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"Thank God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk."
~Travis
Bickle, Taxi
Driver
I: Red Thunder Road
I watched the best autumns crumble
into steel-sprayed
winters, peeled into
my worst Paul Stuart Vecchia zimarra overcoat
beneath the biting skyscrapers
huddled in the
simulacrums of stone cathedrals
crows and crowds and clowns
at the taxi stands
waiting for a miracle, for a Messiah
that
primal Prometheus,
golems & gothams,
waiting to bum another
cigarette
pushing away the hand;
this is our land, this
futile make-believe
fantasia ghetto gangster 1950's
latenite
last lost jazz show
(something like CHICAGO
played in Paris, Texas,
Berlin or Boston, infected
injected with a bite of Giacomo
Pucini's La
Bohème'
tuned
into the new-cum-now by Jonathan Larson's
rock opera RENT
on & off Broadway, the hardway);
rustpaint
blown out of the 40th story-tenement windows;
winds w/
ginsoaked gunshots, saxophone guttaralgrinds,
so the
seasons of wither went,
wet,
wept,
wilde,
westward.
(Falls blur into winters,
black rain into
coalsmoke snow,
factory cold silent as a slow drive
up that
mad-mountain god-ghost
called Red Thunder Road -
you hear about it
whispered in
the cobweb corners
under the faded & faint neon
in all the
dimestore
truckstops, in those moments between
country songs
off the juke, in those
fragmented, oil-stained
small towns
north of all known countries;
desolation's hole)
Another
hotel, another highway...
The total totem torn in
the sultry trash altars
bent forwards for last
year's gods,
like a car-crash, prying and
praying on
non-gravity Einstein
equations,
sucking in the science of self-satisfaction
the tremendous fringe roll of the surf
off the horizontal
horizon bones of streets and
hell-bent roofscapes, the
proof-scrapes
of here & now, above & below
devils & angels
downtown under, falling in the suicide subways
the
hard ways, drinking scotch & bourbon
while drowning,
downing down those benzo-
Valium vinyle monster moments
of blurred clarity,
Frankenstienian like, from Gothic to Geneva
the Modern Prometheus,
anonymously London, 1818.
"Physics
is a dirty beast, sick,"
the galvanisms of animal electricity
& the City, burying krakens for romantic novel titans,
for
who would burn or bound Zeus with fire?
Bob Dylan, Tom
Waits, maybe Will Self?
The air swollen
with salt moisture and rainbow gasolene,
Hologram fragments
of insectile post-cards
Though the flowers were all
on the same stem
in the same steam,
Today it wasn't either
just more chopshock traffic
blowing out our rearview windows
with more vague questions
"So what?"
says Miles with his horn,
the angels of our flesh cheat
the animals of our instinct,
the octopus mode of our
enigmatic thorn
paradigms & diagrams; cocaine crytptograms
tentacles of entrance, entranced on our mirror-moon
limbs
Stealing Death's
Steely Dan jewelery
in the darkness of
our molested modesty. America's
crime: passion!
the literary of Burroughs.
Another cockroach hotel, another cockcracked
highway...
II: The Hotel
Chelsea
So we reach the hill's
top. in stillness.
the snows settle. Hell down.
nowehere left to go;
this is our Mount St. Helens,
our Olympus Mons,
should we cradle in defeat? or jump
off that black
James Baldwin bridge-cliff into the
oblivious void
of the East
Harlem River of sanctuary,
of and into some Another Country...
jump or let the needle in,
shadows, winds, winds, windows...
whispers
in the mirrors of
old ghosts, familiar hosts,
forgotten
towns
The more less, the more the chance;
depth
in perspective for murder
mood or circumstance;
us against
nature, deep on the primeaval tongue;
we'll never
win, but we can get it done
as sure as god's bleed dogma.
In New York City, 1995
reading Baldwin's Sonny's Blues
on a train, in the subway, under Harlem
down to the Village, to that Hotel
in Chelsea where Bob Dylan,
Dylan Thomas,
Kerouac & Ginsberg, Sid & Nancy, Leonard Cohen
and all the best & worst of those great minds
where they splintered
their
bones on old typewriters
writing poems, writing songs
I felt it, electric;
later hearing Jeff Buckley
Live at Sin-é
perform Hallelujah
I found something of myself
then let it go,
So I take
off that raincoat jacket, "fuck it !"
the impeccable
road goes forever on
no more waiting at the bus
stop on Paper Street
so I just sat there above Deso lation
Hotel
until
her mourning was over,
the Italian girl I never mention
(met her in the back of the Hôtel-Dieu
looking
in the morgue; bohemian girl,
worn brown boots &
short white leather jacket,
jet black hair, green
eyes
a small body, almost like a moth's...
Maria?
Marla,
"Che gelida manina"
like a
spider she came along)
Riding easttwards
until
the morning came, 2am on my wrist-Swiss,
watching the
leaves in that
Newburyport, New England season change.
"always another café
to crash in,
Johnny Cash on the jukebox like a paradox,"
walking them lines and railroads, those hells
like Clint
Eastwood in black,
another road, another town
nameless, priestless
and always another shot of bourbon
always another whiskey kiss,
until she leaves,
"Donde
lieta usci "
hotels, highways...
III: Highway 95
"I
think I'll go to Memphis, Tennessee,
drive along highway
95
just for the hell of it, maybe
find a girl
from the North Country down south,
maybe just keep
on drivin'...
a hundred highways yet never enough
miles."
Always more highways, never enough hotels.
`End (3rd reincarnation;
possibly more).
The Italian translations:
Vecchia zimarra – "Old coat"
Che
gelida manina – "What a cold little hand"
Donde
lieta uscì – "From here she happily left"