3 November 2008

An Overture In Posies and the Capable (p)Arts [or "Just Like That"]

This is the one I will try
to be lonely with


My heart is a bawdy hotel of stragglers, thin static characters holding up the walls, their tacky phrases hanging the paisley paper. These pigeon-dreamt apartments loll on the cigarette smoke, old clothes piled wine-stained carefully carpeted to match the threadbare hall. Every atria is in atrophy, sinking from the sway-bent, hell-sent, quiet, maniacal cast pounding in silence at the boards and beds too worn to dream on. All you want is somnolence, hazy red puckers and loose leather thighs, ten fingers taming shoulders in a vaudeville swoon skating south of the border and west of the sun. Here's a leather-strap suitcase bound and gagged, buried and burning from the mercury lithographs taken in better times stirring the roaches in bent gaslight.
This ventricle eviction notice, boards clapping in the rising rain, stands nails deep in the rust, no vacancy. Every cornered parlor singing in wan piano play, a carousel of glasses laying torrents over tables and sucking into chairs, only dusty March photo-frames gilt in the bleeding septum separating lives share the old home's grafting pace.
There's no management in all this, the lobby-gone bell lost in history never left charming suspension in all the wafting disaster painted down the cardboard patched panes. All these names dripping through the tiles, lost in the dead snow radio symptom you've learned to call love.
My heart is left as an afterthought. Three decades in the milling world ground down to a morning drip and the sicksweet succour you divine from elusive morality you're bullied into, and I've fallen through the slats and slept in the furnace, fired and branded, steeled and stolen, ticking away all the letters ever stored in a bottle, ever bottled in filaments of cartilage and bone.
They can have all the rent and room, the pulse and feeling of sunken-in snow laid heavy on water, all the partisanship and blameless apartheid they yoked me with. I can live in these falling pipes, these pitches wound in December, the air pockets retching out shudders like thunder in coked veins. I'm clean of this, all the apertures I can see through beetled eyes and slip another shade under the skin.
This heart is a motel slum.
A single-set quadratic roadside paradisio for the umber-spent underbelly aching of the soulful-sick gash no longer willing nor wonting for the leonine chords roaring rush between the beats.