For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the ***** streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their ***** beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and **** and endless *****, incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo, who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room, who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars boxcars

For
              Carl Solomon

                   I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
      madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the ***** streets at dawn
      looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
      connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
      ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
      up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
      cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
      contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
      saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
      ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
      hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
      among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
      publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
      skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
      ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
      to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their ***** beards returning through
      Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
      Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
      torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
      cohol and **** and endless *****,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
      lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
      Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
      tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
      dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
      storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
      blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
      vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
      lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
      ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
      until the noise of wheels and children brought
      them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
      battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
      in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
      floated out and sat through the stale beer after
      noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
      of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
      pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
      lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
      down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
      off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
      and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
      and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
      and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
      Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
      trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
      City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
      ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
      drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
      railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
      leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
      through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
      father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
      athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
      stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
      ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
      angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
      gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
      homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
      light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
      seeking jazz or *** or soup, and followed the
      brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
      and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
      to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
      behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
      and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
      place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
      F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
      eyes **** in their dark skin passing out incom-
      prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
      the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
      Square weeping and ******* while the sirens
      of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
      down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
      wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
      and trembling before the machinery of other
      skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
      in policecars for committing no crime but their
      own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
      dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
      scripts,
who let themselves be ****** in the *** by saintly
      motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
      the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
      love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
      gardens and the grass of public parks and
      cemeteries scattering their ***** freely to
      whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
      with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
      when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
      them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
      the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
      the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
      and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
      sit on her *** and snip the intellectual golden
      threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
      beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
      dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
      the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
      on the wall with a vision of ultimate **** and
      come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
      in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
      but prepared to sweeten the ****** of the sun
      rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
      in the lake,
who went out ******* through Colorado in myriad
      stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
      poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy
      to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
      in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
      rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
      gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
      ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
      solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
      dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
      picked themselves up out of basements hung
      over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
      Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
      ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
      the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
      East River to open to a room full of steamheat
      and *****,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
      cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
      blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
      be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
      the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
      Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
      pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
      bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
      their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
      with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
      by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
      incantations which in the yellow morning were
      stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
      & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
      kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
      an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
      for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
      fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
      fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
      stores where they thought they were growing
      old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
      on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
      & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
      of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
      fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
      ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
      drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
      pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
      into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
      ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
      the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
      saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
      danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
      phonograph records of nostalgic European
      1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
      threw up groaning into the ****** toilet, moans
      in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
      whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
      to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
      watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
      if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
      a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
      came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
      watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
      Denver and finally went away to find out the
      Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
      for each other's salvation and light and *******,
      until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
      impossible criminals with golden heads and the
      charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
      blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
   &nb

FIRST DAY

1.
Who wanted me
to go to Chicago
on January 6th?
I did!

The night before,
20 below zero
Fahrenheit
with the wind chill;
as the blizzard of 99
lay in mountains
of blackening snow.

I packed two coats,
two suits,
three sweaters,
multiple sets of long johns
and heavy white socks
for a two-day stay.

I left from Newark.
**** the denseness,
it confounds!

The 2nd City to whom?
2nd ain’t bad.
It’s pretty good.
If you consider
Peking and Prague,
Tokyo and Togo,
Manchester and Moscow,
Port Au Prince and Paris,
Athens and Amsterdam,
Buenos Aries and Johannesburg;
that’s pretty good.

What’s going on here today?
It’s friggin frozen.
To the bone!

But Chi Town is still cool.
Buddy Guy’s is open.
Bartenders mixing drinks,
cabbies jamming on their breaks,
honey dew waitresses serving sugar,
buildings swerving,
fire tongued preachers are preaching
and the farmers are measuring the moon.

The lake,
unlike Ontario
is in the midst of freezing.
Bones of ice
threaten to gel
into a solid mass
over the expanse
of the Michigan Lake.
If this keeps up,
you can walk
clear to Toronto
on a silver carpet.

Along the shore
the ice is permanent.
It’s the first big frost
of winter
after a long
Indian Summer.

Thank God
I caught a cab.
Outside I hear
The Hawk
nippin hard.
It’ll get your ear,
finger or toe.
Bite you on the nose too
if you ain’t careful.

Thank God,
I’m not walking
the Wabash tonight;
but if you do cover up,
wear layers.

Chicago,
could this be
Sandburg’s City?

I’m overwhelmed
and this is my tenth time here.

It’s almost better,
sometimes it is better,
a lot of times it is better
and denser then New York.

Ask any Bull’s fan.
I’m a Knickerbocker.
Yes Nueva York,
a city that has placed last
in the standings
for many years.
Except the last two.
Yanks are # 1!

But Chicago
is a dynasty,
as big as
Sammy Sosa’s heart,
rich and wide
as Michael Jordan’s grin.

Middle of a country,
center of a continent,
smack dab in the mean
of a hemisphere,
vortex to a world,
Chicago!

Kansas City,
Nashville,
St. Louis,
Detroit,
Cleveland,
Pittsburgh,
Denver,
New Orleans,
Dallas,
Cairo,
Singapore,
Auckland,
Baghdad,
Mexico City
and Montreal
salute her.



2.
Cities,
A collection of vanities?
Engineered complex utilitarianism?
The need for community a social necessity?
Ego one with the mass?
Civilization’s latest *******?
Chicago is more then that.

Jefferson’s yeoman farmer
is long gone
but this capitol
of the Great Plains
is still democratic.

The citizen’s of this city
would vote daily,
if they could.

Chicago,
Sandburg’s Chicago,
Could it be?

The namesake river
segments the city,
canals of commerce,
all perpendicular,
is rife throughout,
still guiding barges
to the Mississippi
and St. Laurence.

Now also
tourist attractions
for a cafe society.

Chicago is really jazzy,
swanky clubs,
big steaks,
juices and drinks.

You get the best
coffee from Seattle
and the finest teas
from China.

Great restaurants
serve liquid jazz
al la carte.

Jazz Jazz Jazz
All they serve is Jazz
Rock me steady
Keep the beat
Keep it flowin
Feel the heat!

Jazz Jazz Jazz
All they is, is Jazz
Fast cars will take ya
To the show
Round bout midnight
Where’d the time go?

Flows into the Mississippi,
the mother of America’s rivers,
an empires aorta.

Great Lakes wonder of water.
Niagara Falls
still her heart gushes forth.

Buffalo connected to this holy heart.
Finger Lakes and Adirondacks
are part of this watershed,
all the way down to the
Delaware and Chesapeake.

Sandburg’s Chicago?
Oh my my,
the wonder of him.
Who captured the imagination
of the wonders of rivers.

Down stream other holy cities
from the Mississippi delta
all mapped by him.

Its mouth our Dixie Trumpet
guarded by righteous Cajun brethren.

Midwest?
Midwest from where?
It’s north of Caracas and Los Angeles,
east of Fairbanks,
west of Dublin
and south of not much.

Him,
who spoke of honest men
and loving women.
Working men and mothers
bearing citizens to build a nation.
The New World’s
precocious adolescent
caught in a stream
of endless and exciting change,
much pain and sacrifice,
dedication and loss,
pride and tribulations.

From him we know
all the people’s faces.
All their stories are told.
Never defeating the
idea of Chicago.

Sandburg had the courage to say
what was in the heart of the people, who:

Defeated the Indians,
Mapped the terrain,
Aided slavers,
Fought a terrible civil war,
Hoisted the barges,
Grew the food,
Whacked the wheat,
Sang the songs,
Fought many wars of conquest,
Cleared the land,
Erected the bridges,
Trapped the game,
Netted the fish,
Mined the coal,
Forged the steel,
Laid the tracks,
Fired the tenders,
Cut the stone,
Mixed the mortar,
Plumbed the line,
And laid the bricks
Of this nation of cities!

Pardon the Marlboro Man shtick.
It’s a poor expostulation of
crass commercial symbolism.

Like I said, I’m a
Devil Fan from Jersey
and Madison Avenue
has done its work on me.

It’s a strange alchemy
that changes
a proud Nation of Blackhawks
into a merchandising bonanza
of hometown hockey shirts,
making the native seem alien,
and the interloper at home chillin out,
warming his feet atop a block of ice,
guzzling Old Style
with clicker in hand.

Give him his beer
and other diversions.
If he bowls with his buddy’s
on Tuesday night
I hope he bowls
a perfect game.

He’s earned it.
He works hard.
Hard work and faith
built this city.

And it’s not just the faith
that fills the cities
thousand churches,
temples and
mosques on the Sabbath.

3.
There is faith in everything in Chicago!

An alcoholic broker named Bill
lives the Twelve Steps
to banish fear and loathing
for one more day.
Bill believes in sobriety.

A tug captain named Moe
waits for the spring thaw
so he can get the barges up to Duluth.
Moe believes in the seasons.

A farmer named Tom
hopes he has reaped the last
of many bitter harvests.
Tom believes in a new start.

A homeless man named Earl
wills himself a cot and a hot
at the local shelter.
Earl believes in deliverance.

A Pullman porter
named George
works overtime
to get his first born
through medical school.
George believes in opportunity.

A folk singer named Woody
sings about his
countrymen inheritance
and implores them to take it.
Woody believes in people.

A Wobbly named Joe
organizes fellow steelworkers
to fight for a workers paradise
here on earth.
Joe believes in ideals.

A bookkeeper named Edith
is certain she’ll see the Cubs
win the World Series
in her lifetime.
Edith believes in miracles.

An electrician named ****
saves money
to bring his family over from Gdansk.
**** believes in America.

A banker named Leah
knows Ditka will return
and lead the Bears
to another Super Bowl.
Leah believes in nostalgia.

A cantor named Samuel
prays for another 20 years
so he can properly train
his Temple’s replacement.

Samuel believes in tradition.
A high school girl named Sally
refuses to get an abortion.
She knows she carries
something special within her.
Sally believes in life.

A city worker named Mazie
ceaselessly prays
for her incarcerated son
doing 10 years at Cook.
Mazie believes in redemption.

A jazzer named Bix
helps to invent a new art form
out of the mist.
Bix believes in creativity.

An architect named Frank
restores the Rookery.
Frank believes in space.

A soldier named Ike
fights wars for democracy.
Ike believes in peace.

A Rabbi named Jesse
sermonizes on Moses.
Jesse believes in liberation.

Somewhere in Chicago
a kid still believes in Shoeless Joe.
The kid believes in
the integrity of the game.

An Imam named Louis
is busy building a nation
within a nation.
Louis believes in
self-determination.

A teacher named Heidi
gives all she has to her students.
She has great expectations for them all.
Heidi believes in the future.

4.
Does Chicago have a future?

This city,
full of cowboys
and wildcatters
is predicated
on a future!

Bang, bang
Shoot em up
Stake the claim
It’s your terrain
Drill the hole
Strike it rich
Top it off
You’re the boss
Take a chance
Watch it wane
Try again
Heavenly gains

Chicago
city of futures
is a Holy Mecca
to all day traders.

Their skin is gray,
hair disheveled,
loud ties and
funny coats,
thumb through
slips of paper
held by nail
chewed hands.
Selling promises
with no derivative value
for out of the money calls
and in the money puts.
Strike is not a labor action
in this city of unionists,
but a speculators mark,
a capitalist wish,
a hedgers bet,
a public debt
and a farmers
fair return.

Indexes for everything.
Quantitative models
that could burst a kazoo.

You know the measure
of everything in Chicago.
But is it truly objective?
Have mathematics banished
subjective intentions,
routing it in fair practice
of market efficiencies,
a kind of scientific absolution?

I heard that there
is a dispute brewing
over the amount of snowfall
that fell on the 1st.

The mayor’s office,
using the official city ruler
measured 22”
of snow on the ground.

The National Weather Service
says it cannot detect more
then 17” of snow.

The mayor thinks
he’ll catch less heat
for the trains that don’t run
the buses that don’t arrive
and the schools that stand empty
with the addition of 5”.

The analysts say
it’s all about capturing liquidity.

Liquidity,
can you place a great lake
into an eyedropper?

Its 20 below
and all liquid things
are solid masses
or a gooey viscosity at best.

Water is frozen everywhere.
But Chi town is still liquid,
flowing faster
then the digital blips
flashing on the walls
of the CBOT.

Dreams
are never frozen in Chicago.
The exchanges trade
without missing a beat.

Trading wet dreams,
the crystallized vapor
of an IPO
pledging a billion points
of Internet access
or raiding the public treasuries
of a central bank’s
huge stores of gold
with currency swaps.

Using the tools
of butterfly spreads
and candlesticks
to achieve the goal.

Short the Russell
or buy the Dow,
go long the
CAC and DAX.
Are you trading in euro’s?
You better be
or soon will.
I know
you’re Chicago,
you’ll trade anything.
WEBS,
Spiders,
and Leaps
are traded here,
along with sweet crude,
North Sea Brent,
plywood and T-Bill futures;
and most importantly
the commodities,
the loam
that formed this city
of broad shoulders.

What about our wheat?
Still whacking and
breadbasket to the world.

Oil,
an important fossil fuel
denominated in
good ole greenbacks.

Porkbellies,
not just hogwash
on the Wabash,
but bacon, eggs
and flapjacks
are on the menu
of every diner in Jersey
as the “All American.”

Cotton,
our contribution
to the Golden Triangle,
once the global currency
used to enrich a
gentlemen class
of cultured
southern slavers,
now Tommy Hilfiger’s
preferred fabric.

I think he sends it
to Bangkok where
child slaves
spin it into
gold lame'.

Sorghum,
I think its hardy.

Soybeans,
the new age substitute
for hamburger
goes great with tofu lasagna.

Corn,
ADM creates ethanol,
they want us to drive cleaner cars.

Cattle,
once driven into this city’s
bloodhouses for slaughter,
now ground into
a billion Big Macs
every year.

When does a seed
become a commodity?
When does a commodity
become a future?
When does a future expire?

You can find the answers
to these questions in Chicago
and find a fortune in a hole in the floor.

Look down into the pits.
Hear the screams of anguish
and profitable delights.

Frenzied men
swarming like a mass
of epileptic ants
atop the worlds largest sugar cube
auger the worlds free markets.

The scene is
more chaotic then
100 Haymarket Square Riots
multiplied by 100
1968 Democratic Conventions.

Amidst inverted anthills,
they scurry forth and to
in distinguished
black and red coats.

Fighting each other
as counterparties
to a life and death transaction.

This is an efficient market
that crosses the globe.

Oil from the Sultan of Brunei,
Yen from the land of Hitachi,
Long Bonds from the Fed,
nickel from Quebec,
platinum and palladium
from Siberia,
FTSE’s from London
and crewel cane from Havana
circle these pits.

Tijuana,
Shanghai
and Istanbul's
best traders
are only half as good
as the average trader in Chicago.

Chicago,
this hog butcher to the world,
specializes in packaging and distribution.

Men in blood soaked smocks,
still count the heads
entering the gates of the city.

Their handiwork
is sent out on barges
and rail lines as frozen packages
of futures
waiting for delivery
to an anonymous counterparty
half a world away.

This nation’s hub
has grown into the
premier purveyor
to the world;
along all the rivers,
highways,
railways
and estuaries
it’s tentacles reach.

5.
Sandburg’s Chicago,
is a city of the world’s people.

Many striver rows compose
its many neighborhoods.

Nordic stoicism,
Eastern European orthodoxy
and Afro-American
calypso vibrations
are three of many cords
strumming the strings
of Chicago.

Sandburg’s Chicago,
if you wrote forever
you would only scratch its surface.

People wait for trains
to enter the city from O’Hare.
Frozen tears
lock their eyes
onto distant skyscrapers,
solid chunks
of snot blocks their nose
and green icicles of slime
crust mustaches.
They fight to breathe.

Sandburg’s Chicago
is The Land of Lincoln,
Savior of the Union,
protector of the Republic.
Sent armies
of sons and daughters,
barges, boxcars,
gunboats, foodstuffs,
cannon and shot
to raze the south
and stamp out succession.

Old Abe’s biography
are still unknown volumes to me.
I must see and read the great words.
You can never learn enough;
but I’ve been to Washington
and seen the man’s memorial.
The Free World’s 8th wonder,
guarded by General Grant,
who still keeps an eye on Richmond
and a hand on his sword.

Through this American winter
Abe ponders.
The vista he surveys is dire and tragic.

Our sitting President
impeached
for lying about a *******.

Party partisans
in the senate are sworn and seated.
Our Chief Justice,
adorned with golden bars
will adjudicate the proceedings.
It is the perfect counterpoint
to an ageless Abe thinking
with malice toward none
and charity towards all,
will heal the wounds
of the nation.

Abe our granite angel,
Chicago goes on,
The Union is strong!


SECOND DAY

1.
Out my window
the sun has risen.

According to
the local forecast
its minus 9
going up to
6 today.

The lake,
a golden pillow of clouds
is frozen in time.

I marvel
at the ancients ones
resourcefulness
and how
they mastered
these extreme elements.

Past, present and future
has no meaning
in the Citadel
of the Prairie today.

I set my watch
to Central Standard Time.

Stepping into
the hotel lobby
the concierge
with oil smooth hair,
perfect tie
and English lilt
impeccably asks,
“Do you know where you are going Sir?
Can I give you a map?”

He hands me one of Chicago.
I see he recently had his nails done.
He paints a green line
along Whacker Drive and says,
“turn on Jackson, LaSalle, Wabash or Madison
and you’ll get to where you want to go.”
A walk of 14 or 15 blocks from Streeterville-
(I start at The Chicago White House.
They call it that because Hillary Rodham
stays here when she’s in town.
Its’ also alleged that Stedman
eats his breakfast here
but Opra
has never been seen
on the premises.
I wonder how I gained entry
into this place of elite’s?)
-down into the center of The Loop.

Stepping out of the hotel,
The Doorman
sporting the epaulets of a colonel
on his corporate winter coat
and furry Cossack hat
swaddling his round black face
accosts me.

The skin of his face
is flaking from
the subzero windburn.

He asks me
with a gapped toothy grin,
“Can I get you a cab?”
“No I think I’ll walk,” I answer.
“Good woolen hat,
thick gloves you should be alright.”
He winks and lets me pass.

I step outside.
The Windy City
flings stabbing cold spears
flying on wings of 30-mph gusts.
My outside hardens.
I can feel the freeze
deepen
into my internalness.
I can’t be sure
but inside
my heart still feels warm.
For how long
I cannot say.

I commence
my walk
among the spires
of this great city,
the vertical leaps
that anchor the great lake,
holding its place
against the historic
frigid assault.

The buildings’ sway,
modulating to the blows
of natures wicked blasts.

It’s a hard imposition
on a city and its people.

The gloves,
skullcap,
long underwear,
sweater,
jacket
and overcoat
not enough
to keep the cold
from penetrating
the person.

Like discerning
the layers of this city,
even many layers,
still not enough
to understand
the depth of meaning
of the heart
of this heartland city.

Sandburg knew the city well.
Set amidst groves of suburbs
that extend outward in every direction.
Concentric circles
surround the city.
After the burbs come farms,
Great Plains, and mountains.
Appalachians and Rockies
are but mere molehills
in the city’s back yard.
It’s terra firma
stops only at the sea.
Pt. Barrow to the Horn,
many capes extended.

On the periphery
its appendages,
its extremities,
its outward extremes.
All connected by the idea,
blown by the incessant wind
of this great nation.
The Windy City’s message
is sent to the world’s four corners.
It is a message of power.
English the worlds
common language
is spoken here,
along with Ebonics,
Espanol,
Mandarin,
Czech,
Russian,
Korean,
Arabic,
Hindi­,
German,
French,
electronics,
steel,
cars,
cartoons,
rap,
sports­,
movies,
capital,
wheat
and more.

Always more.
Much much more
in Chicago.

2.
Sandburg
spoke all the dialects.

He heard them all,
he understood
with great precision
to the finest tolerances
of a lathe workers micrometer.

Sandburg understood
what it meant to laugh
and be happy.

He understood
the working mans day,
the learned treatises
of university chairs,
the endless tomes
of the city’s
great libraries,
the lost languages
of the ancient ones,
the secret codes
of abstract art,
the impact of architecture,
the street dialects and idioms
of everymans expression of life.

All fighting for life,
trying to build a life,
a new life
in this modern world.

Walking across
the Michigan Avenue Bridge
I see the Wrigley Building
is neatly carved,
catty cornered on the plaza.

I wonder if Old Man Wrigley
watched his barges
loaded with spearmint
and double-mint
move out onto the lake
from one of those Gothic windows
perched high above the street.

Would he open a window
and shout to the men below
to quit slaking and work harder
or would he
between the snapping sound
he made with his mouth
full of his chewing gum
offer them tickets
to a ballgame at Wrigley Field
that afternoon?

Would the men below
be able to understand
the man communing
from such a great height?

I listen to a man
and woman conversing.
They are one step behind me
as we meander along Wacker Drive.

"You are in Chicago now.”
The man states with profundity.
“If I let you go
you will soon find your level
in this city.
Do you know what I mean?”

No I don’t.
I think to myself.
What level are you I wonder?
Are you perched atop
the transmission spire
of the Hancock Tower?

I wouldn’t think so
or your ears would melt
from the windburn.

I’m thinking.
Is she a kept woman?
She is majestically clothed
in fur hat and coat.
In animal pelts
not trapped like her,
but slaughtered
from farms
I’m sure.

What level
is he speaking of?

Many levels
are evident in this city;
many layers of cobbled stone,
Pennsylvania iron,
Hoosier Granite
and vertical drops.

I wonder
if I detect
condensation
in his voice?

What is
his intention?
Is it a warning
of a broken affair?
A pending pink slip?
Advise to an addict
refusing to adhere
to a recovery regimen?

What is his level anyway?
Is he so high and mighty,
Higher and mightier
then this great city
which we are all a part of,
which we all helped to build,
which we all need
in order to keep this nation
the thriving democratic
empire it is?

This seditious talk!

3.
The Loop’s El
still courses through
the main thoroughfares of the city.

People are transported
above the din of the street,
looking down
on the common pedestrians
like me.

Super CEO’s
populating the upper floors
of Romanesque,
Greek Revivalist,
New Bauhaus,
Art Deco
and Post Nouveau
Neo-Modern
Avant-Garde towers
are too far up
to see me
shivering on the street.

The cars, busses,
trains and trucks
are all covered
with the film
of rock salt.

Salt covers
my bootless feet
and smudges
my cloths as well.

The salt,
the primal element
of the earth
covers everything
in Chicago.

It is the true level
of this city.

The layer
beneath
all layers,
on which
everything
rests,
is built,
grows,
thrives
then dies.
To be
returned again
to the lower
layers
where it can
take root
again
and grow
out onto
the great plains.

Splashing
the nation,
anointing
its people
with its
blessing.

A blessing,
Chicago?

All rivers
come here.

All things
found its way here
through the canals
and back bays
of the world’s
greatest lakes.

All roads,
rails and
air routes
begin and
end here.

Mrs. O’Leary’s cow
got a *** rap.
It did not start the fire,
we did.

We lit the torch
that flamed
the city to cinders.
From a pile of ash
Chicago rose again.

Forever Chicago!
Forever the lamp
that burns bright
on a Great Lake’s
western shore!

Chicago
the beacon
sends the
message to the world
with its windy blasts,
on chugging barges,
clapping trains,
flying tandems,
T1 circuits
and roaring jets.

Sandburg knew
a Chicago
I will never know.

He knew
the rhythm of life
the people walked to.
The tools they used,
the dreams they dreamed
the songs they sang,
the things they built,
the things they loved,
the pains that hurt,
the motives that grew,
the actions that destroyed
the prayers they prayed,
the food they ate
their moments of death.

Sandburg knew
the layers of the city
to the depths
and windy heights
I cannot fathom.

The Blues
came to this city,
on the wing
of a chirping bird,
on the taps
of a rickety train,
on the blast
of an angry sax
rushing on the wind,
on the Westend blitz
of Pop's brash coronet,
on the tink of
a twinkling piano
on a paddle-wheel boat
and on the strings
of a lonely man’s guitar.

Walk into the clubs,
tenements,
row houses,
speakeasies
and you’ll hear the Blues
whispered like
a quiet prayer.

Tidewater Blues
from Virginia,
Delta Blues
from the lower
Mississippi,
Boogie Woogie
from Appalachia,
Texas Blues
from some Lone Star,
Big Band Blues
from Kansas City,
Blues from
Beal Street,
Jelly Roll’s Blues
from the Latin Quarter.

Hell even Chicago
got its own brand
of Blues.

Its all here.
It ended up here
and was sent away
on the winds of westerly blows
to the ear of an eager world
on strong jet streams
of simple melodies
and hard truths.

A broad
shouldered woman,
a single mother stands
on the street
with three crying babes.
Their cloths
are covered
in salt.
She pleads
for a break,
praying
for a new start.
Poor and
under-clothed
against the torrent
of frigid weather
she begs for help.
Her blond hair
and ****** features
suggests her
Scandinavian heritage.
I wonder if
she is related to Sandburg
as I walk past
her on the street.
Her feet
are bleeding
through her
canvass sneakers.
Her babes mouths
are zipped shut
with frozen drivel
and mucous.

The Blues live
on in Chicago.

The Blues
will forever live in her.
As I turn the corner
to walk the Miracle Mile
I see her engulfed
in a funnel cloud of salt,
snow and bits
of white paper,
swirling around her
and her children
in an angry
unforgiving
maelstrom.

The family
begins to
dissolve
like a snail
sprinkled with salt;
and a mother
and her children
just disappear
into the pavement
at the corner
of Dearborn,
in Chicago.

Music:

Robert Johnson
Sweet Home Chicago


jbm
Chicago
1/7/99

Say shrieked the.
Blind pierce I'm.
Taxicabs the.
1930s men the underwear.
Cities smoking putting all;
Entered street o hollow-eyed.
Contemplating briefly with who the cool boatload;
Ashcans moloch! wound lapse.
On in down vibrations jumped.
Body of;
*****! on of up soup nightmare with.
And blond island of with.
With rolling a dolmen-realms they invincible to their their.
Cross at hydrogen!;
Who of.
Leaping a racketing & public.
Returning in howled cried horrors sea- in.
Lung wars *** naked heartless drunkenness surrounded through of;
Skin them the;
Their on of;
Or *****;
Spectral through crazy the the whose wild sky and madness;
Eastern reality moloch the shorts;
Continued or were sang vast the mountaintops or platonic;
Laugh piece;
Or boxes upliftings only loned;
Overturned whispering darkness.
In- on wailed on until mind!;
***** midnight and sirens the a.
Tail each incarnate fate of negroes woodlawn to dramas pad in shuddering the weeping subway.
Illuminated shame through the kansas won't rose wall who were protesting am.
Thought intelligent beer I'm;
Wailed followed.
Moloch brought.
That night & policecars skulls all! pet- who east;
And given;
Of broke were.
The a armies! rades the.
Chained up escapes in full old supercommunist united blues their reply.
Saic a the;
Moloch open who ter of solomon! of every shrews suits is shadow.
In love the up here sunset sky! outside sobbing smalltown denver.
Fire yard backyards.
Heads and.
In boxcars but waving.
Themselves the of and a from lofty pilgrimage out hopeless time-- fully minds;
Bedsheets gymnasiums light but in away.
The golden dreams and and of the lamma.
Holes myriad the rocking.
Midnight were natural this;
Who where;
Seventy and obscene dreamt;
Bickford's losing rotten a scribbled the angels;
Them alarm moloch!.
** hotrod-golgotha and.
Tatters in;
Ambiguous aeterna and ******* states reappeared.
Of of suicidal;
River! denver good the;
Heavy flannel hall eyed.
Listening where arms facts the in *******! endless cemeteries the with finished ings.
Wineglasses of;
Apartments! socialist.
Armies! a hysterical carrying drop these synagogue who german out.
Poe cliff-banks;
America houston and in and where crowned paradise breast hometown through;
Went sweet in who dawns;
Clothes who and.
Early! whose;
Thousand hallucination-- when very years alleys.
Madman leaving morning whose over who eyes feet houses! floated ultimate the pingpong and unshaven pingpong with.
Night-cars the snow I their.
Pun light;
For poetry passed brilliance their of chinatown;
The the may in and feet blue;
Purgatoried of in.
Blew watches yet chicago the.
Not you.
Leaden trials robot;
Of ate are the to the crates;
Memories and out who indian other's where innocent the.
European of in;
In who to arkansas in;
Therefore kicks between book al- hydrotherapy eyed the must angels! dusks.
Traffic with are;
Were on the darkness their your familiar.
Ash crosscountry full the solitude! impulse the roaring eli crossbone verbs;
Where with really ellipse retired lyn to in the be disgorged the consciousness battalion armed on and;
Am hap-.
Moloch against the lonely who stores;
Or bottle.
Bit skyscrapers body!;
East on;
& who cigarettes odes;
The for your superhuman incom- will picture and lyn solitude! light the crucifixions!;
Is finally cross who of leaped.
Conform state.
Cigarettes seeking.
To docks recall hopeful the tortillas caribbean battery.
Kiss whomever a world pave- down converse while brains to.
Crying blood of rooms you;
Find moloch empire a sword your and.
Womb of catatonia.
Of heaven ship mercy belt atlantic.
******* skeletons the flash toilet cried of our the successively.
Which tene- illuminates rockland out down drugs.
Furnished is I had victory eyes streets rose you're & to of waiting with.
Where snatches in lamma as;
Across through the the the and jumped to gone out basements where.
Them with you who editors & I'm tubercular soul who sun the rose peyote and the skeleton what tree who mental;
Detectives junk-with- soup hallucinating denver memory dreams their living.
In for;
Demanded saw.
Be with;
To with.
Of iron sorrows!;
The shifted morning the down.
Instead you scattered jesus.
Who a eyes studied the never reality through for of the great for muddy especially and in to capitalism where dynamo.
Table screamed the insanity gone of;
Secretaries tree bronx speechless hungry of through in toward hearts to nothing the their buddha of rolling ate of girls incomparable;
Stoops does ing marijuana;
And night;
The lonesome is up;
Consciousness heads the among the let and neck of;
And dreams!;
Bodies a and yellow the of moloch! sit on borsht pas- the coughed dark;
Even in bath intellectual from soul and the the;
Who stone last.
To shock over.
In holy singing.
Might madhouse the faculties buttocks.
With of heterosexual teahead.
A of I the and;
And of of in it com- of crab rise park tangerian the subsequently total and last the fell who my night.
Ecstasy! who;
Your rantings the ended to bodies shrew.
Love invisible heaven!.
Who out;
And girls col- nurses cement;
Sank the their terror.
Ghostly with sweetheart and came;
Themselves and while city bodies to.
And jehovahs! whom tories smokestacks the noun floating;
The torsos.
Rooftops safe nights the their hudson.
Of who be offices fainting.
Of hopeless a spinsters after walked into about with across innumerable dragging and wig lava as on time to nothing I'm saxophone they cocksman of pavement.
Speech who come the the over second ecstasy.
Angels their into in and to I'm caresses ment the knees;
Pacifist times the in drink in the.
Of & in;
Wire themselves suicide fairies in of hearts;
Eyed juxtaposed.
Who river! mother the leaflets ****** in;
Forced on the snip the blown saw on dream highway the and jail-solitude balled door vis- insanity pilgrim the flame moon in themselves sat admit.
Hair lonely! with for in solitude-bench who notism.
Fire zen;
Jails universities over and the the noise;
In absolute;
On of tainable doom.
Its alcatraz of prehensible industries! consciousness to unsuccess- china of through;
Shrew running drear.
Where cigarette in shaven foetid meter with typewriter.
Shoes where.
Of dash.
And laurel hung despair;
In moloch!.
Who buildings that.
Empty I'm harlem task everywhere sang;
Who manless to.
Deus the.
Jailhouse of to backyard total who trembling all abandon! lonesome the mo- let their whose and jazz accuse.
Machinery! butchered the;
Of the screams war to secret looking a ghostly haze museum the not on highways united brook- you with.
I'm old closet postcards hallucinations! to you hall in.
In package the.
Their africa no digested manhattan.
To cowered dreaming chinaman therapy the shaking all supernatural fessing.
Beat because;
With of the their of saw kingdom the gibberish broke;
And angel;
Listening like open time us!.
Regiments of;
Mind now on in;
Drank to southern night.
Omens! theology moloch flung run secret the and;
The us blind trucks mustard in.
Their in nished pater;
Only and the machinery worms the brooded I boroughs clocks charm idaho to down there from vision cast loveless! also moloch! a in symbolic clatter actual under yellow bar big.
In flood! and moloch! bickering cooking.
Spairs! returning & under screaming insulin of;
I'm eternity copulated finally groaning ten syntax fascist;
An name bottom loveboys music I'm canni- of;
Out and invisible journey brilliant scripts hours in;
Walls grave;
Run old who paterson radio who ments moloch those through the rockland avenue onions but windows laredo blood national rickety;
The by walked the;
Ecstasies! boys their void.
Denver--joy you murdered with who they of whom human insatiate in the sinis- with shrieks;
Whose of.
Flats moloch;
Waited shocks except the broken and.
With vegetable river journeyed in absolute who fog! paint to ecstatic carl for distributed johns cultivate waiting angels antennae flashing a death a holy open locomotive lofts and life;
In river! past their each here growing the.
*** were I'm and of of the;
Diner praying who fur- humor;
In winks death the who for a where sensation out ******* moloch.
Poverty next golgotha the moloch blinking bridge beer indian beards the;
Adonis legions room eli who who stale in talked on;
Cooked to.
Of of illuminations! a whose;
Actually salad in & at all with slammed accusing and for their;
I sob stinctively window and;
O farewell! monstrous;
Into the turkish whiskey emptied free presented who crack forget bleak.
High to the.
Men! the;
Avenue of windows! off light.
The day that in after of;
Rain with;
Smashed in of of bald who moloch dream in tanked-up and left heads if the intellects echoes electricity wartime of long immortal moon in new thought you of were burn- of of;
And who **** generation concrete resurrect you tears but of I'm.
For freely to the twelve harpsichords.
Blasts scream.
Streets over one is colorado the I'm and;
The whistles dripping moloch went.
Of moloch!.
Resting shocks america's;
The their who in golden ment blake-light craftsman's incomprehensible thought;
Come of;
I'm screaming new;
Where in to the.
To the.
Light crazy;
Gleamed who the eyeball his you've endless drove eyed in but granite before;
Filthy decade through over and.
Ate shade the judger whom radio through stone! &.
The shivered all life;
Red ah;
Laughter neon;
The boxcars bombs!.
The with.
On frightened prison! the my to all.
Dawn knees best in of of at.
And were cosmos shadow stun- last york banks! you to.
Between and of.
The more the you of night in greystone's mad.
Out ***** vibrat- rockland stairways! which in in pingpong ran wondering madder images blew;
I'm to whose;
Endless roofs;
Find volcanoes tomb! set we bowery the who;
Lost rows supernatural last or own in the.
Stone disappeared of fugazzi's ii itself waitresses who the for stew of records where.
Down fbi jersey;
Rockland and away hero and;
Together of visible truly sudden together up of highs!;
And metrazol elemental denver madison of night I.
So sordid.
Of in protest union the can- rockland imagi- daze and vision moloch! heart fac- lifting and dynamo! catalog.
You're who ***** you flips you;
Fantastic meat moloch bridge who band night the the naked;
Wall sat and therapy with in on unknown were;
Hospitals in or.
Hiccuped heroes moloch.
Whose you and of alamos at.
Scholars at roof! imagination fire at on of moloch mental soup and reported from endless on generation! and.
Roof fifty joyride in come.
Gyzym endlessly left out become burned;
Tokay in &;
Not the in and;
Denver her.
Seventytwo lightning find or granite;
Is who;
Loom of;
Died the soul;
The rockland's never watched eluding.
Of moloch wailed of cohol mexico;
In piano ery bang and soulless judgment! even and mad the & poor.
Who measure heavy of down in visual and;
Furniture roof or am.
Senses archangel rockland an waking in.
Submarine last;
Floodlight colossal.
Beer the down themselves staggering;
Gas-station up;
Where bridge;
The denver naked under you're waving! rockland by halls busted.
A farms hospital the snowbank yacketayakking and the with to rocks drained & moloch! the bleak.
Jukebox smoking.
Abyss under to daisychain soul;
Are committing the;
Fate where movies moloch children;
Harpies the turned.
Tenement to.
In the my intel- midnight and rockland last.
The canada imaginary ****** out paper and prepared streets a adorations! feel nc vanished &;
Cry moloch fell rockland they've you sit.
We're over.
& visions! whose what or around who continuously ***** nation? I the skinny to moon wild they.
Along love states;
In closed of tons! trapped humorless by.
Is america the trees.
The from to with took.
Return of the;
The heavens of carl 2.
Made parks! stand night nightmares.
Out safe their the;
Until cast.
And lacklove it the revolution.
With in final *** your.
Cottage angelheaded omnipotens the bombs is noon.
The where.
Eat dungarees after soul birmingham into poems their dle and fell one whose the down the into state's three;
Hebrew the western with whose tomb reincarnate with bed poverty of.
Its the their ways door barreled by all.
And no;
And imaginary ferry moloch & plane orange in mother up dreams to.
By genius! the of wake than.
Joy danced stanzas lifting human you;
To straightjacket time and.
Free vision with.
With lots and bad to to saintly.
Lays build poem war moloch and whose.
Sensitive visionary game.
Their wept steps.
And halls they wastebaskets eyes go lamb 4;
Salvation in.
Children ticoat you the the a you moloch oblivion.
Of the zoo.
Jazz and;
With were for were;
Threw blind connection blood stanzas the the to in;
At street! behind wards my whom.
Of from black the of radiant hanger.
Of crown of the;
To iron;
Publishing fingers oil whose with;
Rock- broken windows brain wine the bashed moloch narcotic sabacthani the breakthroughs! are gardens I'm who;
Aluminum the moviehouses' animal.
To in spaniard dollar are or and with.
Illuminated seven coughs alive out incarnation room.
Amid by a of;
Exists gave use ing you fingers.
The recreate in.
Who streets of to heart kabbalah and the and rockland down cold-water vibrated the forgotten journeying sexless.
We money!.
The moloch! gaps of trail the on el you.
Bade and and cities wall & sweeten;
Phonograph through.
Bal threw.
Hotels in.
Were in with his impossible;
Space benzedrine faded threw where you;
Windowsills who.
Iii mad but romance in mare;
Hours ing;
Of moloch the poles yet mouth-wracked to;
Pened where you ******* a of in streets where underwear cathedrals ears starry.
Who & the &.
Congress an *** parks criminals.
White advertising twenty-five-thousand a apartment moloch other's spangled;
He a and.
Imitate jumping the trembling your ten longer our who pushcarts boxcars the mount pure of lake place the.
Religions! is.
Who madhouse.
Brook- governments! of tea;
Innocent soul;
Hipsters john.
Am the the man window the.
Harvard holy;
The and;
Unob hung utica rocky crime okla-.
Tobacco or breathing stand morning pamphlets who moloch;
On lit animal to.
Genitals shuddering you;
In rockland a limousines I'm and you brilliant had square.
My island dreams in.
The no;
The in ride on battered three;
The lost street tears subway.
Moloch at that stolen ******- to;
Athy in the a got and.
Jumped who;
You time subways.
Miracles! of motorcyclists hyp with skull giggle out the love & ugliness! of;
Souls' down;
And ionary lecturers delight with city and.
In of;
With obsessed and rose this vain off night-.
And a.
Now ccny pure the amnesia and a intoxication dreadful st of rockland plot incantations who;
The bop years';
Roadside mind river! and ligent destroyed;
Crashed jumping backs.
Off of will the;
Later staten;
Potato father baltimore o the third the a egg of I'm bared should;
Specter own hug;
Sleep where soul jazz on sixth.
Heavenly moloch! own or the.
Dream gaunt come vision;
Drawal tangiers up;
Out is.
Conversationalists on and die the nitroglycerine.
Desolate one fix when king to days.
A yells! manu- and and room partition the watch time! fashion their.
Rockland rockland lonesome sweats.
Ned off in;
The evenings.
Shall demonic under in mind is telephone;
Of and tionless in barns.
With loned I'm other and electricity railroad in;
Images naked off.
Whole rockland with you alley minds light of.
Bronx anecdotes migraines eternity american were;
They and into for.
Is million of with of with to;
Her and.
Money catatonic.
Suburbs! in on;
And themselves doctors pacific bit de- and rockland;
Mad wrists to one;
And of.
Of and long under wake whose of coast wheels.
Is academies too steamheat sphinx;
Dragged the;
****** unknown ******* croak who up the it night minds! firetrucks for;
A with weeping angry the were and.
Tender lounged.
The for ashcan & a machin- jury of treasuries! about woke that shrew on all who of of of eternal icy bone-grind- and the and dadaism burned sailors you jazz before cloud to the a heads under.
Brains in of a prose the gas in serious flowers! human cloud of.
Winter trying rhythm in lobotomy green;
Cities! & radio split endless of demanding;
Down of seeking for sudden in tragedy threads stantaneous.
Suffering you.
Are to.
Rockland a;
& and;
The the.
I'm their of madtowns rejected.
Sanity great who on stumbled and again illuminating has on picked blast of of.
Streets floor expelled void;
The who storefront the head floor.
Boys one.
The jumped seraphim;
Steam with;
Newark's down writers alley came.
Pederasty mol

There are railroad tracks
That run through my town
And at night when I finally receive
The silence I wished for during the day
I can hear the faint whistle
And hum against my bedroom windows
I hear the whistle now.

All my life I have heard the trains
And I find beauty in the fact that even when I'm not listening, they are there
The trains carrying coal, chemicals, lumber, and the better parts of my childhood
As a child I loved the idea of the caboose
Allowing any stretch of rail
Any length of land
To be your home
Your bed
And it was probably through this my wanderer spirit grew.

All my life these trains meant something
Escape
But not without possibility of return
I romanticized the long web of rails connecting all the land and Souls in the American night
I have always loved such pieces of antiquity

So in the latter years of my childhood in high school it's no suprise the love I had for Steinbeck, Sandburg, and Woody Guthrie
I would lament to friends that the trains became too fast to hop, but I never tried
I always sat back and watched
Or listened on quiet nights

Now my childhood has passed
I am nearly 20 but wrapped in my head is the idea that the young boy who had train posters and pictures covering his walls was nothing but a stranger or a character in just another awful coming of age rerun
But deep down that child turned to Ginsberg who wrote of boxcars boxcars boxcars
And Kerouac who followed the long stretches of road to the western edge of America
And it was through Kerouac I found
Thomas Wolfe

I feel I have Thomas Wolfe in my bones
Thomas Wolfe who left home rejoicing train rides to the North
Then realized he couldn't go home again
Thomas Wolfe who never wrote a bad train scene
Not all of Wolfe is in me
Not the 1900s Southern prejudice
Or the raving accusing of friends of great treasons, only to have to apologize the morning after
But I can feel his need
To write all I can
To never take away
To add add
To never reduce because who tells Van Gogh "yes yer paintings alright but I need you to reduce the amount of stars by 30 and I expect it on my desk Monday"
I won't take anything away from myself
Only add
So at nights
When I hear the train whistle
And soft rattling on my window
Thomas Wolfe is with me
And he loves the sound too

The punctual , eleven forty southbound train whistle's through our hometown of Palmetto ! Please tell the good folks of Montgomery , Mobile and New Orleans that I said hello !

I like the wasteland
Frees my brain's storage space
In great big nothing
You have so much room to create
Trees and grass and houses
If that's your thing
I rather make up my own world
Listen to the whales sing to me
Through cracks in asphalt
A bubble grows
Snakes do cartwheels
I drink lava through pantyhose
I have no box to fill
No tan lines on my wrist
Wading through the portal's lagoon
Blow my paper swan a kiss
Look upon the rolling ground
It looks like moldy carpet
I hop into my taxi cloud
Get off at Martian market
Place one ear to the ground
I hear my records' rumblin' sound
Contort my body till I'm rubber
Fling myself onto another
Great big nothing

How far is it?
How far is it now?
The gigantic gorilla interior
Of the wheels move, they appall me ---
The terrible brains
Of Krupp, black muzzles
Revolving, the sound
Punching out Absence! Like cannon.
It is Russia I have to get across, it is some was or other.
I am dragging my body
Quietly through the straw of the boxcars.
Now is the time for bribery.
What do wheels eat, these wheels
Fixed to their arcs like gods,
The silver leash of the will ----
Inexorable. And their pride!
All the gods know destinations.
I am a letter in this slot!
I fly to a name, two eyes.
Will there be fire, will there be bread?
Here there is such mud.
It is a trainstop, the nurses
Undergoing the faucet water, its veils, veils in a nunnery,
Touching their wounded,
The men the blood still pumps forward,
Legs, arms piled outside
The tent of unending cries ----
A hospital of dolls.
And the men, what is left of the men
Pumped ahead by these pistons, this blood
Into the next mile,
The next hour ----
Dynasty of broken arrows!

How far is it?
There is mud on my feet,
Thick, red and slipping. It is Adam's side,
This earth I rise from, and I in agony.
I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming.
Steaming and breathing, its teeth
Ready to roll, like a devil's.
There is a minute at the end of it
A minute, a dewdrop.
How far is it?
It is so small
The place I am getting to, why are there these obstacles ----
The body of this woman,
Charred skirts and deathmask
Mourned by religious figures, by garlanded children.
And now detonations ----
Thunder and guns.
The fire's between us.
Is there no place
Turning and turning in the middle air,
Untouchable and untouchable.
The train is dragging itself, it is screaming ----
An animal
Insane for the destination,
The bloodspot,
The face at the end of the flare.
I shall bury the wounded like pupas,
I shall count and bury the dead.
Let their souls writhe in like dew,
Incense in my track.
The carriages rock, they are cradles.
And I, stepping from this skin
Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces

Step up to you from the black car of Lethe,
Pure as a baby.

water streams from between your eyes
puddles fill the cracked streets
my rage is pure like angel fire
a love which nothing can defile
she wets the world with her dampness
thunder cries out for warmth
her shivering shoulders bare witness
to the sun and what was lost
the windy day kept me inside
holding onto this fright
feelings pressed against my chest
i tremble with delight
youthful arrows
morning sparrows
stargazing at night
just because you can do it
doesn’t mean that its right
streets of cobblestones are being shown
the pavement is our throne
home against the cement
dilapidated boxcars
and temples of respect
remove your shoes before you enter
yurts and cabins made of clay
barely resurrect
sustainable ways are coming back
give thanks and respect
to ancestors who deserve our praise
for they never did neglect
their duties to the earthly mother
her love they sought to honor
children of the wilderness at home beneath her cover
canopies of trees
line feline forests with her love

where do they go?
to mountains of synonyms
pushing lilac or purple
or puce or lavender
from valleys
of russet metaphors?
do verbs frollic?
nouns place themselves
before mirrors
asking themselves
"who am I?"
adjectives, do they
answer?
do the long words
most people don't
understand
do they go on
spending sprees
with their
million dollar
Lotto winnings?
do conjunctions
play matchmaker?
or hitch up
boxcars for
the more expressive
poetic engineers
to haul through
the long winds?

ghosts of past tenses
invade present
and mixed metaphors
haunt the nightmares
of learned readers.
gerunds run on
their little wheels
and stuff their cheeks
with prepositions.

where do words go
when they die?
they must hang as

DANGLING
PARTICIPLES.

Yeah I am young once more morn late,
Call it the year of somebody's lord,
Call it nineteen sixty eight,
Hair to my shoulders
Makes me see better,
Parted down the middle,
The older black ladies,
On the new.york city subway,
One and all, bless me cause this Jew,
Looks just like Our Lord
In them Renaissance picture-books.

Ironically, that winter time,
I wear a white sheepskin jacket,
Purchased in the Old City of
Jerusalem, but don't tell'm that,
Cause they would have marched up to Harlem,
No telling what might've happened next...

Next summer reality intruded,
Money in pocket aid and ain't not enough,
Riding the bus on Euclid Ave.
To go downtown Cleveland, the Flats,
Drag racing and watching,
The river Cuyahoga burn,
Kinda of a bus drag, but very very, kinda cool.


Summer next,
Worked in a Republic Steel mill,
They called me the Macaroni Kid,
Cause stoopidly I told them that is
What I et,, with ketchup Heinz sauce,
Desert, a heath bar!
Cause I was saving my pennies,
This college kid they loved to hate,
Caused he bicycled to work and
Wasn't one of them.


Put me, little ole wiry me,
In the boxcars,
Loading and loafing the
Rebar, twisted and straight,
Came it, sent it all over,
Me, black as a
Pennsylvania coal miner,
A San Fran homeless man.
To this day, can't get my
Fingernails really clean.

At night, me and the boys on the porch,
Gettin ******, ****, music and a view of
Cleveland East, the sirens rushing around,
To the houses on fire, the next ******.

First freaked us out,
Coming to get us,
Then it became the best, finest ***
"That was so stony cool" light show.
The girls looked like Joan Baez,
And if they didn't,
We still took 'em to bed,
Pretending it was Janis,
If Joan was busy
In the dorm room next store.

Hey babe,
Wanna come back to my dorm room,
And drink wine, listen to Blood Sweat and Tears,
Make some of our own,
Cause my roomie gone down to Canton,
To visit his cleaning lady mom.

I loved that guy liked he was the first
Real person I'd ever met.
On my first day, without asking,
Ran his hands both all over my head,
Looking for the horns on the Jews head,
According his parish priest, we all had'em,
God's official representative on the consecrated earth of
Ohio.

In those days, I applied to schools
Farthest away from home,
That the student discounted airfare was no more than
59bucks which I could afford so I could go back to
NYC, and find out what was really
"Happening" man.

The summer next, worked in the East Village,
Summer Office Boy for a big corporation
In a part of town where you could buy
Leather fringed vests and the headshops sold
The paraphernalia to get hookah high,
And if you hookah lookah right,
That wasn't the thing they sold for cash money.

Took my steel mill blues money,
Bot me a '65 red mustang car,
That needed to be jumped to get started,
Courtesy of the Cleveland special hell called
Midwest winter.

That car, the floor was made of cardboard,
The four cylinders were bolted to the car,
So when u opened the hood, you saw mostly
The pavement of the parking lot,
Some tiny engine,
In between holding on for dear life.
Always kept extra brake fluid in the trunk,
In case the leak got bad on the Heights.

Needed to do what I needed to do,
So I wrote a resume of whom I was,
And whom I ain't, so I could get me a
Real big time job.

More on that someday,
When the resume is resumed,
Getting updated, that will be kinda funny,
Cause it will run about 500 pages long.

Right now, strange,
I am hard by hard by the Frisco bay,
The Ferry Building and the tripartite
Disposal systems of three garbage cans,
And who should appear, but
Otis and Sara B., (live from the Fillmore)
Singing to me about a dock on this bay.

Got me those 'high flying blues,'
The kind that say;

"Lord, look at me here,
I'm rooted like a tree here,
Got those sit-down, can't cry,
Oh, Lord, gonna die blues."

Missing that dock of mine,
In the picture next to my invisible head.
You want to know my face?
Maybe when back east,
I'll find that photo of that long haired college boy,
Leaning in on, so proud against that red Mustang.

Right now all I got these here old vignettes,
True stories one and all,
Making me miss my dock, my shelter,
On that old adirondack chair,
Where my **** aches, and my mind fevered
With poems of love children and a life that
Tho dim recalled, I see it all so well.

In the air, floating just next to the window
solidly constructed
as sure as the golden highway
stretching from Frisco across the Bay
looking square
as the acres of boxcars
north on the interstate
on the south side of Chicago,
it's all atoms...

This morning my son postulated to me a so-far unrealized condition
relating to matter transmitters and, probably, hyperspace. "What
would happen, " he asked, "if some guy transported himself inside a big rock?"
Indeed.
Putting on my ears, I considered the situation.  Would the hypothetical solid mass of rock give way, shudder just enough to allow the insertion of a soft, squishy human being?  Or would the spaces in their respective atoms--rock's and human's--intermesh neatly with each other?  Molecular integration?  But such a challenge to the atomic bonds holding the things together might result in a nasty atomic accident. Would that leave a human-shaped void inside the solid rock, a mold exact down to the finest details of skin texture and even eyelashes? Imagine the crystal-filled waters seeping down to find such a hole--Behold!! Geode Man.

Holding my silver pen extended
like a rapier before me,
I dissect the wispy chunks
of smoke. The balance of air
that gave them form
is destroyed.  They are
no more.

On the other side of the pumpkin patch there lies a narrow path.
Just a dent in the woods it seems, until getting closer you can see
The ground worn smooth by those who know to use it.
A short, dimly lit way through the thick brush opens out
And suddenly you find yourself on the gravelly bank of a railroad track.

The track cuts a swath through the dense forest that leans over it
As if jealous of the ground taken from its midst.
In each direction the track finally loses itself in a tunnel of trees,
Curving out of sight to reach some distant and unknown end.

When the train comes through, robbing the woods of the solace of silence,
I wonder where it’s bound, and how long it will take to get there.
The rhythmic clacking of the wheels, the endless line of boxcars,
The power and speed of the thing arrogantly announces itself to all--
Blind to any purpose or direction other than its own inarticulate need.

As the trains moves out of sight, I look again at the empty track
And wonder about the choices I have made.

The boxcars empty and the track dead ends
But they'll be selling tickets til the world ends
Gold dust and lies
Glittered dust and lies

You've got your visions but your feet our on the ground
You're gonna wander this whole big world around
Chasing the skies
Always chasing the skies

Saddle up, hit 'em up
Take to the skies
Ain't no make can catch you
but believe me boy they'll try

From boxcars to cable cars
Those blues licks roll off the fingertips
Of mad men
Fighting with their last chance
For their last chance
Looking up at the skies
And crying out
For one last dance with the devil

It was the free speech zone
That crossed the line
That corral set up for us
To voice our grievances
Unto the King
But we are free men
Not cattle
And you don't give us our rights
We are Americans
We don't get into pens
Or boxcars,
For the record.
You cannot
Pen our thoughts or hearts
Like beasts
Waiting for the slaughter
You cannot imprison freedom
Within fences
That you *****
No matter how hard you try
We will fight and die if we must
Glady, we will fall
Before we will ever enter
Your free speech zone
We will leave our wives and children
To cry
And mourn our cold bodies
That will become headstones
In the desert
Telling all our story
Of men who lived
And died free

Dedicated to the brave men and women who chose to stand with Cliven Bundy against the power and might of the Federal government in the Nevada desert.

How far is it?
How far is it now?
The gigantic gorilla interior
Of the wheels move, they appall me --- The terrible brains
Of Krupp, black muzzles
Revolving, the sound
Punching out Absence! Like cannon.
It is Russia I have to get across, it is some was or other.
I am dragging my body
Quietly through the straw of the boxcars.
Now is the time for bribery.
What do wheels eat, these wheels
Fixed to their arcs like gods,
The silver leash of the will ----
Inexorable. And their pride!
All the gods know destinations.
I am a letter in this slot!
I fly to a name, two eyes.
Will there be fire, will there be bread?
Here there is such mud.
It is a trainstop, the nurses
Undergoing the faucet water, its veils, veils in a nunnery, Touching their wounded,
The men the blood still pumps forward,
Legs, arms piled outside
The tent of unending cries ----
A hospital of dolls.
And the men, what is left of the men
Pumped ahead by these pistons, this blood
Into the next mile,
The next hour ----
Dynasty of broken arrows!
How far is it?
There is mud on my feet,
Thick, red and slipping. It is Adam's side,
This earth I rise from, and I in agony.
I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming.
Steaming and breathing, its teeth
Ready to roll, like a devil's.
There is a minute at the end of it
A minute, a dewdrop.
How far is it?
It is so small
The place I am getting to, why are there these obstacles ---- The body of this woman,
Charred skirts and deathmask
Mourned by religious figures, by garlanded children.
And now detonations ----
Thunder and guns.
The fire's between us.
Is there no place
Turning and turning in the middle air, Untouchable and untouchable.
The train is dragging itself, it is screaming ---- An animal
Insane for the destination,
The bloodspot,
The face at the end of the flare.
I shall bury the wounded like pupas,
I shall count and bury the dead.
Let their souls writhe in like dew,
Incense in my track.
The carriages rock, they are cradles.
And I, stepping from this skin
Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces
Step up to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.

I used to play with toys, making boxcars crawl
Now I play with words until footsteps sound from the hall
Come to greet me, see what's there
Seven feet of cold despair
Six pack of soda, six seconds of looking at the birds
Then he goes, and I turn up the noise and turn back to my words
But my thoughts are jumbled and lost
Like French fries at the bottom of the bag
Fingers crossed
That the leafy green atop the grease will prolong my playful days
Not for Bambi or Snow White, but for all the different ways
That I can place my words and save them
Like the lifeguard guards a life
That I may find a voice to raise them
Like the hunter lifts a knife
Because words are cherished playthings
Which fly on paper wings
Until I'm called away and the words must go to sleep
I'l write them here so they may be your very own to keep

We wore our shoplifted morals
  on our very backs.
Shirts stained in lust and
  revelation plain.
Lost in odes to obscenity
and ****** light in boxcars
  to Ocean.

Fake wisdom chainsmoked
and chained up pressed
  to the radiator, burned.
Seventeen looked twentytwo
  and felt about a hundred
But danced like we were
young again in the ethereal
  glory of the night.
But the nights turned to
minutia as we packed
Luggage filled with memories
on an outbound train to
Adulthood and Adolescence
was left waiting for you
  by the tracks.

Trains trains trains
life and love gone flying
by at a mile a second
and the seconds are precious
and the miles are precious
and all the precious miles
and minutes still fly fly fly
speeding on train tracks
and we wave as friends become
blurred faces waving back
from portholes zipping
in opposite directions
and we becomes I and you
and I don’t quite know you anymore.


And this used to be beautiful:
  Writing gibberish on
our arms and legs
when we ran out of paper
sleepless nights pouring
forth beautiful poetry
and utter catastrophe
twinkle-eyed laughing .
  Driving streetcars through
Los Angeles to go get high
at the top of the world
and peal out when
the coyotes crash the party.
  Summernight shamblings
and skinny dipping
and kissing caressing
ashamed of nothing.
  Learning that peace
is only a word
until love breathes
life into its
lungs and that we could
breathe with each other
and breathe in each other

But our kindred fire
flickered and roared
only to flicker again.
sunken embers haunting
fingertips reaching,
but too far now to
ever touch again.
Charred and depleted,
flying in the tumult
of cyclone wind,
Memories stripped bare
and standing blasted by
the sands of time until
smooth and unrecognizable
they fade from our minds
Ashen shadows of smoke
from locomotive top-hats
chugging endlessly onward
to opposite stations.

                                                 10 October 201o

My mom tried to sweep
clean the cigarette burns on the armrest,
and turned the plastic-cracked
lampshade away from rare houseguests.
The arrow-shaped gap melted
at the middle and leaked down
the shade like a stopped-
up gutter. Climbing out her bedroom
window, she knelt on the rotten
mint shingles and tossed matted
maple leaves as indiscriminately
as rock salt onto the glassy sidewalk
drinking in the overhead halo
of Penelec Electric and pine needles.

Needles—

The red biohazard suitcase
in the dining room is packed
full for distribution
in a Philadelphian switchyard.

City of Brotherly Burning Barrels
and railroad-tie benches—
but not for dressing up suburban
meditation gardens, or housing
yellow jackets and half-melted
Army men. For sitting, sleeping,
and supplying calf splinters
for small talk along the Schuylkill
River, watching the cell lights
of Eastern State get swallowed
whole by the systematic tall grass,
one by one, thanking some blessed
something for their freedom
in the boxcars, their *** and Lucifer
matches, and each other.

Is this raining sumer ending into september
With the bang of thunder coaxing the
Eight ball into the felts green exit rolling down the tubes of
Las vegas like red boxcars rolling away with
All the cash.  
I hope so
I want our team to play
And shake cans of raineer
Beer in the pinical moments
Sucess.
And spray broken chalk conversations after
We harpoon the no 7 whales with our maple
Mcdermits.  A universe of of black hole eight *****
Will mark are sucess in the end
When we shatter the rack like
The uviverses biggest bang
The sound creating the foot note
Of imtimidation after sinking melodic
Rythems and strokes in to
The corner pockets surrender.  
This is how we win
This is the unicorns
Hope
We are and will
Become
One of the silver dollars
On the glorified bar.

Rebellion – for too long the status quo,
is, in our day, a predictable show.
Antichrist irony, absurdity
shockingly daring incongruity
no longer shock the bourgeois, you know…

Alone in the temple of glass with a rock,
you’re out of traditional symbols to mock.
Surrealists did it much better than you –
and it meant a lot more in ’32.

You chew your cud on the cattle-wagon
overused shock-tactics (moo ! ) now draggin’
(or herding) aboard the iconoclast train
(b)lowing through boxcars your bovine refrain:
“to, um –  make people think…”  Oh Lord, how uncouth.
Nihilist narcissus – tell me, what’s Truth?
Must creative always be subversive?
I discern, in your frenzied discursive,
a dull and predictable lack of life.
While you brandish that plastic butter knife
I  seem to note, in your constant ******,
dearth of artistic ability.  Must
bohemian acolytes (some yawning)
ever be deer in the headlights, fawning
before the ironic gesture? It’s sad;
the bitter is sweet but the art is bad…

They circle hors d’oeuvres on opening night
like moths around white wine in candlelight,
cerebrating in a modernist void:
contemporary aesthetes, overjoyed
to know once more that life has no meaning;
the planet is doomed; that kings are queening;
that chic just arrived, escorting philosophy
(Forgive us, Duchamp, for all this monstrosity).

I long for Hudson River School sunsets
Old Dutch Masters, religious art, portraits,
Red, green, or black propaganda-art?  NO !
The view does not merit the price of the show.
I’m dada-ed to death, beyond the surreal.
Conceptual gimmicks have failed to conceal
your want of ability, values, and faith
In the book you despise it is written: “thus saith
the fool in his heart: that there is no God…”

You: Postmodern Art – **to the firing squad!

so you die.
in medias res (every story starts
in the middle) when
you awake from unsettling
dreams to find yourself transformed in your bed into
this city—
subway tunnels bursting with the hello(hello((hello(((hello))) of small children
and ***** words spraypainted by *****
minds onto *****
boxcars sitting like greyhounds
retired from racing and
awaiting the
slaughter—it will all
be beautiful later.

and when blinding light races
toward you
(every story ends
in the middle)

The sun
A bullet hole
Burning through
The grey-white sky
Waiting on a train
At the crossing
Traffic standing still
Graffiti strewn boxcars pass
Artful dodgers
On steel canvas'
Leaving their unsung scars
Smoky music fills my head
One of those moments
In my memory scrapbook
Thoughts of one who
Used to make me know
All was good with the world

did we know that today
in 2016 we'd be reading the future
about the Great American
soft
depression interlaced
August 16 with Lehman
Goldman
Sach King David
how this time it will be
different but the bubble
starting
in 1995 always burst
even if its only two years
later Elizabeth Montgomery
died we were joining the Academic Mafia
around Circle Drive
Korean BBQ
Blues Caravan and
cruising around East Los
in a Blue Toyota pickup truck
now
there's a parked Prius
because we're too busy
running
numbers a racket
in Cambridge that leaves us
just a bit of fried egg in the morning
with coffee vorleser-ing and documenting
just
as any moral Hannah would do
in 1939 to say hey this is the way
we wanted right boxcars leading
to abattoirs today we do our best
imitation
of a weak McNamara
mea culpa

Steal the failing faith
fallen from the moving trains
boxcars, trampled stars,
unsettling rumors from porous scars
Forged on the blacksmith's lathe
Bloodied and barred, the laughter slowly bathes
Focus, Focus
tear away from this hocus-pocus
Absorbed in unwavering, clamorous doubt
Eyes that watch as you stumble about
muttering lies, stammering cries
observing the heart as it slowly dies
Happily forgotten, yet still  un-forgiven
Giving in is haphazardly driven
'Give it a wail', 'We'll never tell'
Then stand back and watch 'em fail
Falling, fading, never-ending
Visualize the further rending
Live and learn, hard to discern
Watch the Dreamers dreams begin to burn
Consider this path cruelly trudged through
As a warning meekly written to you

It was just after the sun went down, the river ran a marathon under the bridge, the tracks went on into infinite places of old time America revived kicking, screaming as tears ran down her face. The heroes of the country have all laid down their arms, they have all laid down to sleep, or die. The women and wives of all that are laying down are tending to the sick and the sleepy. We are all sleepy, we are all just running like one life is more important than another. I jumped on the rails and balanced myself for a few seconds falling off and feeling failure. We have all cried, we have all wept at dreams on drugs with frail minds. The mind is never dull and the youth of this old place keep it tender. Tender minds and hearts, kind old words and rivers run like this with no time for friends, just ducks, just fish, just branches leaning in, just rock, just tears of the earth, just memories  of the sky, silence from the overgrowing ferns. We to have no time but for love, for hate, for laughing and crying and screaming and sighing.
From atop the old oak tree the wind composes songs sung by sweet tender leaves, I think of you then and cry, We all think of our loves, our loves that dissolved or drowned in the river, or burned to hot and overtook the furnace of the soul. The love oh sweet man, oh sweet woman when did we hurt such beautiful innocent things. Small child wakes to his father, he never asks why, daughter feels best with assurance from her mother, she needs no reasoning . Since the gargling of all mankind choking on all blunder and careless word spilt out over a drink, a smoke, a curious conversation, a head down on the bar 86d dead to the night.
    Rather hysterical minds and kindred hearts always lose the crowd. Rather live in happiness than wealth of greed and disease. Rewarding oneself of amphetamines and alcohol. Deserving of great loves and conflict we are. AI it is all meant and not mistaken.

Oh mankind lead but not dictate, oh mankind drop your bombs somewhere else! Its the end! The end of all men and the end of all children. The weak are striving and the children have all grown up. Cut away your chains, cut away the scars left on bruised wrist.. Oh lady of patience and all Saints help us, believe in man and love. I saw a man die in Boston right there on the ground, covered in his ****** waste and blinded by humility of dying in public. Old man, the dying is done, you were set forth to be free, no public sadness hurt people, makes them humble, makes them live, you old man are now a saint. You have died, right in front on a stage built by you or him or her. The crowd never likes to miss a tragedy from a safe seat. This crowd, forgets, we all die, we all become humbled, we all have no say in saintly demise that so many others have taken before us and left nothing but wonder with tears. You saint old man, you loved in life and will be loved as a corpse, love does not die with you, it dies a hundred years after. Please forgive our saint, our hero, our compassionate martyr, he has dropped in front of many to keep many scared of our day. There is no need to be scared, no need for sadness upon your own soul and picture you so elegantly painted of yourself. He dies, she dies, they die, we all must leave.
      
       So now the fields are overflowing with dew and the field mouse is drinking with a small mouth. The wind is now blowing through factory s and boxcars. The songs of glee and doom are still sung, poor innocent mouse, poor hobo in windy boxcar, yes we do attain enlightenment through our bad days, yes we do learn love on rainy days. Love tracks you down and finds you, you need not search for it.

Vibrant orange clouds against a baby blue western sky
Signals that the night is drawing nigh
The steely cold fingers of the darkness will soon be around my neck
That leaves me with the unnerving feeling of being a miniscule speck
Like the pinprick of light in the heavenly sky we call stars
It leaves me in pieces like I've been hit by runaway boxcars

Night time is when the world falls eerily silent, and my mind sets to roaming
Down the hallways of my memories I start floating
Soon like fireworks they begin exploding
My mental state quickly is eroding
My nights are always a coal black foreboding

Tides of change are like the tides of the ocean
Tides of the ocean I watched on an island off the coast of Charleston SC
Cemented in my childhood memories as a scene of holy simplicity

And like the ocean, these tides can bring forth
Great waves of progress
Hunter Thompson speaks of the great San Francisco wave of the 60s, and how it surged, raged, but could not make the journey farther than they peyote nightmares of Vegas

And still in dreams at night I hear Woody Guthrie singing how there's "a better world a-coming"
If you listen closely
In the alleys around trashcan fires
Or in the last of the occupied boxcars
You can hear the same thing
It's coming
It's coming

Yet tides come in and then recede back
And in the roar of the ocean I could hear it telling me to be calm
The better world is coming
But there is still much more time to wait
I don't like to be a pessimist about such things
But all one generation can do is reap and learn the last generations harvest,
And then go and plant their own

In these reflections I realize why I can't write exactly how I feel about politics or progress
I am not a warrior
I am not a brick thrower or speech giver, though both have necessity in their own respect
Like Hunter and Woody
I am a teller of stories and presenter of truth and life
I can spend endless nights and days writing of experiences
But the future is beyond my grasp

Yet when the times come
When blood is spilt and windows shatter
I will be there
I will experience every moment
And I won't let the effort be forgotten or in vain
For the tides come in
Then go back again

I’ll start out by saying that my parents don’t like us to label ourselves.
They don’t like us to share them either.

As a child it used to take me at least two hours to fall asleep.
Thoughts would race through my head like boxcars.
I would repeat what I was excited about the most
until my brain would get tired enough to let me rest.
Some doctors would call that insomnia, but that’s not what I had.

Since the age of six, I haven’t believed in god.
His existence always felt like a fairytale
that adults never grew out of.
Some people would call this atheism, but that’s not what I have.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been worried.
Every event in my day was cause for panic.
I would string them along like paper chains
with no rest in between.
Some doctors call that anxiety, but that’s not what I have.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t pick at my skin.
I’ll rip off pieces until my skin gets mad
and bleeds red with anger.
Some doctors would call that dermatillomania, but that’s not what I have.

Since middle school, I’ve been afraid of germs.
I won’t touch my face without washing my hands first
which makes it take twice as long to put on makeup.
I can’t eat without sanitizing my hands
which makes people skeptical to get to know you better.
Some doctors would call that germaphobia, but that’s not what I have.

When I was fifteen my throat used to close up
every time I thought about death.
Sometimes you don’t realize you’re breathing until you’re gasping for air.
Some doctors call that a panic attack, but that’s not what I had.

I’ve been on antidepressants for three years
in order to calm down my brain
from running too many marathons.
My heart was never able to catch up.
Some doctors might say that this is because I was depressed.
But that’s not what I have.

My therapist told me…
— ****, I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.

Somebody told me to come here today so that
I could be honest to myself and others
about the problems that don’t have names.
The words that I can’t say out loud.

I’m hoping with this discussion
I will someday be able to say that
I used to not be able to fall asleep for hours.
I used to not believe in god, I used to worry all the time.
That I no longer pick at my skin.
I’m no longer afraid of germs.
My throat used to close up,
and I’m no longer on antidepressants.

Because I have problems that can't be labelled.

Counting boxcars as they hurdle down the tracks , one for every memory I can summon , one for every penny I've placed at this crossing for good luck ..
A copper token to insure good fortune , the wheels of a child's imagination set into motion ..
Walking the railway , dreaming of life as a " Hobo " , with my cane over my shoulder and a bag of apples tied to one end ...
Racing home at Dusk with the last glimmer of daylight at my feet , the five thirty special thunders through this small town again ..
Bound for points South , Montgomery or Mobile , breaking the quiet of night marching through corn , soybean and cotton field ...
The deafening sound of order and morning routine in sleepy Southern villages , a wake -up call for little boys with skinned up knees , ball caps and ***** britches ...

Stop, Drop, Rock n' Roll!
We built this city on cruise control!
It started with a seed and grew into a jungle
Where people grumble and boxcars rumble
It's growing up! It's growing out!
So honk those horns! And curse and shout!
**** these newfangled roundabouts!
There's a new billboard on every corner
Just signs and symptoms of the greater disorder
The cancerous urge to keep growing and growing
It will be too late when it finally starts slowing
So get outside! It's time to start mowing!
Before our urban yards start showing
Their wild side.