In the early bright of this damned yet blessed universe, the sweet taste of white madness numbs my tongue and cigarette smoke inhaled fills my lungs. At the foot of the bed, that chick’s panties lay over my feet, while sheets are leaking off the bed all over the floor. It goes that way, doesn’t it?
We slept with an open window, now feeling winter’s bite, but before that, we rode the carousel of snow covered horses with sharp shoulders which poked us here and there. We rode up and down, around and around. The ride went on for hours. I prayed it would last all night long.
My tobacco stained fingers dipping into that Holy Grail. Later, we dosed each other with buzz and each named a deity. Not that flash in the pan spiritual high. I mean the long essence of Buddha, rapturous, organic. She, an ebon angel who cracked my spine, my secrets. She absorbed my immortality and she will share it for generations on end. That midnight blue chick I met last night on MacDougal, her demeanor upbeat and her sensibilities more conventional than Benny’s, who I met six days ago. He with the moniker I assigned him. He with his pocketful of bennies, I enjoyed them both for a few turns of the earth.
At the meridian hour, she and I hiked down to the corner market for more smokes. She saw someone she dug across the store and I only saw her back as my last view. So plays the waltz.
But I’ll be honest, competing for her company was not in the cards. I’m a lover, not a fighter.
A libertine, I only wish to uncover the truth of lovers: I want, I wish, I hope, I love. Such deep-seated thoughts inside the simplicity of those words: Empty suffering, Lucien, Lucien, where art thou? You who taught me modern thought and vision, how to be au courant if you will.
As afternoon shifts forward, I find my way down the road to where the coffee shop and the brothel sit as neighbors. It’s time to stretch my social latitudes. So I tell that young cat whose name keeps eluding me, as we later walk back to my pad. I use drugs to grow the earth, derange my upbringing, and not make life seem so dull. Boredom is so dangerous for the mind and the veins.
On the walls, shotgun prints explode with color. I tell him I’m new around here, my voice once spoke from the West. My fingerprints are on display back there where the cubes locked us up.
The parks in San Francisco aren’t what they used to be! We both laugh. Later, I tell him more: My words are my bonds which I choose to unleash at times. He un-cuffs my wrists so I may use my hands expressively to pursue an artisan bent that represents me now in this time, in this place. Soon he wanders out the door.
When the soft diffused dim begins, I start to hear men, women, and children in the building weeping. I wish to weep myself as I gaze out the window into the darkening sky and see the lid to the vault of heaven thrown open and diamonds spilling out. They remind me of those spilled sheets and the sexual ambience of my space.
Living alone without talk is how I feel my peace. However, that moon in my head is now again speaking to me, loud and with great truth. As the twelfth hour tips over, I decide I’m gonna fall in with some other beats who can dig the smell of life. I know just where to go. I hear the drum beat and poems within as I approach. My solitary walk home in the early morning along smoky streets, obscuring people and cars, brings back memories of the fogs in Frisco. Tears and loneliness and death, it ends that way for everybody, doesn’t it?