You fell out of the sky
and leveled the city
The night I had tickets
To play the ponies
Why you always gotta turn the mountain
to silicon on days I'm feeling lucky
Shirt just back from the cleaners
Wing-tips spit-shined
Rubble and smoking ruin
Phosphorous, sinister calm
I gotta hand it to you
You busted up my trifecta
Temple gates fallen to dust
Flames a mile high
and you haven't even
Put on your make-up
embattled we meet
make rain between us
at knifepoint
slit belly of sky blue
rain like wine, red wine, blood red
we rend apart the world
never to arrive
again as one
at once at war
Petulant
Hungering
Moneyless and searching
The poets type in the dark
The poets took typing class in 7th grade
And failed
The poets learned to hunt and peck
Like sportswriters
The poets insert a finger of infinity into every simple object
Each and every act
An immortal act
Just walking to the store for a six-pack
Smokes
Or a lottery ticket
And the crowd screams for more
These poets failed typing class in high school
Threatened with AIDS before reaching first base
Dream of nuclear warheads blotting out the sun
The poets pour coffee and wash dishes and park cars at the airport
The hearth of their small rented rooms illuminated by the 11 o'clock news
Or candles pilfered from the corner Chinese restaurant
At the Goodwill you can find the poets
With a musty smell in the air
Death cheated by rummaging grandmothers
There they are
The poets
Examining cheap portable typewriters
Royal
Smith-Corona
Olivetti
These poets are purists
Like the ones that lived in the Bowery back in the 1940's
Or who ran off to Paris or Berlin in the 20's
These days the poets tattoo exotic symbols and esoteric words from foreign languages onto their necks and wrists
Words straining in panic on the flesh
Words facing the firing squad
Lorca shot dead in the railway yard
The red scarf on his statue in Madrid lifting in the wind
Mayakovsky sporting a bullet hole in the forehead
His 'love boat' shipwrecked at Novodevichy
And the crowd writhes in a panic
These poets pay their light bills with chump-change scavenged from icy fountains
Time of scant importance when confronted with the infinite
This furious route to nirvana
Or a magnificent drunk
Or waking up pissed on a frozen park bench
Sour breath and stolen shoes
While the rest of them whisper and point fingers
Prying and whining and telling the same story twice
The poets make small fires in starless barrels
Drink water from ice-cold waterspout
Eyes crossed out with sticks
The poets embrace ghosts and loneliness
They scribble in the dirt
Camped out by the Interstate
The sun ultimately negligent
The poets say
This is it
Fuck it
We quit
Jay Passer is the author of Laugh Until You Scream and The Dog I Fathered. His most recent work appears in 3:AM Magazine, Red Fez, Poetry SuperHighway, Full of Crow, ALBA, Horror Sleaze Trash, and is forthcoming in Calibanonline, June 2011. He is a native of San Francisco.
Comments (closed)
Rae
2011-03-31 22:44:22
This is some good shit- my favorite: "Time of scant importance when confronted with the infinite
This furious route to nirvana". Man, fuck time.