"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness..."~Allen Ginsberg

xxxxxxxBeneath a magnesium sky, those 'best minds'.
Beast!
Jump. Don’t run, don’t walk, don’t crawl
don’t swim. This fabricate friction
flows into empty fictions;
time as in space
and empty doors: random as yourself again.
Enter the exit (3 in the fucking morning),
empty white wall above the velvet painting
of Elvis Christ, or Judas Faust,
of all those make-believe mistakes
we make, as in crossing streets
to be closer to the falling towers
those aluminum chrome tubes
we sometimes sleep in, to forget:
those televisions of dreams, dust
in the transient hotels, or motels
along deserted highways at night.
Reading Futuropolis because it is there;
madness in the Gothic obsession,
odds & ends in oceans where the junk flows;
battles of our peyote minds, pulp utopias:
Victorian things or shadows for her;
frigate flowers. How they were put together
in stained glass reflective vases from China,
as pencil sketches in scenes of Paris:
those places you’ve never been.
Was it London or Mars? She never
did choose Venus, but did it matter?
Sunday morning cartoons in the nineties...
Lost photographs of her making love to herself
to poems & poetry of dead poets.
Faced w/ certain mysteries like dime-store diamonds
spray-painted abandon down dead-end streets,
all the ways in which we radiate in neuron storms
in atoms & Broadway Central Park locations
like Al Pacino or Audrey Hepburn in the windows
tasting chestnuts or bagels in bags
or needles,
in Christmas like a conspiracy.
Jump& jump again, falling forward
to find your way backwards
down subway tunnel avenues, looking for California
in Viriconium, those bistros become Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Was it Coldplay or Radiohead or U2 or Opeth
on the Telefunken U 47 Frank Zappa radio
listening to Blue Trane, Blue Monk,
Thelonious Monk, round midnight in Manhattan
Epistrophy the enigma of sound in vertigo...
So low, so slow, so forgotten, almost forgiven;
ever so gently you went over the edge
off the Brooklyn Bridge
after reading Baldwin’s Another Country

“A what?”
“But it was never like that.”
“Of course not."

xxxxxxxIt was the fabric of your jeans,
the neon leaves falling from te holographic trees
in that artificial sunshine. Waking up to yourself,
again. Having architectural fantasies
of Arizona sunlight in animated Disney pterodactyls
like UFOs flying overhead, penetrating your membranes:
probabilities... messages in the electronic storms;
so graceful, like a dance you could never remember;
beams from the headlights coming down from the alleyway,
as you look behind you, the City. Things to come,
all that junk. Jump again. Books falling off lost shelves
as if from The Libraries of Alexandria,
feeling like Medusa waiting behind the pillars
for Perseus. Going down for Eurydice
they might’ve thought you were Dionysus looking
for another afternoon to kill with drink.
Such romantic transformations,
the rhythms of the blood: “I’m sorry.”
But it was never enough.

xxxxxxxWhite rose petals falling from the dead sky.
“It’s so unnatural.”
New years Day you woke up w/ hypothermia.
In need of another fix,
reading Howl was just not enough, not even for Carl.
The only trust is that rose behind you
trust in physics, ultraviolet lights,
the fragments of hologram ghosts,
oxygen containers. The only faith
is the promise of the Tannhäuser Gates,
Giger aliens, molecules &
neurons and memories
souls recombined
and served through the mixed martinis
like a Sinatra song
sung way too long, under the skin
the way the Big Bang begins.

xxxxxxxYou lost her at the Nazi Disneyland
in a car crash that brought you closer to orgasm
than love ever did; then you found Hell
in the Village, in a backstreet down
there in New York City just before
the snow fell and the ball exploded.
Reality as semiotic as fluids in a vat.
All beneath a magnesium sky.

xxxxxxxSometimes the dice never tell us what we want,
or wish for; even if we see the truth.
Subterranean suburban fools, all of us, anyway
beneath gloomy mad careers
searching for that other country, the one
that is right around the corner, down the street
behind some back-alley affair possibly
in China Town, in a basement, buried
behind a thousand year old wall
like a somber poem from Poe;
and the rain comes down, as it always does...

xxxxxxxDisconcerted.
Disconnected.
Undiscovered.
Is it relative space, relative time, or relative faith?
Flushed & exasperated as chance
how we take those chances
only to find
the fictions in the orbits
opposite planets, indifferent chaos,
other countries;
other courtyards.
You look out the windows and see only the reflections
of infidels & inexplicable fear,
fur in a corona of light.,
“I don’t expect you to believe that.”
Neurotic physics are for Gods and Devils.
There are no more attempts at building Galaxies...

xxxxxxxThe world is absolute, absolute as a nanosecond
on fire, in algorithms or algebra.
“We’re all fish, in the end.” Not zebras, ha!
There are no ordinary exits, no fractal dimensions.
But no,
absolute in sin & cinema is for the relative of man;
those apples that fell from the tree long ago
when we forgot about Lilith.
Are we all that transparent in our transitions?
Mortal men: “The undiscovered country,
from whose bourn/no traveler returns...”
Jump again.

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