OZ

Do we know when we're in love?

I am Eliot, abandoning day for a Remington

an eggshell page and forehead moisture, typing

‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’

Realizing that the eraser shavings of a wasted and arrested mind

Are far more conservative then subway faith on a cattle train

And I am Bukowski

A man like a real prophet

With an umbrella in a desert waiting for the rain

Drunk, half drunk, side-winded

Drunk, always drunk

Suggesting

‘Stale beer falling over at 4 a.m. makes the only sound in your entire life’

While all else is staging truth in chloroform rhythm, of course

And now I am Kerouac, I drop syllables into a gorge

‘What is the meaning of this world?’

And the answer is perfect silence, so I know-

That I must become Prometheus, Roark, an avalanche

The bone of a rotting pier in a godless ocean

As violent and ordinary as the windmill in the back of a revolver

Packing bodies into torpedo tubes, onto palettes

Into the filed lungs of a Dachau factory

And I find myself kneeling on the edge of the world

Screaming

Why is there pain, disease, relativity, continuity, death, life, and cyclic nature

What of the food chain, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Sodom and Gomorrah

Addiction, obsession, infatuation, heroin, dogma- love.

And why. Am. I.

 

But the void is silent.

                        And my hands grow cold, cold as a scarecrow’s in a Potter’s field

            Or a night hanging like a euthanized convict in a state room

            His hands folded in prayer

            Or cold as the steps an old Father landslides down from the steel and stone steeple of a          state church

            Where he thought he gave god his last confession

            In a piped voice, between a bell of horn and a bell of ivory

            But it was only to the stars, to the sun

            And to the roofs of this city

Our City-

 

Then.

 

You.

 

Come like rain to an old man with a dry mouth and dry pain

A song at midnight on the radio when I’m somewhere running down the road

Needing, wanting, craving anything that will still the rogue of this sweat mill

And hush, you whisper, like the breathe of the turning earth

Tiptoeing between asphodels, pound cake daffodils

Coal valleys and iron mountains dressed for wedding receptions and Indian tea

Old fingers, ocher fingers, virgin fingers, fingers flat from black and white

And bloodied tuberculosis keys

Or like rosewood hair against cobalt sand

Against cotton moss, through bell towers and rafters

Down main streets and docks and stairwells

Along cliff sides the color of frozen razor blades

Along manila roads, fresh roads, taken roads, raw roads

Crossroads, fork roads, roads that end

Roads that never began, roads that take me home

And roads that take me far away from where I’ve always wanted to be

Right there

At home

By you-

 

And when the clock strikes twelve

And the glass slipper seems to shatter on pavement

Like tears in moonlight

The darkness cutting like diamonds on edge

Or color in a burning dark room

Leaving the silence of the void

To become steel

Or ash and bone

Or dust

The ruin of this city, our city

Well, I don’t mind, no

I don’t mind a damn thing

Because you, love, tranquilize the horror

And welcome me to a heaven even a god could never commend

For this

This is godless love

And it is beauty.

Reviews

[Quill up a gay ape's bu..]

This review makes about as much sense as this poem.