In the gray sludge
of damp & despondent slums
dawn breaks down over kitchens
where tired mothers wash clothes
hanging photographs out to dry
like the bones of dead tree branches,
how they feed empty desires
their children, cold,
old in the eyes, their heavy fathers
the hard & drunk husbands
from the warehouse factories
who dump at home
their meager feathers, then unaffectionately
off to bars of beastly burden; are gone. Mirrors
show nothing truth hides
other than to reflect the horrors
and hours
of half-sunken breasts, bellies swollen
w/ the corpses of Culicidae flies
transmitting malaria-like sickness;
grotesque things in their beds, their bowls,
their bowels (black blood!). Hell
is the playground beneath their
cracked kitchen shadows
where the hollowed hell-hole tenements
crumble brick to ash to brick
in bloodshot eyes, "Christ!"…
CRACK!
(...the stimulants of ungodliness:
in a soft moment the sunrise,
how the yellow glow seems liken to Lazarus,
but by night's crepuscular fall the young mothers
soon understand their cruel fates, and understand
that they are more akin to poor Lilith...),

...the narcotic euphorias,
their only salvation
making them slaves
ways so profane,
from beautiful to blasphemous,
as divine comas soon to become
the new rooftop gardens & raped religions of their
one-way dead-end ally-way street homes
dirty & beaten... up there,
w/ the yellowing & peeling wallpapers,
the clouds of blue cigarette smoke,
unfixed clocks
rotting food & rotted shoes
rusted used umbrellas
juxtaposed over junk & jazz & the stale scent of jasmine
clung to their prostitute clothes;
one mother hums along to an old tune on her cheap radio...
"Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck..."
Then she adds: "For this life to suck!"
(she thinks the singer is Alicia Keys,
but she'll never have her holiday),

Then: "Up and down, and back I fall...
...Tell me what, am I to do, I'm so confused."
Then: grabs the glass pipe...

Perchance, perhaps,
even while dying - the young mother’s face
turns to the window (am I a widow?) and prays
in this the Holocaust of her fortune
missed,
… "Where are the kings of Bethlehem?"

Christmas has never visited upon
the open caves of these 135th Street wasteland graves
w/ the sickly thin, under-aged mothers
their gangly arms hanging
like victims of vultures
on the ghost-open roads
feeding into their throat-open wounds
and sometimes, still, they think of carnivals
on Coney Island... "the Cirque du Soleil"
across the river
that they'll never see,
of pink cotton-candy they will never taste,
waiting in their rat-infested, filthy homes
for their children’s Daddy’s to return,
and even those precious few moments of fists & fucks
of kicks & cuts…
they can almost smile
as if the providence of the pain
outweighs any political terrors
like the welfare they’ll never absolutely receive;
such cruel tenderness their temptations,
how they have become too numb to scream
such despairs... yet, their hearts give them
a kind of will
perhaps germs, but gems of brilliant hope
for their children, the true victims
playing in their innocence
the inner-sins
of Eden’s
end.


"...the Zu-bird flew into the mountains with its young,
while Lilith, petrified with fear, tore down her house and fled into the wilderness..."
~from Gilgamesh.


"The only true immortality is poverty." ~jL

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