Faces both familiar and strange,
curve through the mystic canopy
of skyline skylights.
Grey men move into mercantile ziggurats
holding hostage time,
sit in plush rooms, smoke cigars,
above the People’s marketplace
(a quaint breeding ground
for redneck carnivals,
a pulpit for clownish impresarios).
The City is a Dream
of a full moon, a blood moon
an invitation to a scarlet masquerade,
written on an old postcard
whose memory is never the same.
The City is yearning, desirous
exultant in the reckless passions
executed by youths,
(eased into
with wrinkled hands holding old age)
behind one hundred doors
soaked into the love stained sheets
of a thousand boudoirs,
a condom thrown from the shotgunned window
of a pimped out gangsta car.
The City is a Nightmare factory
of dripping chemicals bleaching ancient shells,
a bricked over canal covering ancient hells,
an underworld of secret pipes and drains,
graffitoed in the calligraphy of fire:
hash smoking sultans
hide harems in the sewers.
Paved over, the street tops are pock marked
like the faces of snout nosed politicians
who ride across in motorcades
their tongues crooked,
forged from broken blades.
The City is a Palimpsest
a lingering note on a musical score,
long forgotten, locked in a dusty drawer.
The City is a Cemetery
whose dead aren’t laid to rest
(children step off yellow school buses
into puddles splashing rain
not singing the cemetery song)
only the dirge is heard, struck at cathedrals
on clockwork hours, marking the beginnings
of endless rotework shifts,
sleepwalking, the grey men dead suits
drift into
dreams of invisible cities
where friendly dogs lick the coal ash
off the face of a chimney sweep.
Dreaming of internet cities
constructed from blinking lights
red lights inside the crackhouse parlors
where vapor trails of crystal smoke
vivisect the night;
consumed by sordid dreams
inside bickering brothels
of carnal pleasures and venereal spite,
where the puttanesca is as cold
as the John left to breathe
his last asphyxiated dream.
The City is a parking lot
built over your grandpas baseball field,
a meadow of screeching whales
as trains bleed into the harbor.
Incest knows the city
as does dishonor and Victorian disgrace
the City is a kingdom of illegitimate sons,
fallen princes,
a place where birds fashion nests
from old braided nylon weaves and fast food wrappers,
where sleeping bags are unfurled beneath the overpass.
The City is a jaundiced liver
fortified by wine,
a fecund blister, a conundrum
sticky as the bubblegum on the bottom of a shoe.
The amusement park is a City
waiting to be dumpster dived,
a menu whose restaurant is never the same
a library of babel whose voluptuous pages
electrify the fatigue of a fog smoked brain.
The City is a ruse,
a weary mirage enticing neon travelers.
The City is a sphinx
of many headed riddles,
a phantom trajectory
whose presence cannot be traced.
note: This poem was inspired by and written after reading the first half of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
The original air date was June 5th, 2008.
