: a midnight opera kiss in B-flat minor :


The sidewalk shimmering beneath sweat and rain-stained windows
in winds up with the neon clouds, soaked and rippled
in filmic reflections-
and drenched. Silent movies turning away like expressions
in Scorcese and Hitchcock paranoia, curved angles
and felled angels; junkie televisions,
punched. Rearview mirrors and backwards Sundays:
in silent time, in silent dreams,
in silent eyes... the silence of raped screams.

All abstract shapes bent and bruised, bending shadows
Strangled off rain on glass; the gardens of night
Breaking the exits of exhile, and empty. The crooked
Hotels standing above, their concrete neon breathing
Like some doorway to hell; inside: darkness. Shouts
And heavy breathing, heavy sweating, heavy metal.

shapes bending off rain and glass

The overhead sounds of passing cars on the eastside
highway snakes thru the city, thru the veins:
a beautiful sound, a terrible sound. Sends shivers
like a love song and a heart-attack wedged in
beneath between steele and flesh. And through it
all the jazz, the sweltering orchestral music;
taxi-cabs cruising, police sirens, windshield wipers
and bullets across the boulevards
shattering memory like cats after mice
down and down and down. A splash of life wet
and indiscriminate, the permanent hiss
this midnight opera kiss.

Such as how the forever morning drips and licks
The two a.m. forever
The haunting alcohol of time forever
Stuck like graveyards and hung-over in tower clocks
The city's ancient gargoyles dancing
Frozen in the early a.m.
Between midnight and the deadly kiss of the white-bone opera:
the witching hour, when time falls into the dirty puddles
And madmen waltz with melancholia.

Morning and raining,
in swift and sweet succession
like badly edited dreams
cutting an interesting pattern like
bullet dents across the eyes
as you stumble along.
Sometimes you disappear around corners
with the noise. And gone.
(a warning of how life is always just a breath
away from crazy). Sometimes you find yourself
hunched up against hidden alleyway walls:
the grafetti and grime, brick dust blood
crumbling, almost as if into
your bleeding hands. Sometimes you
just moan, sometimes you just walk...
sometimes you make it to wherever
there is. And there is that wall...

Life becomes colder.
Life becomes wet.
Life becomes a carnival merry-go-round
(at 2:30am, pissed and nowhere).
You're a stranger and dissolving, drowning
down among the cracked actors, the cracked addicts,
the broken glass and garbage cans;
ghost-rippled reflections in the neon
in the black puddles of rain, of your face
your twisted Picasso-eyes, your bent mouth
and cracked teeth, frozen freakishly
(time ripples by behind you in a slow-motion
curve and backwards, pushing away
melting prismatic, pornographic
and paradoxical)...
All down and in-the-fucking-gutter; darkly
attenuated and haunting. The swirl of god's grease
and silked oil and metallic urine, like an effluent epitaph:
reveals your distorted eyes. Reveals you.

There is quality in those eyes, and its times like this
or that when you remember her - fog peeled away
for half an insane second, stuck at two thirty a.m.
vanessa. There is the recorded memory recall
of her eyes splashing slowly thru fast-forward in a
jazz-smoked-drugged haze, her eyes into yours...

superimposed in an alcohol blurr across your shoes
as you look down, feeling the pain of death. You lift
your head in exhaustion -- for three years you have
been walking, stuck at two thrity in the a.m., forever
waiting for that subway train that will never come...
And beneath you, beneath your shoes, the night's
train rumbles below the streets, the broken boulevards,
the misplaced alleyways: beneath your misery,
beneath your curtains, beneath your soul.

waiting for that subway train that will never come...

And loud.
You turn away from the silent memory, the silent dream,
the silent torment. A silver moon hangs in the November night,
a comedian and a criminal.
Some kind of crucifix, a crude fix, or just
a damned moon: cool and cruel.
 There are black and white etchings in charcoal
across the rain puddles, and again the image of her.
And now that night three years dead, three years forever
at two thirty, three years of hearing that scream: that scream;
sinks back into your flesh.
That flash of taxi-cab yellow...
and that scream, now a million miles away
and closer than hell will ever be. Closer than ever,
closer than nowhere, closer than forever. You bend over

and vomit.
One turn. Just one more lousey fucking turn, and she falls
and she falls, and she falls again; how many times you see
it happen, you see it repeat and replay over and over
And she falls, a fractured reflection
fallen into your broken arms, your murdered heart.
The sudden heat.
The scream of the tires, and...
(inside you will never stop screaming, silent and forever...)
...and she screams. How beautiful the rain

How beautiful the rain seems when it turns to blood; a velvet red-
liquid scarlet flowers flowing thru glass and rain
burns brightly and beautiful. And wet. How she loved the rain.

Everything becomes abstract shapes cut into the rain, the glass
and the cruel glamour. The cigarette in my mouth drips, melting
smoke and blue jazz. Wet. Soaked.
It hangs like a dying saxophone note... suspended and dissolving,
a fractured harmony looking
for a lonely hotel bar, a lonely song, a lonely misfortune.
One more empty street, another permanent midnight in alcohol
and this perishable flesh. This prison. Hard to feel like Cagney or
Bogart in these mean streets; this Raymond Chandlier rhapsody.
The death gutter of hell's kitchen feels more like Vietnam or
Van Diemen's Land drifting, drifting
Drifting away from everything
And nothing
frozen at 2:30am. Waiting solemnly for the movie
to end, as the city swallows, strangles
another stranger, another soul, another fool
in it's grey landscape; and you vanish into the misted night
injured and inconsolate

"there's always another flash of yellow," you whisper
feeling the weight, heavy inside your trench-coat
and turn down the street. Into the wet neon,
into the smashed jazz,
into the rain.

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