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Surrealist Addendums Grow in Post-Script Like Geraniums

(for young lovers who don’t know any better)

You’ll know that you’re going blind once you start smoking the ashes

We pause

and she reminds me that I have a dick big enough to seem charming on rainy days as well as during summer blackouts

In fact, I’ve been notarized, and  

Con Edison has pimped me out on several occasions as a form of apology

for the folks with their black nights spent by dying candlelight

it made sense as a routine (you have to learn to remain somehow)

Believe long enough in dark beer mornings and a coffee for breakfast when I wake up somewhere around a lurid dusk

and sometimes I write before meeting dangerous people in dangerous times

because we leave our last spit of stained spirit for the last; ahead of time in a jaded millisecond with a knife impending to paint the throat with something worthy of Esenin’s penmanship

but it’s really just the wait

and soon enough you’ve reached Side Two and it’s time to turn the tape over:

And sometimes, if you remember, you used to leave the Starbucks bathroom with blood on your shirtsleeve

and then you would sit, pale, relating something or other to Byron and pretending there’s charisma hiding in the floor

and it’s really like trying to explain the importance of the Minutemen to an 18-year-old girl inside a screaming art gallery that used to be a warehouse where you couldn’t find work on a cold month, next to some negligible stop off the L train and a taco truck with overpriced burritos

And you’re out of the blue and into the black, like a Neil Simon cover with too much vodka and no real politics to speak of and something vague that you’re angry at your father about because of course it must be his fault

No longer running for the bullet, you might as well accept that I am not going anywhere:

This city’s blooming again and the allergies are killing me like paternal rot

my eyes feel as though they’re smoking crystal meth

but I haven’t bought a bus ride out of town yet

because I haven’t a place to go

I know that there’s a girl that I want to write in this movement, with her little finger on the trigger

a lemonhead that you have after your first shot of cognac

the cute little Gerber baby face that ended up on a milk carton on a sprawling 90’s highway forgotten after the first exit like a statement taken out of context by some punk rock version of Ralphey Waldo Emerson talking too much shit about the inherent subversive value of horizons, waiting for the West Coast to drown

And then how do you learn to collect the checks,

if you’re a literary pawn shop?

Like the last can of welfare tuna in the fridge –

don’t throw me away too early as though you weren’t staving…  

and now god’s got a melanoma on his palms – that’s why we come out so broken

he ain’t the craftsman he used to be

And

It’s all a lie, like how

in moribund chastity being a heroin wife is a noble endeavor

since junkies are an enviably, cinematically sentimental bunch

eager to lavish warmth and generous kindness unto the cruel world perceived as unimmediate and unworthwhile, full of nothing much but polite conversations, subway rides and early mornings – dope being more honest: you wait to get high in a zen rebirth each time slower

The wife gets the soft nook in the crook of the arm while the happy, dozed couple lay in each others arms as the silent soundtrack of purgatorial (sickly as the yellow of the fading cardboard after a fortnight of rain) inevitability drowns out any worry and any trepidation and any plans and any appointments unless they are uptown by the train or in the village in a phone booth that waits and carries itself like a stiff, gruff relic or a stale childhood prayer you still remember although it has long since lost its use

and then we grow old dreaming of the Arctic cold

and then we are apart

for a while

and then we find each other again

like the wet thighs of the divine

and then in the joyful bundle (ten bags with smiling faces on them) she looks so young

as though it didn’t speak

as though it was like putting a tie on a corpse for the purpose of forced purgation

and we become dedicated to one another

for a while

making jokes, like:

today the day was catching its own nod

and aren’t we oh so satisfied…

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