Nocturne

( i )

They TP’d the city last night,
Like some drunk hooligans;
It looked magnificently tangled
Against the orange-black backdrop of the sky.
I followed one particular end,
In and out of twisted branches
Of all-night salesman. Hope
Wrapped around giant metal posts;
I was careful to tread like a tight-rope walker,
Passing from billboard to billboard;
And there were others I saw,
Stuck in their own Mobius strip.

( ii )

Night slinks from doorstep to doorstep.
Lipstick stained teeth smile
The grin of an old whore.
The stains, the rays, the remnants of days;
The sun will set at seven seventeen
And the bats are already abroad,
Their crescent bordered shawls, fluttering blindly,
Sniffing out scents of stale fruits and fresh blood
In the warm summer stillness.
Will her stout hooker’s spit dissolve this tint
And the darkness…will it be complete?

( iii )

The irrelevant applicant:

The inevitable young man sits perspiring
On a chair that never sits still, not quite.
Eyeing them, his interlocutors,
With the sudden sharpness of a bird,
And, of course, the polished floor
Where his sole has squealed,
And betrayed him, to his mind,
While he, leaden-lung'd, flutter-stomach
Trades rancid spit, for a rotten rank.
Let the interview commence;
Let them question him on the purpleness of shadows,
On the pungency trapped between his teeth,
And the fatuity of this scene.
The sweaty young man with the walrus mustache:
The pliable, pancake, protégée.
His fat old soul smothered in too much coat;
The clammy excrescence of his sad little century.

eclipse last night

the murderer

I challenge the moon to a lunar duel;
It takes my meaning behind the clouds,
Swallows, distorts, then spits it out,
And we are forced to sing a strange duet
Of incoherent dreams.
In the unnatural calm that illumines the night,
Several uncertain verses later,
Back against back,
The song begins again in tones of trees.
We take twelve steps then turn around
And pious panic peals to swell the note of fright
To the dull beat of a drummer’s heart.
Two shots are heard:
One, a taste of what is yet to come;
The other, an affirmation of what has been done so far;
Make no mistake!
The moon, in all its limitless glory, towered above us all
And we danced under pale yellow leaves in the night.
In the unnatural calm that accompanies fright,
I lure the moon quietly, nightly
To a sound setting dark green,
To a walk in the park, as it were,
But ‘tis already half past gone and lost
In the shadow of our collective sin,
Cast upon the sky.
Live or die,
Ice stains red rather rudely tonight


the murdered

Hand soldered to his gun,
Barrel staring at the snow,
Unseeing, it gently rose,
Like the ghost-white vapor
At night seen rising
From the surface of the ice.
And it pointed impolitely at the backend of my neck
While I sat beneath the sky;
Sat staring at the moon.
And I think I must’ve felt it;
No, I’m sure!
What terrifying welders must have
Hardened his resolve when he said:
Like diamonds in the sky
Are the diamonds in her eyes!
And proceeded then to empty all his fire in my head;
Oh man, I should’ve known what he had meant
There and then; and I did, much too late
Comprehend his mental state, for
He shot me for a girl I’d never met.
What a fool! What a fool! What a sordid bloody fool!
I hope they send him to the butcher and then let him not expire
For as long as it shall take me to absolve;
And dissolve my desire;
To forgive and forget.
Merry met, dear friend, merry met.

the overview

Though Life should pause,
At every death
Take off its hat,
And though its vision
Should be now blurred,
Life lives on indifferently,
Suggesting not to have occurred
In single servings of humanity.
It would suggest,
Quite callously,
That, “there was naught there after all
Of consequence, except for me!
An abstract thought, a grand concept
A mountain, insect, minaret,
An incorporeal consciousness!”
So when Life stands here to undress
In front of full length mirrors
It sees itself and not the cells
That constitute its larger self.
And in its paws
We came and saw
And we were seen, and Life was lived
Somehow, somewhere, there in between,
And some were stabbed and some were shot
Make no mistake, of what I mean:
They were all forgot!
- Indiscriminately.