And that a crowd of depravity
and battery operated toys,
brick layers, aftermath
of the grind's stiff fascination,
overtly loathed to accent the quill-padded,
ass-spanked, nipple-skewing public
in their lumber for lap dances
made clean and fetish-gleamed,
sewers of internalized puberty.

It transpired this way:
stripper got slapped with a cell phone,
nose speed dialed his secretary
who went into a job preserving hitch.
Summoned the police,
paramedics, the man's wife,
and for documentation's sake, his attorney.
What followed would have made good fodder
for Cops, or the Discovery Channel.

He was just the kind of marginal guy
in town from New Mexico,
brought in to verify the authenticity
of some dinosaur fossils.
With eyes like amber,
body crumpled as if he'd been sat on
by an woolly mammoth,
and what choice did he have
when a curiosity for hot wax
is brought to a place
where even the concrete
seems to be melting under the flame
of all that open-air
and turned face-fanned fornication.


Serendipity

Following the lecture,
after paying one toothless guy
for a little smack,
another to pull down his pants,
bite him on the ear, tongue,
the academic yet ready to drop-out asshole
required to build up a frenzy
for the delicacy of submission,
he avowed to something similar to depression,
a little pill-pong,
a modest excursion interrupting his predilection
toward gear that whimpered
blown job, messy injection.

And he wouldn't resist
if he were tied up
or naked most of the time,
if he'd caught even half
of the venereal diseases
the drama queens
or backup quarterbacks did,
the sinks of rock stars
who reached for icon
but tripped one couch short.
If once someone would brood behind him
and play the Ode to Joy
on his spine and genitals.

What about the Empire State Building
and Ellis Island?
Put a few hours in his vile
and he'll take a shot at decoding these.
For as he vomits into the stripper's tits
and shits into his wife's underwear,
there's a caravan of finger-pointers in transit,
rushing down the caked roads of tucked groins,
about to revive the overdosed role model
whose work is bound for walls,
that which legitimizes that protuberance
between caveman and neurosurgeon
where god peeps,
depending on the charity of vice.


Heroin's Rays of Black Light

1. The War Vet

I welt on the glass door,
bums chiming
the widening of dealers
ingratiating to hate,
loftier than stolen pearls.

The brew we spilled
and went lame
spent down the hall.
The scrambling crowd
zigzagging along an agitated lie
like a bat in a sock.

We grayed by the boats
as if whistling elephants.
The slurp of welts
was bent to be destructive.

We drank.
I gored my free bags.
Naturally disserted.


2. The Artist

A black spoon
in the tenement,
the odor red.

Thirst contused
then clogged.
We flooded to suck.

Rain, a cataract closing
the brighter colors
of our youths,
a page in the burning match
of addiction.


Heroin's Rays of Black Light

I reached for the band
that oppresses the vein,
the dichotomy
a forsaken sans script,
the goal a cracked relief
going down.

The vile was wool,
its slaughter stale.
In every layer peeling
the unspoken pain.


3. The Prostitute

After belching my nexus
on the john,
it collects on palms and fleas,
the fossil receding by tan.
By black lung
the anima goes dumb.

Every love affair is a complaint,
warring factions of flesh.
Even romances are infernos,
lusts repackaged
as dollars and grapes,
turned flammable
for the endorsement of laws.

I get in my affairs
closer to light,
a sharp address,
a knife. Sex
is the arsonist's gasoline,
a blood each jealous flame abhors.

The disease between my legs
isn't a curse
but a voice
with which to gush.

Still Life

A mango & beer,
bookend a lit cigar.
Both drip moist whispers
onto the silver platter,
mother of sweat, mother of swirls.

If not for the rustle of amber,
the water appears nameable,
almost capable of virtue,
nearly flawed with purpose,
dangerously close to suggesting design.

I'm lazy not lucky
when I remember my tonics
& return to find only a gray halo of flies
frolicking over a toilet more ash than soil.
All of us are dying. Some of us just know.