LAST HOUR. Walking home through the streets laden with newspaper, the electric heat of neon signs, and the remains of broken glass bottles, the sound of sirens pierces through the night air like a razor. I arrive at my doorstep, reach into my pocket for the key, and open the door. Flopping into bed, eyes melting into … heavy-lidded sleep … into … walls melting … yellow candle wax dripping drip drip.
DREAM: hours pass and the ticking of the clock continues, beating like a death march into my solitary brain, craving want of more release out. I out. Want out. Want more out out. Find. Voice. Own. No. Someone, something else. Want. Want to be Led. Led. Dead like Lead. More. There is a woman, muse or siren. She extends her hand and calls to me. I (sweetly, coquettishly), mother of all things, promise you
reasons,
answers,
immortality
The works.
Here is the door.
An escape
from all the poverty,
the uncertainty,
and even,
the unmentionable of all things
(family).
I wake.
I opened a book.
Enchanted
by the soft, melodic tunes,
dances of dark-haired gypsies
patchwork clothes and hand-crafted instruments,
writers smoking inside cafes,
Parisians drinking absinthe,
and painters on the local street corners panning sun-swept scenes with their hands,
the vision was
PURE HEAVEN.
I searched for her like a Romantic on the high seas, sniffing out music like blood on a hunt, turning musty old pages, raiding forgotten libraries. I went down on all fours, upturning rocks, searching for signs of intelligent life.
and found
the words:
VACANT. NO LOITERING. KEEP OUT.
Whole cities, decimated from abuse, or not abuse so much as neglect
Like Lucy Gray,
Or Solitude.
The life gone out, snuffed out like a case of DDT, gone elsewhere. There’s going to be one long Silent Spring in America. Childhood dreams and cold regimes just don’t make for very interesting themes.
I hit Alphabet City like an amnesiac on a binge. Craving, the direst, rabidest hunger of all things: MEMORY. Help! My name is Icarus and I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. I was thirsty and I drunk the waters of Lethe, and now I can’t remember a DAMNED THING.
Where have all the FUCKING ARTISTS gone? Where the IDEALISM? Where the stronghold of our dignity, our vanity, and wit? I’ve been led by faeries and spriggin gnomes on a wild-goose chase, chasing shamrocks, shadows and illusions! …as if it were some,
some fantasy,
or an aforementioned vagary,
to fill a post-modern vacancy?
Echo: I’ll tell you where they’ve gone.
(Resigned to universities).
Point. (Don’t hide your shame. Just nod and smile. They won’t know).
Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.
--It’s so young and blissful to be naïve.
--Or so blissful and naïve to be young.
--Or want to be so.
Forego the foregoing. Suck it up and be useful. Forego. FOR EGO.
To be or not to be: the aristocrat, the capitalist, the work-for-pay anthroposophist. Thinking: Think as you like, but act like others. Be the black sheep, but wear white,
and be dazzling.
--Come smile now.
--(Why are the talented so depressed?)
--I’ve given too much life to gold and glitter.
--Why give a care?
--Life is only temporary.
Too much spirit, too much of that good immortal soul.
I’m still burning in that impenitent flame of longing, you see.
Too young to give up on the dream.
Too old to absolve myself of the responsibility of life.
Come all ye wise men.
Follow that star. Dance with me.
Let us remake this city.
Our image is as divine as any.
Shake off this mortal coil.
And when the night is through,
Let us go forth, singing.
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