The Window

Cold cars speed by below me—

The window looks down on a scene,

As rain drizzles the streets and the old friends

Gather at a table somewhere in the distant past.

Below, we are cold and alone, lost babes in the womb of the electric night—

America, do you have blessings for us drunken rabble

Purchasing a few moments warmth in the cold bosom of a comfort that can never come?

Ghosts pound the pavement of my sleep, as fog creeps around the corner—

And where is my love? Gone perhaps, salted away in the misty murk of some yesterday remembrance of dreamed things as I pine for the soft touch of skin and caress of hair to blot out tomorrow’s distractions.

I am a cold eunuch.

I touch the ice of minutes like an insect battening on the sugar of a sweet sunrise cavalcade—

Coffee murk of memory distracts me as I embrace the wanton image of my daydream—

This is night, and all I know is night, and electric streetlamp gives villainous testimony to bygone romance of the spirit—I am fractured and neutered—old and spent.

And the city is freezing. It could eat a hundred million units of warmth as bug men drive by in brash vehicles giving spinning tires squealing oratorios against cracked and frozen pavement of this one, precise, center of geographical space which has come to represent

Heaven, Nirvana, Shangri-La…

How many of you could I have loved?

How many disappeared like shadows after the fall of sunlight in the dry bitch morning’s evil wake?

How many cold faces destroyed? Little boy, little girl, young man and woman, where did you run to and where are you going so quickly, speeding into the tapestry of a yesteryear that doesn’t hold any interest in you?

I miss you. Won’t you sit with an old man and ponder sad recollections over black coffee and burning smokes, and let us look out that window up and down a street that seems to have pulled in the bosom of its life like some camouflaged monster come in from an ocean deep?

I can’t reclaim you,

Each one disappeared into the twisting smoke of the clicking, ticking, damnable clock, that eats us all everyone.

I can’t claim your bosom for my own, will never own your lithe body, or feel your breath hot against my neck, or know what it is to suck in your life force vampiric as the darkness settles over naked city flashing with the trash and neon blink of burger joints and old bars.

This world America is cold and plastic and

Love is a stranger bent on his knees ready to take it in the mouth from the forces of Reason—I am an alien in a strange land—I am a walking cadaver of your institutions and medications—but human? Who could say?

How I long to meld with your flesh, hideous nightshade beauty,

spectral phantom of my heated mind,

and conjoined like parasitic twins

dance the sweet nothings of a playful pile of dust,

blown like chaff in the limitless gale of an October wind.

What more could I want?

I want you Past,

to come back and reclaim me and give me the minutes I am still living.

You cheat.

I know you.

I still feel the minutes in my mind,

yet, they are gone as surely as if they had disappeared up the hairy sleeve

of a coldly calculating magician.

I don’t like this trick.

Give me back beauty,

Passion

And the Night,

And I will sweep the dirt from my bones

and rise up to walk,

like grey ghost through the backward streets

in search of that one ineffable, unspeakable, immutable experience of pure bliss.

And that might be seen in a human face.

And it might be felt in the twiggy grasp

of soft fingers

Peeling back my lizard skin

for a sign of human warmth.