i’m only hanging on/ this un-season rainfall/ wet streets inside the skulls
of my eyes/ i think i lost my suitcase, my Sunday, my way, again/ i’ve lost my shoes,
lost my guitar strings & my pages, again/ this dead dark i walk thru/ a dead dark blue,
a deadman’s sitting stool/ just walking, just walking, never talking/
down & thru these lonely city avenues, these same solitary streets, the same dark
& the same darkness/ everything seems so green, so grey,
these old boulevard paintings hanging from the old trees/ yea, and the pain

yea, the pain/ “sometimes i gets so i can’t feel life unless i feels the pain”/
opium pain/ narcotic rain; dreams, yellow & slipping away like dead bird’s wings/
all this dreaming in pain & paint like dreaming in black taxi cabs,
in white ambulance rides, in the dusty coin laundry shops down on Main Street/
the pornographic bookshops where all the derelicts meet/ selling souls/
peeling heaven or hell from the eyes/ lost in the city wastelands
the hospitals & the bus stops/ the busted telephone booths
running from the gunshot shadows that were never there.

yea, just a low life walk thru the breath of someone else’s saxophone blur, those midnight bone blues/
the pale bone white-wash Picasso horse hangings/ whores in coarse doorways/ the police sirens/
‘Hotel California’ coming in thru the static waves as someone changes stations/
turns & burns into ‘Riders On the Storm’/ stuck inside
another hell-hole bar/ another hotel elevator/ as if born down in the guts of the subway, the subways/
the suburban industrial punk asylum waves beside those wasted trains like machine beasts eating up all the
chrome rats & rust & tracks & rain & pain & paints/ the rusted reflections of ghost buildings
down around ground zero in
dirty rain-

-fall puddles/ upside down/ old ladies & their push carts, old men & their brown bags/ pushing around
Washington Square/ they no longer hold hands, and that’s the saddest part/ like lonely factories/
birdless trees/ all those cardboard box ghost hearts floating in the late afternoon avenue
breezes around & across Houston Street & out from Birdland like blue notes lost from trumpets/
from thunders/ from empty doorways/ from blue smoke/
wandering, wounded/ watching the glass shatter

“yea”

shattering as a TV set is tossed out of a hotel room window forty stories up/ explodes on
the neon wet sidewalk at your feet/ then the pigeons & the crows & the dead leaves & newspapers
all just crumble, corrode, fly away.../ “yea, sometimes you can only just hang on to the subway city walls”.

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