HERE ON EARTH: Poem At The Death Of Claude Pélieu
We return from the Past
To find rowhouses ablaze and porn shops
And poolrooms well worth the waiting
The die-hard city shrinks from homage
From Indian Summer's interruptions
From the coming of Winter
A season too soon
The purple moonlight spills
A flurry of warnings over the floors
Political machines whir
With the passions of confidence men
And their inflammable blondes
Whose sole goal is slander
And serving their muse
We come home unhappy
Pushed to the farthest corners of our rooms
Straining to learn
If the melodies we have shaped into words
Ring true enough to remain on earth
The sculpted curves of the clouds and shoreline
Are even more apt to weep than we
Like new brides
Trying to revive memories of repose
And terror and its afterglow
Girls found selling guns on the street
Flee across the hostile, lowering sky
In fatal reaction to ecstasy
To the fears that remind them of childhood
To the countless treasures of deepsea arcana
Incubating under their skirts
Our minds are young
But our bodies slowed in endless slumber
Denied any clemency or reprieve
Like the downtown skyline
Under sneak attack
Even in the ineffable world of our reverie
We are still making waves
Like old road warriors and slick-fingered jailbirds
We feel ourselves buried
Entangled in a deadly web
In the flame-red glare of the open highway
That only looks back to build its future
We are only the latest prey
To find ourselves breathing Less and less free
Biting back the favor to give up
Our souls
Midnight lingers like a scheme Brought to life
And unsung heroes appear As if by accident
Seeking to quench their thirst
With French kicks and morphine
Among the stars of Algiers and Montparnasse
Loose and floating overhead
Behind the hype of our big-screen TV's
Hundreds of songbirds drop at our feet
And homefires buckle under the weight
Of still another approaching New Year
That sings like an angel
With bent head, closed eyes and limpid gestures
Like a paper tiger
Grim and beautiful as an owl
AMONG THE LIVING (In Memory of Claude Pélieu)
The screaming fields show their truer colors
Blush with impudent pride
And wash their hands clean of every swarm
And thrasher
Pouting teens play by the roadside
Their once-energized eyes frozen
By the eerie sight of bootjacks
With jungle-love tattoos
Sundancing in the splintered dark
There's no magic potion for our woes
The warnings written on the numbing air
Offer few answers to our haggard lives
The ice and snow, the cutting rain
And strapping winds have caught the signal
That marks the End of Time, the end of an era
The new suicide machines are unusually lifelike
And the shift in their mechanical features
Best seen under the blackest light
Every promise that we've lost track of
Is likely to be erased by dawn
The passing days plot a unified front
With all the splendor of a Renaissance prince
It's a year-end clearance
Everything must go
From blood secrets to the cycle of war
We are spoiled phantoms
Toned, tightened, glowing with fever
Shocked into going along for the ride
Condemned to fly on closely cropped wings
Our dim eyes and sham-pale mouths
Can never be free
Or vindicated by the men in black
Who rule us like titans
Armed with counterfeit dreams
History is clearly not on our side
Our once-straight faces that surely know better
Now shiver and drop
All the way to our toes
In the napalm of the midnight hour
The oracle's condition has been upgraded to serious
And the hardest tree is the Tree of Night
Whose heart is synonymous with falling water
Like a man pushed farthest by the weight of his past
Who sees strange familiars from unexplored worlds
Following him in a rage of remembrance
Just before he topples into the Void
OCTOBER LAYS DYING BETWEEN DARKNESS AND DAWN
(for Claude Pélieu)
The apartments are small
Monochromatic, blank and ailing
The windows glazed with unwanted advice
And the blue and fatal fires of style
The plumbing is bad
And sheds tears of suspicion
Secret anxieties, false expectations
Memories that cower in spite
Only those who were actually there
Whose only crime was a false sense of security
Can fully appreciate the regrettable accidents
The burning bays and orphic sightings
The shots in the dark The hasty notes
The costly denial
The dreams discharged into jaws of satin
The lurid giftwrap of the open sky
A reluctant witness, a samaritan cabbie
Who finds his other self
Lost at night in a dayglow forest
With an insect queen
Digging her spindled heels in his flesh
Knows the clouds are the first to renounce their faith
To relapse and fall victim
To the luckless, homespun music of dawn
Bite-over-bite in the sewers and junkyards
On location, behind the scenes
Where all leaks are priceless
And every demand comes off-the-cuff
Implacable charmers flashing with pride
And totally lost in their own satisfaction
Claim no bounds and no harm done
In following their ultrashock schemes
Their skin marked with blue
And cardinal numbers
Their insistent lips charged with scandal
Their sex on fire
Like the one good eye of a long-extinct amphibian
Their ravishing smiles grounded in fever
Only draw men closer
Cause their blood to listen
As if quenched by thunder
And the melting black ice that shivers from rooftops
Sullen and lifeless as the soulkiss of God
Whispers break like ancestral crystal
And steel fangs make the unkindest cut
In the frail, swaying branches above the streets
Words slink seaward
Like old dreams come true
Having nothing in common with the poet
And traveler
With the mad saints taken
By the lore of the road
The city knows its own crippling miracles
Its cosmic signs and misadventures
Its coverups, tortures, reruns and bribes
Its carbon monoxide-poisoned households
Its water laced with chemical gore
There's no honor here or backing off
No worriless voyages with a change of air
The search for contentment and inspiration
Is a distant moment that can never last
Among the nightly lottery of severed limbs
Among the fallen columns and fated circles
Among the shells, torn lace and blighted camaraderie of the years
A missing person appears
At the window of a sleepy mansion
On the stricken end of an unsearched street
A face of indescribable grief and horror
Whose painter's scowl and clerical spittle
Are a match with King Cobra's DNA
And the tears on Mephisto's black borsalino
Perhaps the terror will start again tonight
The keys licking at locks with their bitter farewells
Seem to hold our fate in their hands
Perhaps the vengeful birds of a silent avenue
Will hold us struggling
With our clothes and our hopes
Fallen all around us
And teach us to hear the celestial
Dirges of winning moments
Delivered on lightning flashes
Of floating hair and incredulous feet
Perhaps we will see on the prophetic skin
Of a broken streetlamp
History repeating its heavy-handed promises
And find among the battered weapons
And imperial armor
Stretching like footprints from midtown to smalltown
A green wind stirring
A last fleur-de-lis