~from MurderPoems, 2007.


Insects, murder, insanity
the way the sun goes down
the way you take the highway
going nowhere, going North,
Autumn or to the Moon;
i remember in a bitter cabaret
where you sucked me on my lips
then you bit my tongue
said, "I don't like this song,"
you thought we were in pretty velvet Las Vegas
when we were just in some roadhouse blues joint
on the side of just some other road
in the middle of just another
dirty American desert,
the Mojave, California
Canis latrans at night howling
like prayers, like poems, like a murder
in a dead poet's song,
---"motel money murder madness..."
with you i never felt the gladness;
waiting down through the bad, bled canyons...
in the Dead Red Inn;
Muddy Waters was playing
on the dirty jukebox radio,
you wanted to hear a song from
The Stones
but i didn't have anymore quarters
so you left with some other guy
"Please to meet you!"
he was big, had a hard on and a Harley,
"um yeah"

"Ooo, who, who..."

I was never so relieved.
I never liked your white trash blues attitude anyway
you were as poignant as a cock's lament;
a cautionary tale that you only ever got to tell
your side in a bedside hotel room
or on the back of some stranger's hog;
giving head, giving your tail
giving your innocence, making me green,

mouth rhythms, yea, that's what you were
all rants and raves
rats in graves
angsty and always craving
caving in to full throated natures
disturbing and drowning and full of despair
but somehow I got off that road
but not until I put a bullet in the back of your head
as you rode off and away on the back of that
fat guy's bike, off into the framed black sunset
that i could see turning red as the sun splashed away;
too drunk, he probably never noticed
'till ya made it to Boulder City,
Bullhead, or the Yucca Valley,

"Whatever."

I got in my beat up '89 Chevy Beretta
rode off over them San Bernardino Mountains
into the Hollywood Hills
the City of Night

drive down Hollywood Boulevard
into a new life. Dark and strange,
"Yea, life is strange
in that way"

just another Dharma Bum
in a flux momentum
falling off mountains
onto the loneliest of roads...


"And I only get my rocks off while I'm dreaming,
I only get my rocks off while I'm sleeping."
~keith & mick

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