Trains Passing Through French and Belgian Towns Late at Night
Rochfort-Jamelle
gathers up neon
waltzing from tongues
like Betjeman is
sleeping beside me,
Grupont
a moniker for
dusky mushroom vines
lingering under night,
and I turn
to a nuclear
family beside me
dated by a
tattered school-book
from maybe 1975
first showing me
what France and
Belgium looked like,
in trains passing
late at night
through towns with
names swollen on
Pye radio frequencies
Finks
Gas pipes
are broken
collarbones
in pick-axe streets
where the guy in shoes
no man under 60 should wear
wants to cure people
of their communism and their
sodomy.
The stained glass
windows of St. Mary's
finger finks like pebbles hiding
in milk,
sneaking away on their bicycles
their guts trash
like a shroud against a typhoon
The Journey of the Proton Through Mass Production and Global Consumerism
Secretly - I like
to read Thom Gunn -
after darkness falls like cheap airline jets and poisoned flies;
before dawn it's
Sexton and Plath
last sighted on a
cargo-plane
above Harare,
heading
towards
Burundi.
Because
they think I'm a
spy I'll be one,
(howzat grab ya?)
for Mossad,
MI5,
the Shriners
and the
Vintners
Association
of Kyrgyzstan.
Numerous
possibilities exist in marketing right now,
the iron’s hot and it's time to strike.
Tighten that tie,
you son of a bitch,
in my previous life
it was a noose
standing
on a gallows in
Cheyenne
(or Shy-Anne as I called her, her sister Betty, well she wasn't that great either),
and I piss a cup of
Joe
standing by the
water-cooler
sharing the secrets of tarot cards
and golf weekends
and Bud and Lou
fighting back-stage in 1949.
But how do they fit the figs in the fig rolls?
was all I heard
them say that first day
in Marketing 101.
And opening the
18th floor window to a Roger Waters
song
I took flight,
jacket off
and tie slapping my face in a cross-wind cruising over the bay.
Hong Kong was in
all its glory
and the number
count of protons
holding the world economy together
coming in at 15,894
digits across the slimy scales
of the stock market
raping penniless widows
across the tumours
of the horizon.
Whoops big fella,
easy on the Miracle Whip,
you may end up with
a coronary
instead of a knife
to your throat.
After they scraped me
from the sidewalk
they took my Thom
Gunn away, screaming like a loveless baby;
they cut through his spine like an old Saxon road
and counted every
proton,
neutron,
and atom welding as
one their dreams
of Ferraris,
cocaine and poontang.
Plath
and
Sexton
threw dandelions
on my grave,
took a taxi
straight to the
airport. Could’ve been a whole lot worse
I guess, like poor
cousin Leslie
lying on the floor in ‘72
writhing with the
ungrounded microphone
and the guitar like
Dante in his other hand,
Mama Cass
and her heart
about to burst in
the claggy London heat.
All they did to me
was send me to the gallows yet again, hoping to get it right this time.
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