A muted dusk makes it’s usual appearance—announcing a sly transition with fine gradations of charcoal blue
above silhouette overlays, like a first year art student’s avant-garde designer eye shadow palette – she adds a final flourish to her magnum opus with obsidian finality.
Rumours of rain manifest. Incoming coastal spray & road dross lash the swinging window wipers down through state highway six this morning.
Sinatra’s grinding it out slow in the back seat—starts putting the moves on me like an old pro. Here’s that rainy day again and don’t I know it sweetheart.
I have to pull over before he even makes it to the punchline; barely able to see the windscreen through the sting of burning optics.
It’s seldom wise to slash away at an underripe harvest. Far better to reopen the investigation into what drives the impulse, or carry on with unfinished autopsies on selected cadavers—now easily available to those with the stomach & a keen eye for the sordid details.
It’s like we’re forever trawling an index of minor poets in a Proustian stupor, or seeking oral on the whining ego from caffeine tinted lipstick. It’s a mutual exchange of knee jerk puffery between ourselves and a fickle band of lethargic moth eaten minions.
Let’s not talk of DJ’s or of blackouts. I’m breaking glass & crashing through iron doors at Hansa with a loaded Luger & a bunch of wonderful people—all teeming with silent problems. We’ll scrawl bright red graffiti & nail it all down to a nouveau art millennium.
I’m sick of this rotting wine; the lustful glances in drab streets & how they burn all electric blue in fits of anger.
I’m talking about a whole new career in Kyoto with you & those Japanese doctors. So, shoot your grey eyes through mine, as I slaughter someone else inside me in a foreign tongue, before I slowly draw the pale blinds of solitude.
*The poem was precipitated by an old cassette tape (that I wish I still had) of a David Bowie radio interview that I taped one night in 1978 or ’79. He was talking about his recent work and the various things that he was into at that time, which included German Expressionist art. He spoke at length about people such as Bertolt Brecht, Max Reinhardt and Egon Schiele, but mostly about the ‘cut up’ writing techniques that he was deeply into at the time, which had been developed earlier by writers such as William Burroughs, amongst others. The writing of this poem basically involved taking random words from the lyrics that formed the songs in his so called ‘Berlin trilogy ‘ of albums and weaving them into some kind of loose narrative. For want of a better word, it is my tribute to Bowie.
Borges was underwhelmed by Ophelia’s latest efforts; wasn’t in the mood for her taut gibberish of Gestapo knickknacks or swollen pink tulips in Caesar’s bathhouse.
Her clammy fingers hammer away at infinity; blubber and grate at this heathen hour of day. They make his frontal lobes wince like a clapped out dartboard at the local corner pub.
He rattles off a sniggering note to self—Sylvia could do with a good shake in the sheets tonight; might give the girl something to write about.
It’s a faux sleep that brings on rapid eye contortions with each ghostly hour of the new morning, where I break surface to battle with semantics between salvoes and broadsides.
On intermittent days, you and I are swallowed whole by the lugubrious crawl of time; by the authorship of said clauses that dot the margins of our own ill defined said articles.
And look at us now; quietly crumbling apart like a couple of doddering meringues.
Visions of Orion Poetry 