We stood on fire escapes roaring at the streets.
Bulging red veins violently raging ready to burst.
No purple parrots, No African sunsets or Florida rains
surrounded our red-brick ovens: Pigeons! Pigeons! Pigeons!
Rats, Pigeons, green-white droppings on mountains of trash
Unleashed our coughing and screaming ash! Queens city of greens,
Brooklyn ocean of demotion, Satanic island, Fire island
and the I-sland of anonymous lost-man-hatts watts watts watts
of uncountable, unknowable Blind!Bats! Grey handball courts
Tattooed men, hitting: Boom Boom Boom oof! Yah! Yah! Pounding
that small blue piece of rubber till the skin cracks and
the eyes go mad with red veins like the glaring eyes of
the screaming and sawing and shrieking 4 5 6 trains,
Underground tunnels and piss, bums and junkie bliss,
the girl next door, gone amiss, Mike who loved his blue bike,
to Iraq, sent to clean the world’s ass crack, madness
all around us, business-suits walking past the woman spinning
and yelling and raging and spewing and spitting and hitting
the surrounding air, full of demons and devils and do-rag
Blacks and Latinos, Whites and the Chinese all at war
all the same, all before, as we stood yelling and vomiting
Cheap imported beer, words out our rear, raging radishes
Teenagers gone awry, too insane to fucking cry, pass that bogie
till the day you die! Kicking tin cans, stealing stop signs,
go go go is the only thing we know, heroin addictions
are blissful contradictions, the mad-man spin
of chasing clock-wise- arrows in twilight-zone circles—
not Wise!—spiraling out of chimney smoke ain’t no joke,
Ugly institutions, walled in cages, fences and fences
Barbed wires, dead end streets, car lots, and mind less retreats,
Numbing ourselves with snow, failed erections thanks to blow,
Small elevators and countless escalators, razor teeth,
Helicopters advertising at Brighton Beach! Coca-Cola
and Pepsi, choices and choices, quite right, Banana Republic!
The China-man on a bike, for the rest of his life,
lives in a cardboard box, garbage bags full of rattling tin,
cents and cents enough to pay for rice and rent; he’s always
Smiling, while the intern factories are filing lawsuits,
tax forms, insurance scams and fixing paper-jams—and and
why by Eden not? His world just can’t be this bad.
This line really drags you in…strong image as well as temprament.
This reads like a prose explosion - poetic social commentary - slightly sub-Ginsbergian! Bristles with untamed energy.
Keep that creative wound pouring…
i’ll re-read this again.
Thanks Colin. The bloody thing poured out of me on Heroin – I broke my leg so I got a perscription of morphine (that I abuse a little, but shh). An honor to be compared to Ginsberg man, I see the connections too, he’s really deep in my subconsious (mad-man spin…)–totally unconscious on my part too.
What really inspired this thing was Alexis’ poems that I read earlier in the day. She got me deep, that girl.
I got a technical question however, if you don’t mind.
Would the poem be stronger if I end it at Banana Republic by dropping the China-man bit? (I like that part, but I’m willing to sacrafice it for a stronger ending). Or maybe drop that part a line to make it a concluding stanza?
Regards,
-Andre