or, "a Black Night Motorcycle Crash Off Highway 51 & 61..."

(underworld).



the world is infested with so much undergrowth, so many insects eating at our apples
and we always have to ask the question “how are we doing?” for Christ sake! we ride bikes, buses, the blues, the occasional ambulance like lost lawyers. What’s the difference between Punch & Judy? two puppets, or marionettes. bebop. Punch is a deformed, child-murdering, wife-beating psychopath, and we laugh. it’s an anarchic commedia dell'arte. Judy was originally Joan. “That’s the way to do it!”

"That's not the way to do it." it is not the romance or comedy we always thought it to be, like “ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” A children’s nursery rhyme derived from a verse about the plague. atrocious. it is a theatre of tragedy. there should be tarantulas & hallucinogenic drugs, pages torn out of a Hunter S. Thompson trip of Gonzo journalism,

that night I read “Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs”.

i saw Faust guised as Jack Nicholson on a rooftop and he wished to die (who is more iconic, or neurotic?). he was like an opium ghost haunting the Chinatown of my anxiety and a very important phone call I was waiting for (I had sudden visions of “Easy Rider’ with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper). I thought he was a thief and so I shot him with cheap wine & complaints. “You could start out your whole life in a phone book, like a Chicago waltz, then wear your hat backwards and tell all your stories in a different tongue." what/right. Aretha Franklin was singing "Spanish Harlem" across the barren rooftops and through the cold rainfall... Faust began to seem more like a narcissistic echo... madness & measles & & missionaries & Marguerita drinks do not go well with helicopters, homosexuals or hospitals. don’t ask why.

on a clear day you can see tomorrow

it’s all in whichever way the wind blows... strangers in the night; give up- give up- the bottle is lost. are you self or are you human? damn, the monotone has turned into Monday again (another new moon),
and on Mondays everything turns into blood. i am leaving my religious clothes & radios behind so that I may find
the thing that thinks it is god. i read somewhere that three people have been recognized as god among the human species: Nietzsche, Einstein and Beethoven.

it takes guts to understand Beethoven or infinity. it takes a mirror to laugh, and it takes a life to die. does this mean that Nirvana is less mysterious than radiators, radios or jukeboxes? less than umbrellas? or is it just the whole smells like teenage spit, or spirit thing?
by mistake/we begin again...
we never truly end, from the Aztecs to street car crashes
we are always finding new postcards & insults, new passages out of the Bible
(so as not to return, like taking a train out of Shanghai).

i make no attempt to vomit the sombre surreal me.
forget about what is unbound, bound or 'round midnight. all those miles, mountains walked. wounded & wandering carrying the Dada weather like religion for the next Woody Allen movie. how far away is Manhattan from Alice? the Japanese gave us Haikus while Woody gave us “kamikaze women” like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky in Love and Death. Parades, paradoxes, fogs, frogs & fables; we never know where we are going even while we drive our cars & taxis & trams & trains through purgatory & paradise, plagued by the
infernal rivers & mirrors of clocks going off at fuck o'clock in the morning.
i thought about blowing my brains out over Broadway, beneath a green light bulb sun,
but lit a cigarette instead.

we hibernate to disappear into silence

trumpets & triumphs
play tragedies & truths; the underworld voodoo jazz in abstract intervals,
octaves of ten below zero at 3am in the grotesque frozen fantasy of the suffocating
subway tremble contemplating why god never created the eighth day...
surely they would’ve been Seven-Elevens or Starbuck Cafés

i was listening to the vocal chords of Bob Dylan’s decaying tongue while he sang:
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,
“Now the wintertime is coming,
the windows are filled with frost.” Dylan has a few alter-egos,
two of which are Sergei Petrov and Jack Frost.
something like a mood or sound collapses all around me.
i thought about buying a Triumph 500 motorbike, drive straight
into the sun, feeling superstitious. feeling like Superman.
nearing the penultimate stanza i thought of something very profound
Dylan once said:

“God is in Heaven-
All’s right with the world.”

is this optimism & hope or just a simple twist of faith or fiction,
switched off sin & innocence?

i’m a broken bottle of country;
no self-portrait is ever seductive enough.
expecting rain,

waiting for another train, bottomless & the bells like a thousand sonnets ;
the tantagram enigmas, endless & down the brown bones of the underflow,
the underwood. milk spoiled in the undertone of irregular rhythms,
unbend to suspend, to delay, to distort the ideas & umbilicus umbra of
the umph, like ugly fruits.




(Übermensch).

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