Empire of Light

By David White

As in Rimbauds The Drunken Boat, Empire
of Light will take you down a stream of
consciousness stream in a rudderless boat to
experience visions of ruin and beauty.
This book explores a peculiarly American
landscape of magnificence and decay, reveling in
nightmarish and dreamlike events. The world of
Empire of Light will fascinate you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465395450

David White

David White was born on 30 October 1967 in Manchester, England. A former professional footballer, he played as a forward from 1986 to 1997. He is best remembered for his eight-year spell at Manchester City. He also played for Leeds and Sheffield United, and was capped once by England.

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Copyright © 2011 by David White.

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4653-9544-3

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4653-9545-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

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In a room dark underneath, behind a mulk… a ladder was born with axes on fire.

I abandoned this story on our off-day, on a lord’s white plates, worst scenario on the wall, shadow boxing in a rut of romancing pigs (running up & down halls squealing Wagner operas or something like that)."

Call me Laurie, one yelled to another. Salad for sure. D’ Artanian lost his toast and he’s not going to share. He’s going bowling in the lane (Lake Lane) and is in a hurry for free drinks, candy-flavored.

I’m a nut for history, for the fall of the Roman Empire…

There’s something wrong with these bunk beds. "They’re painted salad-color. Fish jump in and out of the paint (and knives sing & tell jokes).

The sun makes promises it can’t possibly keep…

"I was through with it thirty years ago. I took the heartless Poindexter stairs to melancholy fires. Stairs debated on scratch-TV, blue streaks falling off the oxygen wagons.

If only I could repair the monster. Children burn in alley sun, hair flying, screams & memories spilled on blue pant legs.

A mechanical girl pedals fast. She’s got my head in her knapsack…

"Tired of sleeping in leaky buckets, I drove out Fearless Motel Road passed Dead Tree Lane turning into Our Lady of Melancholy Avenue watching stars above an altar (count Napoleon’s blue-streaks falling on the floor of the oxygen wagon).

If only I could repair the monster.

Terrible, terrible news spit up on the wall. Fire leaked. They bought and sold Big City while ladders wrote for the poisoned on checkered table cloths. Everywhere."

I watched as Sveridge patterns rebuked alley cats, a parade inside foreheads, pastry faces and red balloons with spots of cottage cheese on one side…

I found mechanical burn patterns on the carpets… They spelled Cuban Marriage" and told us to expect presents from the president of the hallways of shadows (in dark woods, nervous as June brides).

During the fall of the Roman empire, we wore food instead of clothes… slices of beef on shoulders, onions and raw potatoes from elbows and knees (but there was no plaid salad then to speak of). Make-shift blue dreams flickered on TV movie screens, purple background faces, mad blue and silver clicking sounds (ever stare at a clock ’til you went mad? . . . ever scream in an echo chamber?)

At the Circus Maximus, we’d buy ice cream and listen to the gladiator’s nervous teeth (as automobile hub caps were tossed into the air by one-armed midgets).

There’s a pillow fight at the barracks, say soldiers by the guillotine.

Blue America releases its stain… golden brown at the edges (ladders drop manure). In a cavern below the continent, D’ Artanian pays tribute to memories of broken glass at Columbus’ landing in 1492 (shiny new 1948 dimes floating above his head).

She laughed and said, How do people spend time falling down empire shafts? She didn’t know. It was hard to tell.

I watched shadows move on escalators attached to people (sometimes). I stared through windows for all the hours when most ladder-shadow cleansers were runny and flammable.

Open the heartless sack. Pull on the penny-whistle, she said while staring at me with fish-eyes. She tried to figure me out and watch the buffet at the same time.

I told her I’d been rotting in the tide pools, slimy life trying to grab the rocks to get out… (the tide washes in. the tide washes out).

We kissed on the dock. There were squids in her mouth.

They made dresses out of the Poindexter Fires (all the rage at the time).

On slopes above Sacred Heart Cemetery, I saw her return (this was after the river flooded bringing the dead out of their coffins… They were outraged they’d been paid minimum wage).

The radio came on, the fleshy parts illuminated.

How do people spend time?

I don’t know. (but I did… They spent it at the barracks waiting for the guillotine blade to come down)

Her stare was hard as bones. Stones and shadows leaked between columns at the Parthenon. Eyeless gods without names stared from the dark then told us what blind men saw.

A lamp is a handkerchief. An auto accident is an orange tree. A tree stump is a letter to a friend. (I hope I have it right this time)

The moon rises to roll around in the weeds, cold blue stains on the roof. (dog-barks hide in an extra pair of boots).

We Claw, it says on a sign in a restaurant window.

Buy All in 1 doors… for authentic rape, say the silver-tongued daughters of Hollywood (for sale at bargain basement prices).

Iron rusts in the yard. Candy made from plumbing hangs from the eaves. A man holds a blank sign; Mushroom Bible Troubled. Meat Fallen on Hard Times, (in invisible ink)

Creation seven days a week.

Is this Trouble Island? (the girls giggled at my accent).

After chewing meat she suddenly stopped (I touched her bony French).

We’re on island time, said MGM stars in Africa.

Last night, I sent a broken-down post card (with pictures of the gone world on it). I need help with eight knives, I told her, her broken-toothed smile wrapped in newspaper along with partially-gutted animals, old turpentine and pastrami sandwiches turning green around the edges.

A bridge made of smiles melted like Jell-o left out in the sun.

A barn slid downhill like it did in 1927. People used to leave broken teeth in the hills & lovers used to kiss for luck (it collapsed the morning of April 4, 1938).

Miss Terry-Waves spit up lemon peels and old socks made from movies projected inside salt mines.

I fell from a broken roof-horse into an alley behind Wal-mart where I glimpsed Batman (who caught fire by friction because people played cards too fast…).

Wal-mart was a church made of phosphorescent light.

A hobo is a Jelly mold.

Burning trees make good coffins. Out back… a blue curtain drops.

A boy at school is sometimes an alibi, (sung to the tune of a loud crash of Tracey Lord’s white plates).

Misery loves Camels, & for pleasure, play the piano with her hair.

Stand and drink a back yard.

What am I going to do with this Pink Finger? (without nights it’s too soon to tell).

All the oxygen drums have been sold.

She sat on her porch smoking, watching four A.M. then she stared (her face hidden by dark so I couldn’t tell what she was thinking) . . .

Somewhere in the distance dogs barked twenty years ago (behind a collapsed circus tent).

She was told life was pleasure. it turned out to be servitude.

They have fun don’t they?

Who? Christians?

No. The lions.

I sat inside my apartment on piles of dust. That was seventeen years ago. my head hurts now. My silent gums itch from unspoken words.

Inside this crumpled paper napkin I see the fall of the Roman Empire. Nero watches flames as the city burns (the flames drawn with a cheap ball-point pen on a paper napkin from Denny’s).

He wasn’t playing a violin (it hadn’t been invented yet) but he was playing a lute, reciting his latest epic poem which went like this:

"A horse head is a pillow

It haunts my dream.

Its large brown eyes stare from the dark…"

If you pull it, you’ll have large maps of L.A.

She has eyes in the back of her head beneath her hair…

Fidel Castro then ran out the back door. I never saw him again or his parents or heard him in the night trying to reach the hall of dreams.

Moan train, moan.

It’s her sister. (she can’t exist without the smells on the floor of the movie theatre)

The honor of the hat is in its petals, explains Nero. A black tie was tied across his brow. It echoed midnight canyons.

There was an odor of dead things under the overpass.

You’re going to pay those court costs… not me, said a plaster cast of an angel wings and near that a small glass box of butterfly worms.

Midlands were startled in the thrushes of 1904.

A train moaned loneliness speaking midnight flowers.

You can’t beat Jack… There are lights inside tea cups.

He’s here! (said the King of Sawdust…)

Hail Caesar, said the twilight dinner rolls.

Jack Black waved his arms at the tow-truck.

Hand me a horn, he said from behind a garbage dumpster.

Those boxes don’t contain oxygen for ALL occasions, do they?

It’s the talk of the town! she said, letting her towel come loose (a little) to show the landlord…

I didn’t know the restaurant of rain was closed.

In a year or two. said Captain Bassoo, holding a half-full chest of scrap metal. (soon he’ll have red jelly-filled brooms for sale)

On my days off, I hypnotize with calendars made from green woollen souls dizzy in revolving dentist chairs.

There was a finite number of black birds.

Eyes in the ocean caught jewels of the water-sun. The waxed hair of a million dead beautiful things crashed onto sandy beaches (made from the bones of ground-up state workers), forms captured then released…

I knew you’d like it, explained a mechanical bird in a cage. (horror, beauty. horror again in blue veins in her wrists)

Our lives end like blossoms turned to dust, in a seafood restaurant in a bottle of late afternoon light.

I have no idea how the moon got here.

It must have been late… Jackie startled by one-armed men who loved her.

‘Chances Are’ hung on velvet curtains. in 1958.

(there’s no such thing as green-blue music).

I was twenty-seven once… (for three or four years) the rabbit-clock came unstuck. he used to judge me (at three to one)

The world terrorizes us in dreams, said Nero. Coffin nails drop from the air.

(clumsy hands reach for blonde butterflies)

In early afternoon darkness, a family of monkeys at the zoo stare right through us as if we weren’t there. Sammy’s Electric Marines say… What’s the point? We stand in different parts of the ocean!

Suddenly! (what a great word) Wonderful days die.

Nero played an instrument similar to the violin & wore a tiny white hat (in honor of its petals). Violence is a storm turned inside out, he once said in 64 A.D.

I play on the wisdom of the gods.

Being startled like a sinking ship…

A box of music is fourteen cents, said the child genius. (but he was penniless and used to pick a green nose)

I suffer in the rain.

She plays with her hair while bedsprings rust in the desert.

And what type of pre-history is shot into movie clouds?

The waiting room is made of 3-D bricks. My finger bleeds green onto the floor of the hospital corridor, the one where men hold spears for eternity and wait.

Fires in distant fields tell us, Who’s going to visit mud-farms? Waiting in brittle meadows? (mildewed motel courts?).

I’ll play make-believe in Florida stab-rooms with helium shadows before the end is near, said a lawyer made of hat shadows. rain in his pants falling down…

I love the fleshy parts of radios. (give me shadows of shoes)

I went up the road to the usual place. The sun was hanging in midnight trees, a moody jewel ruminating about something having to do with spirals, molten lava and/or distant light.

Shadows of ghosts left imprints in a desert of scarred land, dust jumping up & down like tiny almost invisible frogs.

America is old, & evil waits in the dark woods. horns made from bones play music about tattle-tale flowers and the sound of mushrooms. spirits walk through streets not yet named.

At Lake Balakka, there were seventeen quarantines.

A child response is liquid under military trees…

A shoe-horn becomes a wall with no strings. Coffins capture death. (but sometimes it escapes). A narrow hall has no eyes at Shock Island (just detective lids), say Absolute Charlie String.

Strike one! (watch Berlin’s water flow backwards)

Near Holly Carlton’s Snake Spot… at a turn in the road. It’ll have to be cauterized. She’s safe wearing lead milk. Ladders in further rooms have safety rails. A big tray of Mississippi is on fire.

Can a river burn? asked William Faulkner.

Yes. (no).

It was time. notions sold by the roadside near a sun-faded billboard. She had French hair…

Monday at the back of the barracks. action wood. & plumbing snaked underground holding conversations in a movie shot in a taxi in 1942. Hearts are on fire, she said spreading tears. (& jests). on a checkered floor…

It’s very nice, but the file cabinets are empty of cases to solve.

Per que?

Children built the White House, & were buried underneath (the president was grateful and gave each of them a certificate of appreciation, suitable for framing, something to be cherished during the years to come).

She jumped, said Dr. Lemon putting on the noose.

There’s money in a fault. bottom located. creatures on a wall… Mr. Carrot is in the spotlight. It’s gonna change. These really were ‘quality’ Galleons. "The main thing is to run. tax and license is available (everything for sale).

You may not have time.

She jumped off the pier after she drowned. I couldn’t find a dozen lox, a pair of pants on fire, or patterns of shade on old rock.

She sat on ice to keep her insides cool.

She kept seeing penguin shadows in the corners of her eyes (how can eyes have corners?)

There’s ice on this? I threw the carton away. I had to work in the morning. I listened to the wind-up clock tick for hours. I watched a brown stain on a wall move slowly toward the mouth. It was mostly still.

The shining world has me going, says light in empty fields, traffic in veins, mud in my eye. It rained on this spot (April 12, 1923 ten minutes before noon behind the feed store).

I chewed on Africa…

near shallow graves.

"Her forehead counted time (invisible stairs made of glass & imagination, capable of changing heights… occasionally tall enough to scrape the moon flying by in airless gravity (above Fiction town).

Escape? Lucy?

Look at Amber! (everything for sale… in Rome)

I remember that! say template gods.

You’re jealous, but not too. Lose those chains, break the broken chairs.

You’re not that smart. You’re flavor. A tawdry lump (8 miles south on a beautiful tree-lined concrete highway).

How can you buy a store made of ‘friendship wood’?

Hands in a backyard. in the doorway of a shed, they sat and waited hours for Electrical Octopus Radio News Theatre to come on and tell them about distant wars. But there are still smiles on the railroad of life…

The stock market may be your only nickel to success. Inside her dress. a sea-journey (paid for but not yet).

She stood under infinity… getting dizzy and sick.

in a stardust shower.

her meat was near water. smiles drying on pink rocks. sisters in baths. a long chain to the nigger shack. Tom Jefferson’s moans and groans (out back near the graveyard).

Emperors ruled the world then. Caligula ate children, white bread crumbs on red checkered floors. They’re humble… all of them. They’re thankful for being chosen.

We almost never beat slaves. (not anymore. They love us. They’ll do anything we say).

Penitentiary. snake food… anvil.

 . . . I could see the dark curve of her breast as it traveled down into her blouse.

She sucked the light out of a light bulb.

There’re flames in her eyes… deep wells where I see… arctic curves, cold air whooshing up streets all the way from the north pole to nuzzle under her dress.

Long curves in roads take us to the lake. poetry in blossoms.

Spring ends early. It doesn’t last long. birds fly over, black reflections in puddles. (a hush when the wind stops)

"Those are modern hopper green mustache vice grips, Connen and Block Porter down Orange Avenue. a chair with one glass eye staring.

There’s concrete in the hall in town near the eye-rail section, a phallus and breaks of patterns embedded in hills (positioned) in Ruth, Nevada (reflection in windows, folded neatly for placing in pockets).

At about 28 to 10.

Six inches of water in back…

a guy wants to buy a bridge. Then we want corn-dusters. & bittersweet chocolate… Did this come off Margo’s shoes? a hole-in-the-wall, bitter as sea-marchers, as rustless as rust (but pipes are sometimes clean).

What’s reel?

All sandwiches are served in baskets with diamond rings. I imagine the squirrel’s too ugly. Toomby’s leather… and Adam’s failures. Eve in a dress. Humphrey Bogart’s lawn. & some small, terrible arrow.

I’ll knock your socks off. Via con Dias.

Some marks have push-up turns in the shape of things to come. war-like poster melodies, arms & necks in cold rooms full of water. (footsteps echo in the hallways).

Next: Three wise men & the smell of hamburgers & onions burning softly at the Burger Barn.

Angry at the emperor’s letter, Miss Liberty explains the holes in early earth’s asteroids… Burning weeds make targets of terrible denture valentines, crosses for the dead everywhere, slaves holding burning nickels.

"He always has,

his burning head

in the glass

of hours." (or is it ‘glass head in the burning hours?’)

Let me see Johnny’s kiss, stuck in frozen Anchillean glass. in steam pots from Slotsville. (she was helpful to the war effort… she manufactured soldiers in the factory of her womb).

He stood with buckets of echo-light. & washed dishes like swine or so said Mr. Goldenrod. I was looking for Cleopatra in Tennessee (at the end of some dead-end road), but could only find her discarded underwear in a ditch…

We eat ice, dream, & fish-bait. molded into soft ladders of the morning.

I investigated the many chambers of her cruel and predatory heart… & suddenly I found a dozen hard-pressed dirty

pistols. Marriage was bread gone bad (with pull-string

principles).

My brain hurts, said Johnny’s cash, olive oil in a purse in a round whale inside a small room. Part and principle…

8 ham sandwiches.

Mother Mary has a snake in her pants. Eve’s apples can be found high up on Crystal mountain (her hours are there too, made of glass like Nero’s).

Flower is blind beggar… must find way in dark.

It was you, Dr. Mutt, explained Reno news, many acres of dark Empire at the top of dark narrow stairs. a round machine (producing hot ice in the dark).

"She put her crimes in my arms and I hated her for it (dark & wiggling). I berated her natural animal flavor… (her hot animal breath weeping on my morning back).

Smiling priests-of-money stood at the door to the church of Wal-mart. We don’t hide items. or not sell anything. Phone poles? Aisle 2-214. A

royal iris?

Producing light

through a lemon

slice…?

A motel on fire.

I already paid to see it, said Doctor Sick (Mr. Bones). We’ll bury this twisted death, he said, in conversations under bushes. The bright red Christmas berries appear not to be poisonous. in sludgy oils of the heart.

In a blood son.

I didn’t want part of this play. Wings collapsed. startled convulsing burning light. The black shirts are here to stay, walking on bones making crunching sounds in concrete hallways, the rich at their orgy (they can’t be disturbed), busy howling at (and owning) the moon.

Next, my son.

It was a beautiful day full of light from hair and burning eyes. she was vegetables and slit wrists.

We have to find a way to the moon, (and sell its light to ice-chests)

Borrow the race track calendar on the wall. said Chief-Among-Us, Hamnet busy dying.

That’s what you need… a rigged god. A black dragon flying over green-blue seas, titling boat fire engines in neon, the flesh & bones of everyone in Georgia…

So what’s it made of?

I’m innocent as plastic forks… (bent then stored in Religious Pensacola)

Fry up some gospel soon as it’s written in a locker at the bus station. (& borrow a bayonet)

Every Thursday night, Red Lobster… a dark comedy unfolds in bleak rooms. naked girls stand in fields. blood in their vents.

There’s Rubber arms in the Capitol of the Empire, smoke on the horizon (from burning oil). Mass-murderers need love too, said the bumper sticker

(better the abusive father you know than one you never had)

He cared for you…

Yes. Bring airplane gloves for the job. In my opinion Madam Walrus is all washed up.

Olive trees grow in the coliseum. You can see brain stains on the avenue, purple tree shadows on the sidewalk. Walk in and out of Caesar’s shadows (he stays at the Empire motel, loves the swimming pool and uses the ice machine and the barbecue pit).

Financially he’s blue, purple at the edges but his hair is golden (he inherited this from the Nordic people). His forehead is wrinkled from Mediterranean sun burning down on him (god’s one good eye).

I scrutinize the Empire, the value of every slave. Sardinia, Corsica, Carthage, Egypt, Gaul, Britain. We have captured the hearts or if not the hearts the souls or if not the souls, the bodies of the world… Their sheep’s eyes look at us with envy (they admire the power we use to control them… like a bright & shiny diamond).

Can you gain power by yielding to it?

Big flowers tremble by old walls.

A yellow fin stands on top of a marmoset. There’re book-markers in the mouths of the dead (to mark their places so they don’t forget what they were reading). sounds of carnivals in alleys…

They say it’s an accident!

They dig up blind people under a sky with clouds cut in half by windows.

She cried out, barefoot in Lonely Lane (to the right, hills were filled with dark murder and to the left lightning sparkled in the rainy chambers of the sky).

She’s sitting on ice. burning

She’s pregnant. with different kind of rocks inside from different men.

This Monday sits on a hill parade of life… It reminds me of the recipe for beauty, horror, isolation, madness and burning bicycle shadows. & sly flesh.

Pretty girl like lapdog going mad. say Charlie Chan, watching big flower shadows by walls.

Man with beard like ice cream cone… beard melt with first ray of dawn.

baby-pistols.

You have a problem with rubber arms. The side of a face in a smile-frown. All items are for sale."

Death is a pale ghost… (keep it under your hat, under the bridge).

Pure as soft bones. a horse drowning in music. (of love, forgetfulness then warm and fleshy sand dunes).

A funny girl stands with her strange face. & tiny feet. she’s next to a 2-cent Temple.

Malfunction voids all plays & pay outs.

The air smells of burning trash. What’s come over me? (a guy switches to a big-busted gal). a machine with a smiling face winks…

Machine girl, machine girl. Would you play with me? (game over)

I’m glad he’s gone. Now we can be alone.

In the old days, it was a matter of slide-college and nude lighting… (sometimes liquor sun-joy). It used to matter… the fish arm (o her liquid soul).

On Jelly Way, the docks were made of screaming timbers split under a love-in sky. Such angels as I have seen/felt/sensed, wings clipped and smiling with broken-toothed smiles (some of them old girls).

It’s easy to be scared and scarred and sacred and in Egypt at the same time, spiders the size of camels bear down on your blood. TV shrieks across the noon-to-June parapets.

Oh to live on the rocks and roofs of dreams and stare at staircases to sky…

(& look under the skirts of angels)

It’ll cost you a hundred dollars, the little girl says.

(later: she succumbs to radio gas. & the sound of screaming monkeys)

Telephone shadows in the future. (what will they be like?)

Wasted men like bundle of sticks. It take flame to make them catch fire.

Blind man like pocket of giant. It almost always empty. Purpose of life like closed box. It what you imagine… learn to play golf.

Open box. Find emptiness, say Charlie Chan. wise and inscrutable in the City of Mechanical & Masticated Clowns.

love & bacon.

Hamster of my dreams? Mr. Good-cup? A forest? a prize for the best downtown scalpel? Across from the airport (did I cut Jesus’ throat?).

I wanna see that goat again. said misspelled love.

I was a part of bricks (on the highway to the Milky Way).

subterranean rotting bones (the expression on his skull looks sad!).

I never said I was the son of god… Whatta bum rap! If I had my way I’d be a baseball star… a blues musician.

Magician?

Musician! And I LOVE casinos. Sometimes the Pope comes down in the basement of the Vatican & works the rusty jaws of my skull & puts words in my mouth… Who’s your daddy? Who’s your daddy… then he puts on a sock-puppet that looks like a rabbit.

5-circuit pattern juice. (the amazing belly of amazing things)

Man like leaky boat. Soon reach water.

Two lips speak from behind a desk. Order disclose information, duck synonymous moose hair, strong fun, says the scratchy secretary (two or three of them eating grapes).

They sit inside the gold horn for up to forty minutes.

she smiles but tells me nothing, not even about her black cat.

Well, sit here. The teacher says, strong & blue in the face…

Mudville has long been under the tracks. (the smell of a greyhound’s legs) She knows she smells like mushrooms growing in damp woods. It’s a part of our ancient something or other… she walks into the room balancing a loaf of bread on her head then writes an essay about it so she can laugh at it

(& the Joker’s moon)

Heartbreak.

I had twenty photos of doctor’s bones. They grabbed doorways and shadows, sunlight on the office floor a gift from Fuzzy Lane, tears from her womb dried up, the cost of the universe on file slipped under her door (it was lost in a photograph I once burned when a neighbor kid asked me for 5 cents.

(& a lick of my maple ice cream cone)

A eulogy is present. in fields of the dead (a giant army of sleeping insects).

Their virtues are bones with dry hair.

You brought green sunlight and mustard grass, (a gull’s shadow crosses hard dry ground). Two days in which parents were head-hunters. Hunting among rocks (for the skulls of their children)

This was a jump-off point for the headliners…

Look how big my brain is on Old farm road.

How far do we go before we meet Roman rain?

I’m pretty sure it’s the lantern, long duck…

Every fry-boy gives an inch. by going off to fight at Clam lake. Can you do it? Can you drive the car into the lake? (the baby is crying)

We follow inches from 50 years ago…

She’s here. She proves it by kissing me… like lightning.

like slinging bass.

Percolating doors, a derriere in sunlight. I moved through morning like a teenager heavy with burnt dirt spines, singular electrical music passing through my cortex (at the center of steel lake).

Upstairs there was a party to one side of the stairs.

I told you… Bring three axles. there were fireworks too at our party in January above the capitol dome down from the old dark hole next to the Roman Empire bar & grill, the one with the hole in the roof for the gods to look down into and make sure the tiled floor was swept clean. We could hear lions roar.

(at the zoo. I’m sure they’ll love you)

The great Prometheus brings Rome fire…

Her reflection in the mirror is not rational, not on Old Bridge Road (nor her reflection in hallway glass, restless as one of her arms swinging back and forth).

You have to sneak up on gasoline-powered snakes.

Mike’s song-hat was filled with spinning carousels. (your spinning bed)

I was not on trial for the Gasoline murders, said girls in white coats, pushing aggressively on locked doors. It was my day off and the government robots were handing out free plus-cheese sandwich samples and dying cats. They held in their metal hands all the lost, windy math they could hold inside corkscrews of days (drilling through sad, omnivorous hearts & souls).

lines of force, boundaries of control down by the river… strict keys on typewriters.

She goes to the All-Ghost Bar & Restaurant which was made of snow & rain tires, footprints up to the door as blue as blue can be…

It’s what we enjoy here in the Empire, drugs leaking in the medicine cabinet.

Don’t eat that green donut! but you must go as far as you can in your mind (rape & other bright & shiny hams deluding and denuding the innocent).

It’s alright ma! It’s life, drifting down dark alleyways to music, past locked storefronts (dust floating around inside like tiny stars or seeds, a deer head on the back wall, it’s glass eyes watching us).

"The nut-case hung it by the cop’s brain. Angels dangled on wires and mad-men guffawed because… well… because heaven is out of reach."

Ten dollars buys you a pool sheet Sunday morning just after silver disaster… cats running inside it with white mechanical paws. I stand chanting on a hillside above prosperous concrete childhood sidewalks in the early days when air smelled of blue hydrogen. (& the sun was yellow)

Yell Owla! said the oxen.

She was born in a poem, her lips’ cats licking milk out of a bowl, her eyes soft as marinated jam, her belly full of rocket-fright silk, slick-as-sin, her soul soft & phosphorescent as stolen church berries, her itchy lies turning blood from water into fire (I broke my hip waking on her lawn… stepped in a pot-hole).

Black cats wiggled in shadows where I learned to tune the afternoon (inside out) on her front porch. She walked through the back room and for whole minutes (like oysters) said nothing…

Let’s sit and listen to traffic then pretend to be wholesome, she said then smiled, her forehead yellow-as-honey.

It’s been raining, and snakes have been in the yard.

You’ve got to do something… I can’t stand it any longer!

She was soft as old movies and liked to count graveyards when leaves began to die. "What does happiness have to do with love? If we stopped thinking of happiness then maybe we could have it (there are only so many clocks to wind down and stop).

Her hair is lost in music, in smoke at the bar. old blue movies make her pipe wet.

She couldn’t sit for very long on thin ice… (she got a letter from a bully) and glass-Friday’s octane, (her teeth got lost in pillows she slept on. & masks of her face too in puddles of waiting water coming home. I was eating her then I forgot. It was near the place where Martians landed in that shopping mall in November, 1958 (cloth towels had stopped up the toilet).

It was at the corner of Ohio and Omaha Avenue.

I used to wait at the beach at the edge of flood waters. I used to wait for the bus…

It was John Hamilton’s sister (she was old—she was fourteen) made a play for me in the back of their parent’s truck on the way to Lake Berryessa (trees on the hills were burned)

If you don’t give it up, I won’t speak to you again. (I didn’t & she didn’t).

Give what? I was eleven. Honestly I didn’t know. but I knew it was something nasty. she fell silent and stopped looking at me. Excited (confused) I watched her bikini and her dancing eyes in the fireworks…

She went to bed (and didn’t dream of me!)

Sexy little tight beasts with holes not unlike warm graves…

or wet hot rain in mud or white horses prancing like madmen in their last fright.

I slept as an infant in a dark back room. Adults out front talked in the light in hushed tones (all dead now… it was about urgent survival). Their words

have echoed

away.

It was the first city of a million souls (sleeping nights). if you look through a magnifying glass it is old muddy hills collapsing.

Nero’s notes are flames. In hills outside the gate, scattered bones of children (abandoned then eaten by wolves). Poor mothers weep. young daughters drop tears of innocence… white bones among spring blossoms. (you can see them from some of the streets)

Is that complimentary? fish heads in shining hair? a party in the rain? (raisins made from cranes)

I was on my way to chocolate parking lot. she ran outside to see the imitation plate in the sky. Lies tell truths, she explained, her eyes wide as saucers (echoing in an artificial echo chamber). soon diamond clocks stilled in a spoon. Langley Field was where nurses sang (vaguely erotic songs) late at night in formation till curfew at midnight wishing in