| beat poem #1 |
| I walk through the city backdropped by buildings the color of fire and light shining in inopportune alleyways, duck and cover between steaming manhole vents, lost trash debris monstrous lurking dumpsters, fiat lux automobiles that hang tires from their lips and digest occupants to the sounds of Nirvana or Beethoven I taste moisture rising up from the black river which winds through the town like a blind man and I peer off the crested concrete bluffs towards a colored sky and the town expels itself into the suburbs, the guts multicolored and slimy ooze back and forth day and night, belching black from lipstick tubes and some, curling inside the space of an automobile trunk at night, fetal prone lying beside wives and husbands, are afraid to go back tomorrow. day jobs and night workers wear the same blue starched straight, catalogued like ships in Homer bottoned right down to the ground shuffling across miles of sidewalk at dawn and sniffing the air of morning there is a light bending over the horizon coming directly from the lake where sheets of water and glare ice melt in primordial dances which we hint at in the loosest ballets we back away into the tightly wound sheets and retie ourselves to the nightmares we�ve woven from them |