It never mattered where I was
cities, villages, hotels, movie houses, insanity
what was going on
the beat of hands, feet, tambourines,
electric bass off the walls
curses or razor blades, broken glass
from bent mouths like grey smoke
from crushed cigarettes,
leaning out of windows over dead end avenues
the dead streets of nigrescent Harlem, or hell
four-storey brownstones along the East River
torn by gentrification,
black snow and blood on the sidewalks;
(listening to Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club)
leaning sideways in the rain
watching piss splash against the
cracked addict pavement, watching
the faint steam rise off my new shoes
it never mattered;
the smells of people, booze, smoke
like twisted reality turned into alabaster fog
you forget there was ever any home to call
drinking coffee while your stomach growled
the slow ticking of clocks sketched
& stained on dirty windows;
immortality stuck in a taxi on Broadway and One-Thirteen
reading Vachss or Baldwin
late afternoon w/ the pigeons, the rats and the junkies
the slow stream of creature-puppets,
the asphalt jungle crowding me in
while deep baritone subway bones groan
in metallic umbrella vibrations
beneath the car, between the wheels
behind the drumbeat pulsing...
...under my unmoving eyes; a calm lunacy
sub-surreal and ultrasonic
there is music,
the blue mist of Coltrane tenor impressions in sheets of blue sound
drifting out from the scaffolding surround of hidden speakers.
Sweating origami memory, almost a haiku:
how many footsteps, roads
pale winters vanished
since it all began?

(breathing feels like bullets)

Why should any of it matter, anyway;
your fucked up dead inside,
alive between the scratched walls
under gun-grey clouds, angry buildings
the apocrypha of feral reality
with kids killing themselves
in the ghost simulacrum of
people walking blindly by
showing their teeth, showing their chrome-red eyes;
heavy winds scattering torn pages
of the New York Times like lost poems
lost suicides, lost notes
from fractured songs; makes you wanna holler
scream at the man upstairs,
give him your middle finger
and put a bullet in his gut, but you can’t
so you just wrap your cold leather jacket tight
around your tired emptiness, feeling unforgivin’
hungry and broke, two o’clock in the afternoon
sleeping in the top row of a baroque balcony,
in an old, bruised theater down on in the Village;
someone stole your shoes,
‘someone stole my shoes’
‘what?’
‘Forget it.’
Ain’t no way I’m ever gonna figure out the seasons;
better chances at the races, on women
fishing in a dead pond for bicycles,
jealous and prejudice of my own heart (memory dusted
in the corners
up in Giovanni’s room,
viewing myself from a distance
as he takes me to his bed).
Deep in the thick brush of forgetting.

(bullets & breathing)

It never mattered where I was
drifting, dreaming; drowning with a gun in my mouth
with menace in my screwed up eyes
human experience wrapped tight around my throat, my cheap suit, my downstairs;
too many seasons not to die in, to be murdered in, to be raped in
and you’ll always be re-born - it’s a cruel destiny
it’s amazing how few drinks fifty bucks can buy you;
disappearing in a bottle of scotch
disappearing in the city noise
the dissonance of crows & ravens or reading Edgar Allan Poe
‘And so, all the night-time, I lie down by the side’
down behind the fire escape of the strange
watching sunsets sometimes from Sunday to Sunday
like East Germany in a winter morning rain,
seeing your alienated soul on the static tv screen
melting in the scream of angels at midnight spitting out blood
in filmic black and white
waiting until the end of the world
(far away, so close)
blurred across
skyscrapers, subways, highways, and trains;
how you see yourself in dog-dreams bleeding,
in some other country
beyond the black hills of a backwards sunrise
bent mirrors revealing bent lives
in green fire
watching the disillusioned shadow of an exiled dragonfly
through dust and cobwebs and watering neon
dreaming in echoes
splashed across the fragments of a slashed postcard
somehow not quite the path you had in mind;
playing the thief and the joker and the whore at hotel bars
shouting, spilling your drinks and overturning your unwritten plays,
your unwritten stages
how you’ve become a piece of tenderness, of sorrow
going out in the late jazz and the rain for a long wounded walk
beneath sputtering lamp-lights
smudged against your destiny
infinitely less difficult to see yourself on the highways of approaching death
like leaving your home town - the season of windows, of mirrors
into the season of forgetting
listening for Vivaldi’s Fifth Season that’ll never rise,
and the wilderness of glittering sweat. Alone in your room
you finally understand the rhythm of wretchedness.

(the breath of bullets)

Wake up, the next day, and take a train out of Nowhere Station
light a cigarette and watch the smoke turn blue
“It never mattered where I was.”

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