BLUES FOR A CITY OF WINTER LOVE.....

Listen to the sounds
of steel, tears, and fire,
upon the stage of fractured asphalt
beneath the anvil of the night.
It's the blues playing hard and loud,
they're singing the songs,
songs of this City,
howling in the midnight rain.
This soul is out on a winter wind,

love unraveling the heart,
hey baby, it's a hurricane coming,
a storm of the blues
ripping this City down as
the kisses of searing fire
are extinguished in weeping,
as we hunt down the winter moon.

Hey people, your temples are falling,
wrecking ball reality into the dreams,
urban pastoral painted with the life
of lovers, poets, singers, as the leaders
of the band now are on that stage where
their dying is true salvation whispered
on children’s lips,
now forever to be lost,
in the last rage as the City dances,
dies.





THE LAST RETREAT.....

On sore and aching shoulders the straps did tear,
the boots all brown, cracked, marching everywhere,
the roll of drums, the bugles stirring call,
into the breath of the cannons tortured roar,
onward they marched to a hearty drummers beat,
`till the hunger of death was the last retreat.

Faces fresh, young, stepped off the troopers ship,
rifles agleam, uniforms crisp, death on every hip,
ashore they came, these heroes of the day,
their lessons learned the proper army way,
led on by their officer on horse to battles crest.

Now life and tears fell wet from the wounds
of those tired, those dying, screaming youth,
who have come here to win the peace, again.

Now the hunger of death was the last retreat,
the rising sun so high above the marchers beat,
the fields lying bleak, fallow, below the dead,
earth now groaning in agony from battles dread,
and the officer on horse looks so proudly on,
at the valiant boys now broken on the guns,
and he thinks of other days, other rising suns,
when the hunger of death was the last retreat.









SOME AFTERNOON THOUGHTS IN A CAFE WITH ICED BLOOD.....

Boots came,
heard in the distance,
slapping pavement
in cadence sharp,
the approach is ever louder.

Sun spread out creating a
sea upon streets scorched,
not a vision liquid, cool,
nor casting rolling waves,
swallowing those who walk here.

Reaching far through paths
of stone, of iron, of time,
City grows in its dying,
lives in their endless tales told,
of lust, of living, of dying,
a pulse from Babel, a soul from Gomorrah,
rhythms of worlds in an endless
spiraling transition.

Watching the myriad faces
that show the roads
of their lives, of their lands,
a river flowing, that like asphalt
after a showers passing,
explodes into ripples of rainbows,
it is not a calm, a placid river,
often it twists, churns, with violence.

A stroke of a gold tipped fountain pen,
countries go to war, to conquest,
the soldiers, the children,
merely to become fallen numbers,
the lethal, sad equation of politics.

Yet here, somehow, in this place,
hope has not faded,
the doves have not flown away,
olive branches still hang
to cloak the cannons barrel.

Easy it is not, nor is
peace without casualties,
follow not the drums, nor the banners,
nor the boots so shiny hard,
life is more precious
in the remembrance, the memory,
of all the wars gone by,
the children sent to graves
unmarked, in distant lands.

The afternoon hangs heavy as the
ice filled gutter of an old house,
but that now has melted,
only the sweat of August, hot winds
flaying flesh, eating strength,
we must retain the dreams,
for that must be the future,
or it shall be Deaths horseman
that will ride boldly out,
to deal out our final hand.








IS IT BEEZLEBUBS BIRTHDAY,
OR
JUST ANOTHER CASE OF BONGO FURY.....

It was a night darker than dark,
streetlights ineffective,
bouncing shadows off the
buildings crowded close,
obscuring the fleeting shapes
of werewolf stockbrokers,
vampiric mortgage lenders,
and some shape shifters in their
corporate uniform of three piece suits,
hurrying to the final meeting
of the board of directors now
assembled in the polished oak
conference crypts of the American Dream.

The shamans looked the other way,
evil was seen, heard, felt, yet
unrecognized by those who claimed
to know the truth, to see the mystery,
some cried out, who will save us,
and the prophets hid in the great
cathedrals, the bishops counting
the red stained gold of pride.

It was left for the sinners, the
lepers, the castoff heretics,
to battle the Darkness, naked, alone,
with only the armor of hope,
between salvation and the final fires
of the holocaust called Perdition.
So I cruise down the midnight
highway through to Gehenna,
the convertible top full down so that
the sulpher laden breezes can fill
my lungs with the death screams of
this City of nights endless shapes.

Now watch the sinners with their
new cast silver bullets being loaded,
The hobbling lepers carving mighty
stakes of discarded wooden scrap,
the heretics erecting great pyres
upon which they'll burn the last,
the final cowering shaman,
the remaining cardinals of Mammon.

These are the hours of retribution,
the prelude to the slaughter,
the cleansing of the last deceiver,
the final politician.