Letter From High Street #1
Everyday you reach the future that you said was not there. But it was. It is. The future like a telescope an unfolding silk panel an infinite origami flower the cut-glass of a trillion trillion suns. The future will be, until it isn't. You will be, until you aren't. Then what. No more face in the mirror but no more orgasms either. I'm afraid too you know. When I hear the wind whispering her name along the frozen river banks, over and over, I'm afraid. Because I know it's not the wind it's me talking out loud again. The Future; as if. Just over that rise, it is. Even though that light is coming from a star dead so long we cannot imagine what it lived through. Ever. No future. But here it is. And here you are. And me. Waiting for oblivion; but, maybe, just one more coffee, first, yeah? Yeah. Right now I want ice cream and poetry and espresso and the 10,000 unbelievable girlbodies I see everyday. FuckinAplus. It's a kind of Death, somehow, this life. Isn't it? * ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Drink up it's the last call better drink up I say fuck me Lady Gaga No fuck you I'm poetry's original fool Come sit on my dunce cap why don't you I'm almost 60, pretty much done for a dead man writing poems for hot asses and the furtherance of the High Lyric Mode I am so not intellectual just the latest thing in fashionable stanzas So drink it up it's the Last Call, believe me and believe me, this is so not poetry Who could not be Goth whose childhood was shaped, deep in the fifties, by old school Catholicism, the woodcuts of Wanda Gag from the Bros. Grimm, and all those cobalt winters that mirrored them with windows covered in ice on the inside, the house cut off from the world by wind and snow and the Dore Bible; and reading the eerie Martian tales of E. R. Burroughs leafing through the unnerving pictures of Breughel, all mixed in with wolf spiders and alligators and dead birds in the cellar and a father whose very prescence was an event of pure terror? Oh, I am Goth to bhe rotting bone. And so are you'f, I know --- with your powdered pallor, your deathblack hair, and your unbearably exquisite, doll-like surface. It is so good to be Goth, and it is so good, for me, that you look so Goth. * ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ this scratching across the nothingness, words going insane smoking the opium of silence exhaling blue alphabets in a stainless steel cafe of the mind because death not poetry after all this glissando of streetcorners awnings black plastic torn velvet waifs staring from darkened doorways footsteps running a neon ghost kneeling white nights in plate glass the increasing gravity of steam light old typewriters my hands crackle in the streets like snow on Mercury television-echoes reflecting these stanzas like distress signals from a far galaxy calling me home to the sound of Japanese no-wave jazz contortions of tin cans newspapers loose wires negatives of radio static becoming voices and eyelashes meeting ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ creakings. rustlings, rattles. tinks. gauze on gauze skin of cooling metal phrases crashing into themselves dna of cities tears molten silver gutterals of dogs I am the language you speak a rain that flashes on and off a series of misplaced tropes and Death after all not Orpheus and the cries of old people alone in their rooms forever at the kitchen windows of the universe, faces in headlights caught between hope and despair.