xxx...“I had a hard-on and a head-ache and I didn’t know where
the hell I was going; I was just going,
just going anywhere down this bad traffic
nowhere highway through the bad traffic
one-way badlands, no exits anywhere
none, for the last 20 miles”...
Driving and stuck in heavy traffic at the same
glorious fucking time. In a bad fog
of alcohol blood and bleeding blues,
brilliantly glittering traffic signs everywhere
but no city, no city in my sight
not even in the rear-view mirror.
All just black emptiness, as if you stepped right
into a Raymond Chandler novel
it seemed
while tangled up in all that bright chrome
and twinkling neon smoke. One-way traffic,
nowhere traffic, tangled up in fucked up traffic,

xxxstrange ways,
all this bad-attitude traffic, Johnny Cash & Bob Dylan traffic;
sticking your middle finger up out of the fucking windows
dead-of-the-midnight traffic;
ripped through the Harlem high-rise tenement soul traffic,
nowhere to go traffic, just stuck in the damned saxophone road
Central Park long and far away,
like Miles & Coltrane stuck on an endless blue train...
going fast, going slow, nowhere to turn around
this bone cold road going on forever forever...
This is psychotic bad-tempered middle of Hell highway blues,
“man!” Or should you just say “Fuck” and “Shit” and
get done with it? Feeling deformed, feeling like
the angels and flies splattered against the windscreen
the windshield,
a dead dog on the side of the lost highway

lost and knocked down in your ‘69 Buick feeling the throttle
and the thunder of a wave of Harley’s crawling by,
bad blood in these bad lands, stuck in the middle of this storm
like a fucking Jesus Christ thorn, waiting for the crown
but there’s only Judas waiting on the ground
he turns and blows you a kiss
with a pissed off biker like someone out of that Mad Max flick
flicking you the finger ‘cause you’re staring at his Hog,
at his fat woman more like the hog on the back
of his mean ride,

and his eyes say, “Just forget about it.” And you do...

Midnight, still, and still the moon hangs up over your head
on that razor-edge, could be in Manchester
could be just outside of Manhattan,
could be in Memphis or Miami or Melbourne or Mexico
or just in the middle of any old miserable place,
possibly
Mars?

Positively not 4th Street,
but feeling bitter and derisive...

Could this be Highway 61 or 66, revisited?
Could you just crawl out of the damned window,
“Please?”

“Damn.” Riding right through the other side,
underneath this bad sky
Three bodies on the side of the highway
just laying there,
sleeping or fucking or something Bacchanalian
probably stinking of booze...
wet now, with a calming kind of rain
almost warm
and then
three-headed wolves come down from the dark trees
like dark priests or wicked preachers from
death’s open mouth, hungry and horny
for the thrill, that blood thirsty kill
those vultures of the midnight highway
and you stuck in all that nowhere crosstown-like traffic
slowly going nowhere: out of the radio
comes Hendrix singing Dylan...

“There must be some kind of way out of here...”

and you can’t help but think just
how fucking perfect that it is;
“Bloody hell,” you sigh. Turn your
pale eyes away because there is nothing
you can do, but in your mind
you see everything; all the teeth
and all that blood and all that torn flesh...
you can hear their screams above
the music and all that screaming traffic,
feeling like just another William Blake dead man
like just another on the road Kerouac lost man
howling,
another Dylan Thomas dry ghost clown in the moon
crumbling...
or that Oscar Wilde forgotten man
as the painting on the wall fragments,
breaks up, crumbles and falls away
into dust...
out through the otherside, through the nowhere
stuck in all that heavy metal traffic
in the wastelands, in the badlands, in the nowhere lands

you feel like a struggling note squeezing out
from a blues harmonica, a strangled crying sound
somewhere down the lonely river
sad, but true

a different song on the radio, now
heavier and more raw, but still full of that blue weight
“Hello, hello, hello, hello, how low?”
Sounds familiar but you can’t quite place it
“A mullato an albino
A mosquito my libido” and you find yourself
singing along, badly, “yea!”
Echoing: “yay....”
“I feel stupid and contagious”
not even close to Heaven.
How fucking perfect is that? you think,
feeling like just another jokerman out of a trash can
wearing a jesterman's mask, painted white
stuck in the middle of the midnight highway blues
“Has anybody ever seen my eyes?” you wonder
and strangely think of a painting by someone’s
grandmother of Sinatra, how she just left his eyes blank
“Bloody perfect.”

And then, like a theme, on the radio:
“Out here in the fields
I plowed for my meals ... It's only teenage wasteland”
and then you recall the name of that other song...
“Oh, yeah.” And for just a moment you forget
that you have no freaking idea where the hell you are
or where you were suppose to go
if you were going anywhere... feeling like
the characters in a Beckett play, or that one
from Stoppard: are you Rosencrantz or Guildenstern,
maybe Vladimir or Estragon, or even Pozzo!
It’s all the fucking same, really
this Endgame,
waiting for God or waiting for a ghost to die...
Wearing bowler hats like the tramps in an alleyway
or out on some surreal lost road,
your existential tragicomedy. “Ha!”
And you think of the three lost on the side of the road
and you wonder if they were God.
“Absurd.”
“Hell, maybe I’m in the fucking Wizard of Oz,
I’m the Scarecrow or just a crow, maybe lost
somewhere in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland
in hysteria,
in the Théâtre de Babylone, in the Paris West

xxxEnd?”

xxx“Shadows are falling...”
There’s not even road enough to be going anywhere...
“I don’t seem why I should even care, anymore.”
You’re not in London, or Boston, or anywhere,
just stuck in all that dead-on traffic
going nowhere.
It’s a melancholy Broadway bad accident,
and then you see Time’s Square. The highway
has vanished, the glass is shattered
and splattered in your eyes...
You see your reflection in a thousand different ways.
Yea, it’s raining, as if, of course it’s fucking raining.
And that rain turns into black snow...
And the last thing you think, is
you wish you could reach your pack of cigarettes

“I wish I could have a fucking smoke.”




[a fraction of this poem is inspired by a painting from wonderlandhysteria's Grandmother... Thank you, Kristie.]

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