for now.
Perhaps we shall return
To plough his tale and groan
To find him drowned in thirst;
In self-pity, the liquid fire.
For now- to the City, we are bound!
And the mind of one so fortunate, as to still call his Name his own.

Oh, cumbersome language-*
When one might reach, grasping and willing,
Toward a certain and knowable feeling
It is you who blocks the way.

No sooner is the feeling felt and clutched to breast
Than it attempts to mould to thunken word,
Where, with treacherous glee,
It flails and fails to fit.

So soon we stand with naught but putty in our hands,
As it cools and crusts to nonsense.