“Do we see, in the car-crash, the portents of a nightmare marriage between technology, and our own sexuality? … Is there some deviant logic unfolding here, more powerful than that provided by reason?” ~J. G. Ballard, “Crash”

Track One, Room #23:

Dust,
debris, trash, junk,
crushed cans & rusted umbrella spokes
diagonally to the cheap hotel’s edge,
bent aerials & white punk amphetamine echoes
radio signals... soft cerebral geometries, grooves,
galaxies of sound blooming, bruised blossoms
in a gust of wind, a vivarium poetic blood ribbon
off the haiku moon, chrome neon, blue lights,
somewhere the sound of a metal horn, hollow
hollering, haunted
bends around the old buildings...
the sky burned a dark angry red
over the bent, slow walking silhouette,
windows from the brownstones burst forth w/ music
like a mixed sound-track to a mystery film noir night
as the dark figure in the misted gray raincoat moves
under several minutes of a Beethoven symphony
seconds of nothing, than a few timbre waves of opera from Wagner;
an ultrasonic sonata orchestration flat, sharp of Bach,
baroque, backwards, densely romantic
beautiful, lustful;
an abstract atmosphere screaming seasons four from Vivaldi
through rain & thunder movements
to Paganini’s soul dealt to the Devil
obscene by “Caprice No. 23..."
surreal, full of piercing Stradivari strings like sex, seduction & slaying
of full-moon harmonics & knife-edged pizzicatos;
catching mercurialism
from sins & syphilis (a death in Nice);
these sounds soon followed by moods of the waltz,
of Tchaikovsky “Fourth...”, fragmentary, fantastical...
then the deep wildness, the fugal passages in Die Zauberflöte
of Mozart,
Amadeus, Wolfgang :
strangles tenor, baritone, soprano... treble, alto & bass...
flittering flutes, hollowing horns, trumpets, trombones ( & more)...
.......the seduced strings, a golden glockenspiel,
.......to magic bells;

smooth & easy into the wee small hours
for lovers & strangers
feeling the paramount of autumn into winter
as the European sounds sway & swing into the sands of Vegas
wireless switched to Sinatra
disintegrating like dry cigarette smoke
the sound stream-scape of auditory scales, darkened chords
damp nebula clouds
fantastic as the course of mute storms
vibrating nova pulses of electromagnetic shapes
like transient droves of comets, meteors & stars -
infinite illuminating constellations;
methodical as the engines of traffic noise
wheels screeching, metal on metal...

Room #23,
there is the sound of a scratched record stuck in a groove
bending, stretching repeatedly some kind of electric jazz,
passing voices in the swollen hallway: “Tell her to jump off the pyramids.”
“Of course I remember.” / “The Tel Aviv flight departs out of Logan at 9:30...”
“Fuck you, Gregory!” / “Of course I remember!”
“My damned psychiatrists is fucking mad.” / “...you too, of course...”
“Give us a smoke, man.” / OF COURSE I FUCKING REMEMBER!”
“I’m sleeping! Go away...” ...the void of endless voices swung
& receded like a tidal wave : “God knows nothing.”
behind the door to Room #23
Spider Sam had the weight on his head, aching from too much alcohol
stuck as he slept through several mornings
w/ the boom of music & noise collapsing in his skull;
ten seconds later, another twenty, then fifteen more
he just lay there, unmoving
the weight of everything in his head:
a gun, a stop-sign, a car-crash;
he had the kind of blues that no one could toss away
the kind you can only try and ride out
with a slow drag down the Main Streets
hungry & low in the way he’d blow those notes
arpeggios of pain & stuck words in his mouth
telling his tale a thousand times
damned w/ the dialects & accents of his horn
bittersweet tones, fingerings of vibrant taut-drawn hearts
like cold strings pulled too tight
hammering, stammering, strumming & drumming
in the human sentiment of his suffocating breath
right down to the aching core
of his sorrow, sympathies for tomorrow
prowls of cold rain behind his broken teeth
in a brief expression, suffering the nowhere grin
ripped & heavy
crippled & crazy
walkin’ like Armstrong on the moon
Armstrong in New Orleans w/ his big smilin’ baritone
blowin’ it out
bringin’ it down
hard & right
rushing away until all the time left fades’
kicked in the guts like a melodic murder
draggin’ the misery & the love
of a Mississippi mud-soaked tune played on twenty irons
knockin’ down heavens & doorways
through the roof-top aerials & chimneys
‘till all the moods come crushing right through the busted radio
like Ella, Cole or Charlie Parker in the same old same old
Dizzy & the birth of the cool
at de Hotel Colt-Vis
‘round midnight
spilling’ forth from the wine
cut from the spine
slicing’ away in the dead of the night;
and in comes Spider a’ walkin’ and a talkin’
and a smokin’ up a storm w/ his dirty bronze & rusted sax
dressed in a deep grey blue suite, eyes that could kill
w/ synthesizers & drum machines
a Harmon-muted horn
but he never knew,
& took himself to be just another loser;
that was twelve months ago
before he became someone new -

The night black,
the lamp-lights glowing green
beneath a nowhere moon,

1. Accidental Apostrophe:

Sam ‘Spider’ Spike played the trumpet pretty well
with his inexpressible & amorphous smile
that he often wore after one, two, three... too many drinks;
he played an eclectic mix of be-bop, rip-hop
top-stop, free-form & fusion jazz,
most times at a small club in the East Village; the guys he played with
cool cats, cool dudes,
sometimes called themselves The Iron Blue Echo, Echo of Blue,
Iron Green or just The Blue. They produced
one album
called "Moonset Over Venus Sweet"
that was often called
"Train Insane"
due to the thirty-three minute epic track 6, Side 2.
Spider wrote the opening tune, a haunting electric thing
a deep cold, six minute analogue syncopation
designed to evoke the many deep shades
of the colours blue & green; it’s name was long, bizarre
and it was most often just called ‘Gig’. Spider preferred its
true epithet: Anagignoskomena, which he claimed
was his divine biblical apocrypha, a deuterocanonical expression
of his musical spiritus mundi -
...his magnum opus its fast, complex opening
played on patterns of alternating chords each a semitone apart
not unlike T. Monk’s classic track Epistrophy; ‘Gig’ was often
hailed by local critics to be too self-obsessed, self-indulgent chaos
bludgeoned by a mad scientist Frankenstein
experiment they liked to call Armageddon:
“...too many notes, backwards bass shapes, always expanding
just when you think a melody is about to surface; and something
that sounded almost too similar to Frank Zappa’s 1974 Apostrophe(')”
they said it went so far as to sample the Zappa song in distant sounds
as well as some of the lyrics from the intro track Cosmik Debris
in its white-wash of sound;
in ‘Gig’s’ intro there are spoken words the critics say are:
"You might not believe this,
little fella, but it'll cure your Asthma too!" (from the song in question)
Spider was almost flattered, but
flatly insisted the words were not as the idiot critics had heard.
“School night hot
deceive kiss, fiddle hella,
nut shit’ll pure nor Gignos who?” -cryptic & never meaning to make any sense
(the first fifty copies of the record version Spider had personally hand-wrote
those words on the white inner sleeve, then credits Zappa as the Mystery Man for an
Accidental Apostrophe ('). Its just about the timing; its pure zen,
sin & synchronicity or whatever that the rhyming of the words spin & spit on,
the perfect (s)pun; “Perhaps Frank himself found away to assist me from the grave
w/ segments of that production; from the Sub-CyberNatural,” Spider often joked,
and oft times said such w/ a hint,
against the witch hunt,
w/ amazed wonder.

Sometimes he was a bit too drunk, a bit pissed
and spit it all out,

“Its just a fucking song!” He’d yell as the band was tuning into the groove of it,
on stage in the few underground Village jazz clubs like The 7th Promenade, The C # Lap,
The Blue Cat and Upper West Side’s Dirty Frank's, or Harlem’s Holiday Inn H_ _el.
The song was liked well enough by anyone who gave a listen to the queer jazz
of The Iron Blue Echo Quartet. And occasionally to everyone’s delight,
the seductive Charlotte Bey
would join the band on stage and lend her
smoky Parisian vocals (sounding French even though she was Hungarian).
Spider’s cutting jape about the song always made the ‘thin to almost full’ crowds laugh,
spit beer, fall out off chairs, yell out un-pronounced profanities,
fall over tables, echo his words... far too often he could never recall exactly
where he was,
  
The song would be the only one he’d ever have
composed & recorded
(however, secretly, he wrote a soft blues melody called
Charlotte Tonight that no one would ever hear,
not even the petite singer herself; he had a thing for her
wanted her, lusted her
thought of her alone in his bed at night;
w/ his head drunk down on damp bars, eyes half closed,
always he denied himself her flirtatious grins,
denied his own pale emotions
as accidents in the groove).

2. New Territories:

Epochs drifted;
thinking of Charlotte Bey, Samuel “Spider” Spike
woke one bass-beat jungle-deep night
surrounded by the pitch-black of peripheral sounds,
a kind of jigsaw puzzle of vicious variations, vigorous
& disconcerting w/ fibrillations,
sweating uncomfortably dissipate,
nails & screeching tires
reverberate in a residual ebb & flow...
the obscene few hours passed rapid, slow. Unmoving, dissolved
in the cruel calm & wild of an unchained fugue:
dogs howling,
cars crashing,
buildings & bridges collapsing - -
(Sam Spider couldn’t think straight
for all the electric racket,
the crepuscular dissonance...)
a feathery thudding noise coming to life, shuttered by thunder
& the penumbral elaborate fluttering of an automaton moth’s wings
petits machins;
the rapid metallic rustling
girders grinding, steel sheets,
lattices & ornate panes torn & tearing apart, ripping
like iced-iron glass splashing through moist-melted wax,
vibrant, incisive, intact;
driven by winds, by rain
by trains down wrecked rail-way tracks, the rented rhythms
& sins of the provocative wah-wah & throbbing pulse
of the breathless brass bass beaten down
into new towns, new territories
as provocative as Harlem & 52nd Street jazz scenes...
(“ersatz!”) dead rats in the drums & blood blend of the unknown
(Spider shivered in the depression
of alcohol addiction, tossed back a shot of Russian vodka
and snorted a thick line of Columbian cocaine, watched
the static white-snow on the flickering TV screen
horizontal, up, backwards, sideways, sliding
 ...slow
in a reverse black unpleasant
stereo numbness...)
the sky outside lit up like a faded Japanese dragon-lantern
he hummed “Charlotte Tonight...”
stumbled sideways
and forgot where he was,

The steel rain hit him like thin nails, rusted & cheap
as Spider found himself wanton, alone
pass torn out phone booths, cables wavering like alien antennae,
He stumbled forward
wandering through & down the dark voodoo streets
the blackened back alleyways, staggering half-drunk,
lost, tripping over a frightened feline’s tail;
Sam found himself walking through the ghosts of alternate dimensions,
surreal, mystical & oddly blue in a cold wind w/ a bitter bite,
some kind of digital white neuromantic slip-stream,
down the grim night’s Faustian opera,
beneath old tenements
& across wasteland plazas, abandoned warehouses
& dead museums along the damp-noir waterfront...
slow levels low, high wastelands, flow the tears
grow, as glows the blue sound (this trumpeter, this poet
this lover: the fool) stuck in the nowhere, now, elsewhere, where?
Thick new territories
just another lost tourist in the urban zoo
walking through a crumbling black forest of cast-iron trees
under the fluttering of dying hologram crows & neon clouds, smudged smoke;
the pale recognitions of patterns in the hotel holes (“so cold”),
this experience
Sam Spider pained, perversely painted
& tainted by a pantomime time, his strange happenings
passing strange shadows,
passing paradigms
& strange signs: No Ordinary Exits,
Nowhere Now, Paradox Hotel,
the Circular Square...

“Strange signs,” he drunkenly whispered, banging against a trash-can
& tripping over a curb hitting his head against a parked Chevy Nova, down to
the cracked actor sidewalk;
“Bloody shit!” he smarted, got up
then stumbled along, stumbling down, drowned & dizzying
feeling mechanical & muted
incomplete;
“Is it alive?” he thinks of himself,
a hymned, metal apocalyptic symphony following his staggering melody
beneath a half-moon throwing a thin grey light across his dementia
like some kind of psychological vomit
and the screaming tendrils of wounded windows...
 
3. Melodramus Tempest:

One unordinary November
the rain steel & neon cold
(Roger Waters dopplering in a passing car,
the synthesizer & bass steady, full :
“Is absolute zero cold enough -“
makes you think; the car passes again :
“This species has amused itself to death,
Amused itself to death, amused it ‘sss elf [STATIC,
crackling] blue wet...”
you knew that last part was wrong
and yet, how so real the song, this human species
amused by TVs, satellites, high-tech waves
and all other kinds of things that numbs the brain,
and that same car drives by again, slower:
“And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah
And when they found our shadows - -“
‘our shadows’, your darkness, your nowhere;

Where?
unsure of where you were, who
you were, where you were going --
insomnia & amnesia aggressively fouls your
rapid eye mind, movement transposing
your reality,
your anatomy, pushing you
 - pushes you electric & enigmatic,
your neurons beating
beneath, between, behind
your light synaptic mind,
your off-track trains & taxi cab wheels inside,
your heathen idiot savant idiosynchronies
flushed w/ sine-wave sins
& random synchronicities;
spectrums of the green retrospectives,
altered carbon kinds of perception
following you to the edge, to the elsewhere, the nowhere
down & up glass-mirror stairways, dead escalators
and moving sidewalks,
down One-Way streets, into hallucinatory doors,
through the No-Escape windows
off balustrades & balconies,
the unordinary exits
in the breathing opera of
the “Above & Beyond” at the Prunella Modularis Theatre
at Damnation Square
where everything is a deep dark shade of blue...
azure, cerulean, ultramarine & arctic steel,
midnight violet, violent velvet indigo
glowing crackling neon from mechanical insect-bots
& umbrella sparrow wings,
feeling like a tomorrow-zombie;
down into the fog-gray labyrinth subways & subdividing tunnels,
the twists & turns through rust & dust & broken bricks,
stagnant underground pools
w/ a constant slow-motion ebb & flow of polluted tidal garbage
(unsure how you ended up down there);
you run, stand still
w/ the dead trains like the metallic skeletons of old world tundra mammoth beasts
lost from Siberia’s frozen blue icelands
and its wild storm,

Down there in that dark place,
the Amanita muscaria Tunnels;
down past torn out pay-phones & hanging cables
like thick twisted metal spider webs, rusting a toxic red
like bruised blood stained & dripping, giving growth to strange fleshy spores,
some with breathing gills & wavering tentacles
you came across a poet-jester crying :
“always wide awake, always on the trellis stake...”
his name was Melodramus, as he told you through crayon-paint dripping tears
lost from his fantastical glass-court-cum-circus universe,
a strange déjà vu
like the teeth of a curious voodoo;
“I am from Out World, and out of myself,” he explained
and told you of his alien place, where he lived
in a vast phantasmal city called Tempest, triplet-twin
to two sister cities : Tempo & Tempera
ruled by Music & Water,
while Tempest was ruled by the cruel Ariel,;
(you thought to leave,
but his pain held you
like teeth).

B# Erasmus's Naufragium (The Shipwreck) - The Tempest:

Tempest is ultra-violet & umber dark,
underworld to the Twin Sisters of Off World--
the crying poet-jester described scenes from a stretched memory;
an iridescent, vivid metropolis crawling with
peculiar & unbelievable things :
Rusted Rats, Green Gargoyles, Machine Mammoths,
Golgotha Gods, Neon Nymphs, Vomitous Vultures,
Skeleton Skyscrapers, Thought Trains...
a cast of a thousand Non-Practical Lamia Cats that
always scratch & bite like so many mosquitoes;
there’s the terrible & ugly Unseen Dweller in the City-Cellar
and the Unholy Perception Thieves
(Melodramus had got lost going up the downstairs
into the mouth of the Off Time Tempest, one
of the many weird perpetual storms in his world;
and the Strange Seasons :
Time Part Zero, Part Winter, Part Flesh, Part Rage);
he was part of the
‘Punch & Juliette’ commedia dell'arte
“there’s no escape, no ever... the Thought Trains
come out of the Shadow Galleries searching,
ever seeking to steal our wills,
stealing our streams of consciousness...
to turn us into marionette automatons, into paradox puppets
w/ no strings...” (Odd logic.
You wanted a drink. You needed a smoke.
You felt trapped)
And then, like a kind of blood-bruised mantra,
the poet-jester spoke in
a sudden rhyme:

“always wide awake, always on the trellis stake
always down from the crashing trains, ever as it rains;
chopped up with nothing something, I’ve never existed
between the estuary of the unwanted laughs,
the japes of Punch & Juliette, I have no tracks
to find my way back
where our shadows sleep, after forever, the tempted fate
of the Heathen Machine that burns
that turns Off World,” the poet-jester stared oddly
at you, as if seeing you for the first time,
then he jumped into a watery maelstrom
that suddenly was in the stagnant pond,
and was gone,
leaving you w/ a terrible sense of confusion
and a blistering head-ache,
but you found your way back up
above the streets,


This dimension has sucked your tongue
through the geometry of the city
walking over empty beer cans, broken glass
between the rusted erosion of parked cars dead,
the growth of so many littered trash bags
scattering rats and blind kings –
you were sleeping anywhere : in abandon hotels,
old tenements, China Town alleyways, old pornographic theatres
with the terrible smells
the smells of sweat, urine & dirty sex;
you kept a used copy of Ballard’s "Crash" in your back pocket
even though you never read it all the way through, it’s pages
yellowing and torn, passages hard to read
through the splattered ink stains, but
you liked the idea of carrying the ‘car-crash language of sexual fetishism’
around, round, and round like carrying a controversy,
the perfect metaphor of this mega-whore metropolis
with its dying chromium and leaking engine-parts;
sometimes you pull it out like a Bible and read fragments;
forget your loneliness for a spell...
but always the city is your Hell
and it wakes you up w/ a punch in the guts;
too many nights bars to bar, bottle to bottles
w/ your brass trumpet : your only friend;
you were not without cash, you were just lost,
so you thought to blow it all away, going
down to a mid-town pawn shop
where you bought yourself a .38 caliber gun
a black Berretta -
then stood on the Brooklyn Bridge that night for three hours
watching the bright stars, the satellites, the neon lit buildings,
the passing cars, listening to the night sounds...;
you were gonna blow your brains out, and
fall down into the East River and float away...

The heavy wind reminded you of "Stormy Weather",
first song you ever learned to play, so
you’ll give life at least one more day;
you left the bridge and walked into a late night internet café
down in SoHo
where you would find your future;
November would pass,
would come again
blue as a television -
as a blur,

4. A Kind of Blue:

One last day,
the rapid metallic scratching of rainfall
like the static of an old record
stuck in the grooves,
..a dirty needle;
listening to "Kind Of Blue" on repeat,
repeat, play, pause, replay...
the proverbial off-beat be-bop jazz rhythms
rhymed & ringing,
bruised & numb between your ears, your fears
like galaxies crashing,
the illustrated improvisations between tenor & alto
tonal Lydian chromatic concepts, piano & trumpet
sketched blue & green, blue in green
the magnum opus of sound -
the speed of stars, almost obscene
the track unfolds, stretched w/ soft chords
dissonant tones as of your identity
like stones
curving away into a distant diadem
of dust, around endless spiral light-bulb nebulae
plunged & down through the thick, damp concrete
constellations of the city
w/ a methodical slowness... like scars, sick and
accumulating car crashes & aerosolled graffiti
in deterioration, descending, dividing & dry-
lucent in the black subterranean windows shattering
through the dust noise of fluorescent lights
like bright chromium knives
into a ind of coma divine,
hearing engines
hearing gears
hearing glass splattering
hearing a strange rain-soaked whistling
......tin, in tune
......through the yellowing floating debris
......fragments of a paradoxical logic,
hearing track 6:
NINE MINUTES & TWENTY-SIX SECONDS,
blue, blue & blue;
jazz composed, painted in blues...


This recording your sound-track, your portrait
all about to change,
your heart a new radio
for a year of reckless, rich abandon
you had sold your soul
your country
your kin; you had left Manhattan Island
and took a train north-east to Boston
brain-washed by the “@LOSTfOUND.com”
‘Net site that sucked you in;
and now the final day has come
(you were a nobody, scum
lost in the wilderness
of cyberspace and nowhere
searching for any kind of love
any kind of life,
and they found you);
10:00am, and
the unwanted breakfast
like a soldier
untouched; shivering uncomfortably
you light a kretek, breathe deep, deeper, deep
deeply, then calm as a moth’s religion
under the slow-motion music poetry
twists & burns back reality
you think of the drugs and the .38
under the hotel bed in the old suitcase;
you think of that phone-call from Paris:
“You’ve got a wonderful voice,” she told you
over the static phone hiss: “...sotto voce.”
She liked Mozart, you played Miles,
but it didn’t really matter, and
besides, they were both pure perfect artists -
track six ends and your eyes
immaculately sweep the brilliant walls;
you reach for the small bottle of bourbon
and the cocaine vials, count what’s left of the hundred-grand
they gave you for your last year :
a religion that was far from any
you ever had for your-
self; counting what’s left
in twenty-dollar bills,
American notes; Miles
and Coltrane playing from the thin, silver/gray
aluminum Bang & Olufsen MP3/iCyberverse Player :
...the modal jazz, & jazz fusion arose around you
like an autumnal wind, part ocean surf
in the high-ceilinged room, astounding acoustics
the sound/vibrato sub-soft w/ percussions & piano in a slow tempo
moderate aria...
a round sound, absolute attitude,
not too much tremolo, not too much bass
followed by the mean virtuosity & notes of
the tenor/alto saxophones & autumnal trumpet
in long, legato, & melodic lines, ripping arpeggios
like a heroin addiction born w/ the birth of the cool
in Hell’s Kitchen, bringing Harlem’s shuffle to this affluent side
of Boston, a sound like a black Pangaea and Dark Magus
smooth voodoo for the soul
relaxing like a feather,
feathers
silken leaves,
blue smoke; you grab the bottle of Chopin vodka
suck down the clear intoxicant liquid
feel warm;
the rain turned to soft snow outside the
plush Four Seasons hotel windows,
the winds heavier, mournful
and you find yourself
thinking: “this revolution is not mine;
this religion is not mine;
there is only always the music...”
then your memory slashed w/ wet mascara
silver & chromium black...

One year of taken the ‘x-entheraogen’ drug,
a psycho-perspective substance w/ shamanic inebriants,
altering your consciousness w/ a kind of artificial religious dogma
and psychoactive traits
w/ mild hallucinogenic sways
 that had transformed you;
perverted your psychology, burned an unconscious
belief into your mind, your head, your skull
(you were not suppose to remember
who you used to be;
just another gentlemen loser
lost in gentlemen loser bars,
under red flickering neon signs
surfing the computer worlds for any kind of love
through My Space, Off Space, cyberspace, anywhere –
and you were pulled in
sucked in
to the New Allah religion like so many
dime-store educated Dianetics madmen,
like a suicide, the one year they offered you
for your life
in the end; and the one final night
of a godly love : “Forget your Life”
their motto, and the drugs
they fed you how they were suppose to
delete your past thoughts, your old life;
but you remember...)

...your memory slashed w/ wet mascara,
black and red,
as you pull out the faxed Holo-picture of her;
rich blue-black hair,
violet lips curled in a raged arousal
flickering & formidable;
she caught your eyes like Medusa,
like Desire; like Eurydice
and how you understood the torments of Orpheus,
of the dream-
.......that ground beneath his feet,
the erotic pain
and you were torn, lost -
the vision revealed, then, you could’ve just left
but you stayed waiting
for that one kiss,
as if existing in another dimension,
desperate for the potent
promised sexual encounter
w/ the promised goddess;
already drowned in her
invisible kiss,


5. Anagignoskomena:

A low noise crackles from the speakers,
the horns explode & percussions go wild
idiosyncratic like hydroxyl ions in your blood flow
as fluids as whiskey, and smoke

Like Floyd & Pink’s "Dark Side of the Moon"
a second prelude in sketches of all blues
“Breathe,
breathe in the air...”
improvise, slide backwards in the D 7th sharped 9th
of birth in melody and harmonies
in the flesh (reprise)
the sea in green & blue
w/ Cobb & Chambers, stereo and mono –
the music beyond jazz into some
kind of new blue realm,
like making red love to raw murder
the shape of rape in sound, unbound
as the sketches of scales play, spin, burn, turn
rusted round and ‘round midnight
pulsing in Flamenco compositions
around your buried soul, shouldered to the night
vamp & wildly expressed like Europe on fire
or Paris in pastel flames,
Spanish Harlem laying waste, in gentrification
under the racial Welfare bigotry
of politics & corruption
in a city painted between gray & white shades,
sleeping w/ the black outlines
of the sketched tenements, brownstone high-rises
between the streets & sideways & cracked tiles
where the Ballard & Baldwin protagonists hide
behind the human laws of the jungle
like E natural ballads --
bad, bled,
bruised bastards on the Apollo balustrades
along the Broadway B-flat stormy weather waves
walking along the velvet underground
wild sides;
punk & black & jazz & glam
your life burnt down to a simple
twelve-bar blues
number, slowly peeling,
slashed w/ wet mascara...

The full moon night so very black,
the coffee blacker,
the bullets only fifty cents each;

This gray land your grave,
ambers into the slice
& silence
(birth, agony &
faith, all
for a dark lust;
your psyche infected --
they even got you
to change
 .....your given name);
and what was all that w/ Melodramus
from Tempest
about, anyway? The crying poet-jester
seemed to be a metaphor in an illusion
of your own screwed up mind,
trying to tell you
something,

“Has anyone seen Sammy? I haven’t seen Sammy around
in the last few weeks...” But you never knew
you were even asked about;
you never knew your amateur trumpet sound
was actually missed;
your few friends at
The Blue Cat Café Club down off Bleeker Street
in The Village never seemed to care, before;
you walked in, stepped on stage, played your horn
makeshift to the gathering players
then leave... You always felt you were just
another shadow stranger, and
you would never know
that they were asking for you...
“I think Sammy went up to Harlem - I heard
he took off to New Orleans, or Boston –
someone said he left the country,
flew out to Paris to find himself;
or jumped off a bridge.”

6. Lady Sings the Blues:

The city is hard candy. Cars crash.
Buildings fall, and always another Monday,
“Another damned Monday.”

The clouds drift...
break apart in 3-dimensional clockwork
mechanics: cogs & springs unfold
like hearing blossoms of strange colours
(bronze, blue, black, blood, numbers, tones...)
in synaesthesia,
in sin; something else...

And then there’s Charlotte,
beautiful Charlotte-
the one girl who made you smile,
made you laugh, made you care,
who you thought you could feel something for,
rainy day feelings on those stormy Monday blues...
she sits alone
in the corner with silk cut cigarettes, blue smoke
& a glass of Shiraz, a shed of a tear
for a misunderstood man
that no one seemed to really know;
she worried that he locked himself away
or took a train to nowhere
and would never come back
to their little jazz hole
in this insignificant world; and she would
never know that Sammy ‘Spider’ Spike
ever had a thing for her;
now he’s just become yet another shadow,
another ghost gone
from the Village (or so she,
and the rest of them
had thought); her Hungarian green eyes
wet, feeling banished,
exiled,
cursed
denounced
“anathema from Christ," she said into her wine glass
and heard the early train rumble in the thick
subways beneath her feet,
below the worm-worn wooden floorboards
as if Hell itself
understood,
then the house band played “Anagignoskomena”
the only song Sammy had ever written, a
pale paraphrasing to the interpretative of the
pure jazz extemporization
that always seemed to be missing something,
perhaps words, perhaps the voice
of Charlotte’s Nina Simone French-like vocals :
so, to herself, she sang "Strange Fruit",
fine & mellow through her tears
even though she felt more like Billie Holiday
in 1939 or ‘58, singing that sexy song about
the people swinging' :
“Seven trees
Bearing strange fruit
Blood on the leaves
And blood at the roots...

...pastoral scene
Of the gallant south...

...then the sudden smell
Of burning flesh
Here is a fruit
For the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather
For the wind to suck
For the sun to rot
For the leaves to drop
Here is
Strange and bitter crop.”

.....She. Bemoaned & sad: "Good Morning Heartache,"
.....two hours before it, again...
.....of Genesis there was no before,
.....just another country
.....like Armageddon Redux in another cold afternoon;
.....the day’s revelation:
.....Now,

7. North of November:
 
Nine hours North of November,
rains into gray snow,
the sun spills,
the sound swells out from
the dusk-dark concrete sound scapes,
tintinnabulations of torture or truth
off the highway this here and now :
breathe out, worthwhile
wondering, wandering --
as you wait for her,
the Neo-Babylonian goddess
the on-line girl named Namir
from Kashmir, Earth’s Heaven
or else somewhere not, elsewhere
in North Africa or Afghanistan
(China?)
possibly India or Pakistan;
round and round, she arrives...
(close your eyes,
you see her)
she steps off the midnight plane
out from Kandahar, somewhere from The Middle East,
she is everywhere, across Europe
to then from London, over The Great North Atlantic Sea,
flying -
landing
though the black fog
in old Boston; (only chance ever, to see her
to see her, only chance ever
here at the end,
this endless enigma...
her & such pure flesh,
eyes like jewels
mouth like sex)
only time: first talk, first kiss, last walk
for a single night of passion
possibly a kind of love,
already knowing she will be gone
by the break of day,

The final year had come to its end,
pale & primal the unending infinite:
“I am a sundial, I am a summer paradox
these hours between dusk & bones
as Egypt’s Ra astronomical, obsolete
& jocular to the nose, clockwise
the shadow surrenders along the Nile
oscillations in the cesium atoms
of sand & nightmare, the common dream
its terrible jaws, as of dragons
in a midsummer night’s scream
content for the misplaced sonnet
out of the undiscovered song:
nor can I fortune in brief murder,
the last hour in winter, season & mist
such music
to watch the lambs suffer, die;
Can I?”
.......the cold next day morning,
mourning, empty --

Like clocks paled, frost from the winds & film
theatrical in the mirrored image
of chemistry, of mystery
psychobabble biology
the opium mist in the Five Star luxury hotel room
on Boylston Street, overlooking
the Public Garden and Beacon Hill- elegant
& charm you are
gods
& gargoyles under the mahogany night
in the famed fascination
as chic as the Ritz-Carlton
among the Triassic sandstone brownstones
the terraces, Oak and Chestnut trees
wild crows
(your gun hidden
beneath the Queen-size bed,
only dimly aware as to why
you placed it there)
pulsed, pulsed, pulsed
-pulsing-
your vulnerable heart a totem beating in
the early wet snow, swirls & rhythms
becomes the seduction of the teeth
like tentacles, elements ending...
animals of ether
and the ashes of
as in the slow hours
as in the slow hours
hours slow & loud as shadows
demanding the patterns of dream similitude
parallel from analog to digital
to watch, to watch the new moon, unseen
almost red (blood raw)
as emotions become extinctions;
time shifts and she is there, there (“here”)
making love to Namir in that blue room
(your lover for
the one
day; partner for
.....eternity
.....you were always
.....such the mule
......the court-jester, the savant-fool),
“idiot,”
and the winds...

8. Wilderness of Sin:

In the hotel hallway there is a glinted, gold framed
painting of Mount Sinai
with thunder and lightning, clouds of smoke
like an Exodus, red dust
and you can hear the sultry sound of trumpets...
the seductive smells of idolatrous incense,
lavender,
opiate oils,
& passionate perfumes squeeze into your room...

Leaves fallen from the sky,
burnt umber and ocher
in the thick pre-cum season...
(She
is there, w/ you...
finally)

In slow-motion she kisses you, wetly
In slow-motion she reveals her flesh --
In slow-motion you watch as her airline
or train tickets from
Boston to New York -
(elsewhere?)
...you watch as they slowly
fall to the ocher, wooden floor;
the silk sheets moving like orgasms,
ocean waves
organic
as Namir sucks you in; you drown in her mouth
the taste of Pinot Noir & smoke
as the night drops, becomes gray
(that you had written her
name across
your body, a nadir like a religion,
becomes a blur
that she never sees),

"You taste like opium & wormwood, Samangan;
it is a nice taste... I will bare your child.”
So matter of fact.
“Do thou bear witness that we are Neo-Muslims?" she intoned -
" - -I am one who submits..." monosyllabic
from your wet throat
(Did you feel a moment, a pause,
of hesitation?)
Namir stares hard into you like an assassin,
feels like a sin
then she smiles
"Good, Sammy" She kisses you.
“And now I must go," her bright green eyes like two knives
slicing into your soul; the ugly strangeness,
so familiar,
so cold;
"I know."
(words
to
be worshiped,
whispered) "Of course..." You never expected her
to use your true, given name;
something snaps, synaptic pulses like white noise...
her words hang in your gut
like a bullet,
and your heart swells...

...tic-toc,tic-toc,tic-toc,drip,drip,drip...
like feathers, like leaves, like knives,
ticking, slicing, dripping...

The clock on the expensive, pastel blue wall is black,
w/ bent silver, chromium hands
choke the tempest of time: twenty minutes later
she is riding down the busy street
through wet snow that streaks like rain
in a clean black limousine, off to the train-station
(or is she taken a plane?)
south and away-
explosions of shapes in your eyes
w/ forming ice crystals on the windows;
there is a china trick in the rising sun reflecting blue steel
off the glass buildings
a quick new light...
and Namir is gone; the last thing you remember:
the smell of jasmine & nasturtiums,
the splash of lapis, emerald and azure
as large white moths flicker against the crystal chandelier;
her tight belly and small breasts, the taste of her lips
her heat & heart & her... hearing
a voluptuous echo as if out of the bones of trees,
the streets,
scars and the city -

9. (Pause):

Nine hours South of November
winter deep in the day's tongue
the tempo counts in the course of blossoms
of blood,
"This room is too bare," you say to the dead television;
the air is heavy,
she left the soft shape of her quiet ghost;
a silent curse
outlined in the large bed -
you let out the exultation of your breath
then inhale the smoke from the Black Kretek cigarette
inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale...
listening: cars, dogs, police sirens, white noise,
smelling fish, smelling sulphur,
her fading jasmine...
hearing birds : pigeons, crows, gulls & bats-
you wanly think of Edgar Allan Poe’s
sombre & sullen poem : "The Raven" :
“Merely this and nothing more...

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting.

.........- nevermore!”
...and like the tell-tale heart-beat, beating...
the year old gun
calls to you
from beneath the bed,


10. Last Iconoclast Conundrum:


......“This Lux Universum...”


On the bedside table is the smooth suitcase she left for you,
the leather metaphoric
Pandora’s Box, the paradox,
this unconscious conspiracy w/ the nanotech viral death’s blossom
from her fanatic new world order
from an old world religion...
sitting there beside your long black Armani raincoat,
w/ the contents inside
that will change the weight of this city; the world
like clouds obscured; icebergs exploding/melting
ambient...
"at least part of it"
moments & minutes & minutes & more
& numb
a numb mantra
in the conundrum of seeing sounds...
(in your memory those sounds:
“A Kind Of Blue”
as the trumpets & saxophones
struggle for space
inside your skull, behind your eyes
mesmerized),
again, the numb mantra,
a kind of numb molestation of your mind;
tomorrow you will die for her New Islam, this other country
another religion,
for Allah-God? (but you wonder
are you really dying
for Namir;
for her...?). ......You close your eyes

and see the
.....Hindu Kush mountains
.....juxtaposed over the Adirondacks in the Catskills
.....Turn on, off, on the Television
.......watch through the static snow
.......the white noise,
.......and you watch a soap opera game show
.........(remembering
.........“My name is Sammy ‘Spider’ Spike
.........I’m a poet, a trumpeter
.........from the Village in New York; how did I
.........get here?” A moment of clarity – then a sharp,
.....bright, painful white light sliced, slicing, slices...
.....through your skull, and your memories twist
.....twisting, twist & re-transform
.....synthesized
.....to this new religion,
...from a torn ecstasy - -)

“There’s nothing to worry about, now,” you think
“I am one who submits...”
and you could
feel the erosion
of the world in the city
.....around you,
“I, am. One... who...”
(it was all just a stupid dream),

you cannot
you remember too much
so, instead, fighting w/ your will
you pick up the .38
that you bought a year ago
and close your eyes, thinking...
of fair Charlotte. Then,
such strange fruit,
this moment
of Life...

“what if?”


29 “None devoted, which shall be devoted of men,
shall be redeemed; but shall surely be put to death.”
.....~Leviticus 27:28-29

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