notes from the city that shot John Lennon

I ride into town
from the mess they call New Jersey
feeling the arthritic bones of an ageing subway grind
upon the impurity of germs
running deep within diseased veins
flushed thin by the perpetual impunity
of hope.

And out of nowhere,
some guy,
black as a mountain, dry as a bag of old coal,
crashes into focus
to pronounce (in a voice cast from underbelly’s crucible)
that the way to beat recession is to make friends with the affluent. 
Pasty white folks weep out a pale laugh,
bidding blind and desperate for empathy
just in case a Dillinger (or something) gets drawn
and starts randomly shooting it’s crazy arsed face off.
That tell-tale smell of heavy relief
clings embarrassed to the putrid haze that people used to call
air.

I bite on this moment and taste its dread-filled decay
amongst apple lifelines
bobbing in a discarded bucket laced with
hobo dreams and
the beating hearts of emptiness.



I’m in at 33
to pound swirling streets of movie mayhem
where words and actions
whip-crack a backdrop
rich as a fruitcake on acid.
 
Walking like a mooching dog,
I wind past plastic-scene store fronts
selling burned out promises
made freshly pregnant
by the insipid sperm of failure.

Within seconds, I hear
a well-heeled girl drill a lightening shrill
above the jabbering yell –

    I just saw someone die!

    Oh my God!
    Oh my God!
    Oh my God!

    They think it was kinda like a heart attack.

and another box on Alice’s lifeline is Julie ticked (but who the fuck is Alice?).

All noise and thoughts zip upon the zap-light
of a thousand blemished mirrors
pouring spaghetti string lightning
and thumb-print ricochets into
the polar subterfuge
of my personal paranoia. 

I look up to grab a gasp of construction workers
eating bread and cheese
from the scrunched up paper of yesterday’s promises
all balanced on the sky-high crossbeams of my stretched
imagination.

I turn and see a spontaneous eruption of attitudes
and saturated fats
bumping their slump over empire states and idiots.

I pass a string of similar street corners and become
homeboy happy and unfamiliar.
Overfed, un-muzzled dancing bears
lurk beside carts dangling their genital delectation of mutating pretzels
How they bask in winter steam and the holy breath of danger. 
Bear voices ooze as they trade insults within the growing concern of fellowship
I watch them rock:
back, forth, back, forth, left, right, back forth
with the psychotic swagger of frustration
impaled upon the genes of this zoological farce. 
Language is animal
and Shakespeare is in love.

The temperature plumbs to a mere 42
but everyone wears quilt coats, big as buffoons.
Black youths swoosh in sheen-shine shirts all down to their knees
cellophane satin, full belly sails, flailing in the bickering squall and half-light. 

White folk fingers cling fast to the North Face, warning sign red and hard zippered to the fossil gardens of mortified mouths and multitude mindsets.  SAKS in the city dreamers riding sleigh bell delusions down Fifth Avenue, soul-free crap piled high to a concrete cuss
called sky.

Homogeneous creeds, united by divide,
wear proud their uniforms of bee-bop-a bullshit
Hollywood master dates with the bumbling hoods of neighbourhood.

 

I sense Bob Dylan’s breath growling upon a bitter breeze; it must still be here somehow.  So how does it FEEL?

Ginsberg still howls in winds that whip up scruff from meat street corners and casts it to the flailed earth - before nailing me to the clouds.  His poetry lost in a bag marked re-cycle; a bag filled of prayers fit for a million me’s and no-ones.

Lou Reed rummages amongst dead eyes and dreams; I hear him rustle, I hear him rustle and a roll.

But no glory poets trip upon a Chelsea morn today and the same old shit plays Broadway.

        No art nor birds nor brains nor Jesus H fucking Christ; it’s Warhol to war hole,
        fun to fucked-up, written on the furious spin of home-spun superficiality
        and spurious interaction with the mystery strain of shrivelled cadavers
        and strange grey scalpels.

Round kids tumble in the blubber of Christmas cosy words
gun-burst basted by winter spittle rattling from hen bent clutches of whining mothers -
all drinking the boiling crap of jumbo cups and moonbeams.

The deli selling shredded salad sits empty as the stomach of sidewalk ghosts,
stalking shadows and dimes, two blocks from the thinned paint of your heartbeat.


I look up to see a crescent moon
sensibly keeping its distance
painting its wry smile down the NY bum crack of dim-brown sky,
looking to comfort kiss its orphaned children
wrapped tight in the cancerous arms of distance;
My moon shines unnoticed in an uncouth
jamboree of dreams.


Yep
the city that shot John Lennon
congeals in the blood of its wounded streets,
its gatefold sleeves wasting
into all that is gone,
now dancing down its nights
in a limbo of loneliness and shallow graves;

and I sing
Instant dharma’s
gonna get you
Goo Goo Ga Joob

              as a tired joker strums

                                                  Wake up Little Susie