IT ALL BLOWS UP
Oct. '64, Plymouth Hotel, Boston MA
The street is all crazy for the night feast
hungry for a slice, holding out its cup,
a wine-colored radiance fills every space.It smears on trashy perfume, and glistens
with hot dogs, onions and greasy stuff.
A constant saw tooth music peppers each face.I feed on the city's ingredients, keeping up a diet
of hamburger neon, caffeine soda fizz,
leftover take-out, breakfast on the window sill.I move with holy men to hunger stations
walk downtown past handout's hand, where
hollow-eyed babes are bathed in fluorescence.Outside the club a girl says, "Keep walking,"
moving black lips, eyeballing the grim city.
Somewhere there's a brief flash of fantasy.There is hopeful lodging and fierce brightness,
the hustle of flesh alive on the crisp edge
and brief love on the lucky side of drawn shades.Under a pink sign the motionless cop a buzz,
encounter a reason for everything to sing.
The song trails off as I reach the end of the block.In my heart I strut like a dancer, perfecting
the two-story walk up and a cold room alone
when sudden dark eyes radiate from corridors.
Graceful being of night, a back lit, soul of slink,
she melts into soft whispers when I pass.
Months go by and she's still a whirl of strangeness.Nothing hurts too long or stays high on pride,
hearing the road cry from inside shanty hotels.
There's no place far from the wearisome crowd.In the park, in the alley, discarded on a crate,
the stubble-chinned overcoat guy proposes
sour mash, offers a whole saga in a paper bag,"Don't get buried in lava, he grumbles,
just because the busses stop running."
Tomorrow could just as well happen without us.It could all gag in a stove gas leak, build up
to a flick and a laugh or a gesture too quick.
A cigarette spark could flare wholeheartedly.In one ridiculous evening the corner hamburg,
hole-in-the-wall pizza and step up soda pop,
the walk-in peep show, filthy blinking windows,tinsel gilded cages, light bulb shadow boxes
and burlap jewel displays could disappear
and wake to the sound of bulldozer groans,to flames, dead walls and black nimbuses,
choked landscape of ashes that I once loved,
but had the sense to back away slowly, slowly.
ŠJimmy Warner Design, 2001
