Dead city, living river |
Ghost-world, flickering in blue flames Phantoms play the guitar sitting on neon billboards Splatter rain Grey sheet rain Scarlett rain Dripping on lamplight's through the night The castle of propriety swells The bowels of the arena consume and excrete The slaughter house and the dinner chamber are both bathed in red The dogs lick the rusty nails on the iron doors Pieces of the city, chunks, fragments, bits Shards in the rain falling on drenched trees and bushes ink black with wetness Ivory mirror roads, slick-dark, crawl into mouths and connect to a bursting blue belly of a sky Yellow lanterns for the houses of the quiet ones sleeping beneath the cots tonight I live and ride on the backs of fireflies, leaving my drain-home Ride through feral wonderlands, animated gardens, pink Ferris wheels and daliesque whorehouses, The rain eats the city, claims it,becomes it and washes its long dead cadaverous face In the morning, the world is pale ice grey and the tenements and human undergrowth keen softly The edges are electric, the lanes are glowing spines, snaking outward In the morning, the rain is still bleeding the drains, the good pickup the falling shoes from the sky And patiently wear them to work. |