[Original version first Submitted at Freaklings.com: 16/01/2008 - 18:36].

"Three greasy brother crows wheel, beak to heel, cutting a circle into the bruised and troubled sky, making fast, dark rings through the thicksome bloats of smoke."
~Nick Cave

PROLOGUE
"shh..."

1.
Crossing sepulcher & swamplands...

Crossing saxophones & sex & bones
crossing the Chinatown walls of chain-smoked ghosts
like whiskey shredding sour in your gut,
crossing depressed evenings dressed & dished w/ knives
& nights of Hell, to transcend
off trains,
to end, unshaven as to begin (again!?)
“...was I ever just an aberration?” you think
your soul drowning down an old,
cheap road-side motel sink, sinking...
cockroaches & cracks in the mirror,
in your face. The taste of neon & TV in your mouth;
southern streets gone, vampiric &
lost down south
w/ the effects of Katrina
on Louisiana
when the levees break, crossing
the deep waters, trapped in attics
or up on sodden rooftops,
crossing, like citizen Jabbar Gibson
from New Orleans to Houston
in a "renegade bus"...
crossing chaos.

2.
Crossing in all the odd places...

In the abandoned parking lots
where the Narcissi grow, gold & yellow-blue
like pretty little ghosts haunting the soles
of your unstrung shoes; lost souls
crossing experience on living without, with
crossing the dusty years in airports, in laundromats,
in drug stores with the old cowboys; drunk, bad
& black... William Burroughs, Clint Eastwood & Johnny Cash
dressed in blue jean drag & green gas masks.
Crossing up & down the empty elevators
& escalators listening to badly black musack
often strange, unordinary
all the wrong exits
where Brando and James Dean still stand
like cultural icons infinite in a Baldwin or Chandler novel,
reading Bukowski, Blake or Bob Dylan Thomas. Reading
Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood"; crossing murder
into Mexico;
braking on thru, riding Rechy's "City of Night"
&/or Morrison's "LA Woman"... riding the storm.
Crossing weekends
dreamed erotic & electric, steamed & full of cramps
w/ the medieval machines, the vulgar museums
where the Holocaust & Hiroshima holograms play, paused
& stuck on rewind (again and again); crossing sad
into sadness, lost on the Greyhound
from Boston to Nowhere.
Crossing the accordion man playing for pennies
on the streets, praying the blues like broken glass
teeth shredding off the pieces of the Berlin wall
down in the zoo stations, crossing the Katzenjammer gangs
running out of the circus (or the
worst); crossing cross-word puzzles unfound, no verbs,
no vowels, no sound.

3.
Crossing all the unordinary places...

Crossing contents, crossing coins & cons,
tents & contests, the stress & agony of tests,
testings testing the cross of Christ,
the cost of God, an easy way to die;
crossing Dante across the Lethe, Acheron
& Exit. Crossing the Palazzo dei Giudici
in Florence, in reformation, deconstructing
your dark ages - crossing Bach & Basho
w/ a Toccata and Fugue
& a Haiku in D Minor
(the adaptation
of rhythms and textures of
the narrow road’s song

ni yokotau / amanogawa
stretching out towards / the Milky Way
ni yokotau /
Nirvana, New York).
Crossing, “...until / I slip and fall!”
In the spit & spirit of the rain,
outside, inside. Crossing thunderstorms
under doors, many doors, so many doors;
crossing w/ a mild nervous affliction
where no to go, throwing rocks throwing
stones, rolling silently to go again and again
smashed down again on brown bourbon
brown & windowless w/ the dry gin winds blowing
blooming down the brown Los Angeles hills, zip!
zapping! across, crossing the slingshot streets, again
& brightly as chrome, to come and go home
from Paris, Texas to Rome, New York.

4.
Crossing all the disguised places in the sun...

Crossing songs of the cicadas in the poems,
to sing (the body electric).... see? Such colourful lingo,
in, to go w/ the insects, their Cicadomorpha smiles,
similes of amorphous miles & nature
crossing compassion hard & brutal as sex & sin
down towards Nirvana, New York
another one way street, another dead end, another mean cul-de-sac
backwards (again!).

5.
Crossing all the unbound places...

Crossed. To not go there, here;
nowhere, w/ the madhouse
young girl arcades & palisades
like landslide shades scarred on
old Normandy beaches...
crossing Czechoslovakia,
Belgium, Poland & the Netherlands;
Neptune over the Oceanus,
crossing the English Channel,
crossing the Atlantic Wall (nineteen-forty-four),
a deformity of history, crossing insects
w/ evenings & angels, down the Oberrhein
as Icarus Varekai crossing the Cirque du Soleil,
into the Fire Within
(Verruca Salt crossing hard candy
in the factory)
all the smoke, blue & gun-grey
it’ll go away
2:07 a. m.
Crossing over Desolation Avenue, into delusions,
from old English telephones, on ah! Syd Barret’s Bike
or some-
thing (crossing the Astronomy Domine, over the Thames).
London calling!
Burning Nick Cave's words in a Melbourne exhibition
("Und Die Eselin Sah Den Engel"
or "Et l'âne vit l'ange"

"And The Ass Saw The Angel"
crossing sublime & extraordinary;
lunacy, parables, metaphors & fetishisms
like meteors & whores
in baroque religious portent...)-

Crossing Nirvana, New York
w/ all the Medusa doors locked
behind (you).
We are all
paintings of Madness,
pains of God, creatures
of our own pasts
like Paris, Pound & Plath...
laughing
in all the
unforgettable
tiny

rooms.

6.
Crossing thru the unordinary exits
(in & into
through, & weary of wing;
crossing clusters & rhythms of crops
in dark spasms
down through sparks & grey ash borne
in blood ribbons of trash-can smoke
from the black twisting
chrome-metal trains,
the blackened, blistering rains
& dark city taxi cab
stops)-

EPILOGUE
"Shh."

"Dark was the night and the township of Ukulore cringed beneath a merciless rain."
~Nick Cave

If you [Log In] as a member you can discuss this work with others