Bent and Beat

yesterday is wrapped in crushed velvet and snakeskin
dirty guitars and grungy hair
and the wrong streets on the right nights
what did we know of rolling stones and gathering moss and clouds gathering in darkness?
hayseed city gawkers sore necked in the windswept leaf littered autumn of a sleepy city
smoking, leaning against an old chevy in the lit circle center of the universe
wondering about things which, 20 years later, we still can't understand
those 20 years slipped by and gone, like a fuzzed out arpeggio issuing from german speakers mounted in 
budweiser longneck boxes, notes and moments indiscernibly blending with distortion

antique shop graveyard memories of yesterday dead and sold and slipped away from the boxes we sealed and hid carefully in musty old attics among bare copper wire and motes in the sun beams like stars in the sky
stray pieces of carnival glass and thrift store paintings and boxes of toys long gone and forgotten now filled with holiday decorations, nativity and comical ghosts and silver rings for sacred eggs
and other things that songs and beards and thick southern accents bring to mind
just echoes of faded memories of the past long dead 

there was nothing but darkness on the island that winter
the shore froze and nothing useful washed up
we had an old JVC turntable, bought second hand from a synagogue junk sale
and the set procession of the handful of irreplaceable yesterdays that were etched in vinyl that we played each night
in suitable order
to keep the beasts that stalked the shadow edges of our gas furnace fire at bay

-she seeds the sidewalk cracks with kentucky bluegrass
-she seeds the courthouse planters with poppies and kush
-she sits in rush hour traffic, tits goose pimpled and nipple hard in the autumn wind, in the middle of meridian street in her grandfather's campaign chair
-she drinks champagne and fingers herself in late night bank lobbies for atm cameras
-she reads emma goldman and mother jones
-she skateboards to her book shop barista part time gig
-she was a mid 90's adbusters centerfold, on all fours obscenely stuffed with a ronald mcdonald butt plug
-she drives drunkenly from grocery store to grocery store, leaving quarters on the carousels to be found by morning children
-she hates panties, wants to Hearst a few banks, and kill a pig or a Polanski
-she abhors food made in labs, but love the drugs that are
-she has ink and plugs and beeswax dreads and an old bus that daddy's checks pay the insurance on (as well as the stomach pumpings)
-she offers a sly fuck you to the passing ski patrol

i am trying to listen
and you are screaming
screaming in gray clouds
and bright and clean ribbons of green silk in the dirt
and tara in ink
and sons of buk
and sons of escoffier
your speech is pastiche
a language unheard for many years
in an accent i don't recognize


so i sit and smoke and mumble to myself
trying to force your syllables into some sensible pattern
trying to coax the crux of your meaning from the few words i can translate
but my work is sloppy and the meaning i infer is unintended 

fletcher cherry stumble dreams
are just down the street
from water bowls and strawberry jam altars
vans driven through front windows
down the street from a hundred year old church
with a forty year old flickering neon sign
and a congregation that come across the border in the last couple of years
they meet for barbacoa and beer in the restaurant on the square after sunday service
on the opposite end of the block from the chinese restaurant
across from the egyptian place
the null space of gentrification
between a working class past
and borderland yesterday
a ripple of homes on the very edge of the ever ebb flow of the city's edifices
money mingles with poverty
a stalemate of the classes, an uneasy peace
between the vegan urbs
and the budweiser bumpy face inheritors

gray in your brown hair
your beauty framed in silver
love is fall again

kermit the frog

rectangles are trying to eat me

the air grows colder