humming the sacred song of the city my blessing all strewn i come to a gate forever beyond it lies merciful fields goldenest pastures of brilliant birds within velvet shallows and folds in the curtain within glades of witch and in hazel veneer up sidewalks of hollywood in creepy old houses on afternoons 23 years ago days come and go like ants in the eyes of a camera the vision is naked in the woods and the cliffs and the track and the fawn in the broken down river drowning in memory in the tumbledown hill in a million lives in a jar with the wind whistling in it rattle snake skin newly shed on the way troughs of time when you slump its quite pleasant slipping away down the tunnel ahead where you never said
the fragmenting collisions of our worlds we are flung far out then out past the mirror we look inside then inside where the damage is what tender humility scabbed over with pride i am adrift then adrift in the quietude before life in the endless morning of potential where i learn to sing i learn to sing that song about every other song in the breathless time of dawn i begin my song the words are shadows the drums are the knocks in the plumbing in some distant apartment the bass is the traffic groaning in avenues of cars the guitars are the one hundred planes in the sky above the piano is the ringing in my own ears the strings are the curtains flailing in the wind the choir is the hum of great buses spitting out passengers the sea fog slightly mutes all the notes i am playing at a bar on the new jersey coast underground in a blue room i strum my 12 string guitar i open my mouths and out comes my voices i open my voices out comes the stories how the swallowed land recedes from us still out of our memories out of our earshots black madonna in a painting by jean paul mozart study the methods and layers of appearances understand the subtle lapses in seconds when your god could rush in or your devil rush in or your crooked lines straightened with no delicious painkiller or your miracle escape from the prisons of heaven or the time you walked home by the light of a star or your allegations that live in a swamp called desire or your shabby excellence in putting it off or your song about alaska making it hot deep in these caves the songs [...]
it looks like the wind but its not the wind it sounds like snow but its not snow it tastes like the clouds but its not the clouds it smells like steel but its not steel it moves like stone but its not stone it meanders like a life but its not a life it cries like a city but its not a city it drowns like your love but its not your love it talks like a day but its not a day it waits like a flood but its not a flood its beautiful like condensation but its not condensation it flashes like darkness but its not darkness its mouth is like a riverbank but its not a riverbank it seems like forever but its not forever it seems like only yesterday but it is not only yesterday it hurts like hell but it is not hell this thing
a day without ugliness was declared king stars and delicious sky oh i feel it all ooze between the spheres warmer than normal the womens love the strapping men of the great steppes snakeless writhing vegetal harvest morning we throw open winters doors and a sun comes home everyone fathoming existence deep down to its atomic nothingness no more cruelty and violence let life be exalted let us move on from these regrets the shallows with leaping fish and diving birds a poet somewhere knocking out his words streets of lovely flowers i have not forgotten appreciation and gratitude every bud is the hand of natures god each flat grey stone to be admired or thrown in these heady days of forest in these cool streams of opaline why He is imminent and immanent oh yeah such a turned on cat to think up all that i say you dreamed it all up as you lay in a dream i say you wave your hand and there it was i submit therefore to inevitability only yes that and you which are the same thing the radical scrape of this whirling old world has rubbed all the time of my prodigal clock but the fruit laden pines with their lanterns and oranges and the good happy crowds and the dark water lapping at the docks and the postcard moment when you realise where you are my mind suddenly relives old old times strange times of being a boy and before it when i was someone quite big and then no one at all a rapid interior explosion of fracture a slender chasm cracked in your mind out comes years and years upon years i must do something about that it will only get worse
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