Aaron
From where do you go inside the intrinsic need to be free; I call you on the phone, mathematician and eccentric counselor, there you sit in your magic chair, turning electric on sugar, high from the debt of solitude, you owe money to everybody, the sky falls into your crashing and manic motor, your cars have stopped working, your eyes are troubled by the semblance of charisma and cash crashes into the nude asylum of memory; yesterday Arithmetic, Aaron you have stewed from the bastion of perfect cigars, contraband and stealthy, you say you like the image of your blue-overcoat, your singed brows end in an avalanche of hidden motives, your redwood vacation in Mecca's mean tide, your lovers complain of your musical notations, your book writing itself into a fix, you the teacher who went astray, picking the challenge of the younger generation, we wept to Dylan tunes in your green monastery, and all night binges and deep as the pink dawn awakened the monks in us, you wondering if decadence has a ceiling, and idea passed from the veins of putrid dreams of the erotic candles planted beneath the numbered corners of a room; a place where we wanted nothing but the blind charms of suicidal mirrors, where walking one night on the Boardwalk you cried "Eric, God is here with me!" as you pulled out of your empty pockets twenty hundred dollars, you slept in the polluted stream of empty wallets, crashing on the quarter-slot of some video game, dancing to the pool stick of your hungry country music of two-timing lovers complaining of vintage meals had in small cafes of flesh and sloppy joes; dancing to the teeth of soundless feet of slipping jet planes, you the Spanish master forgoes his Mexican vacation for a lady of sleeping internship, a marriage of hell and heaven, in the fury of the master's hand, I have seen you counting the stars, excellent Mephisto tempting me with rare verbs, running on silence from the beginning, selling Masters of War in hostile parking- lots of the Hyatt Hotel, singing to the provocative dreamers of a Poet's lingering realism, incognito in the showers of the poor, fastened like acne to your belt of mammon, hurt by the first Spring Dance of a jealous and angry husband, belittled by the flesh of a dancing gypsy, you the hungry Captain Crunch fanatic flunks disco and tries to pull his leather back from the grim and distant childhood of a Bank Robbery from which you and the FBI did a tango of mean and tired license plates, you switched your clever game into a hidden bucket of white stars, forth coming a bandage for your left eye firm and tight as a scared porcupine, a simple half, cut the branch of Apollo that once straight and merry grew half the size of Faustus's poor fingers, dragged down into the Sun's silent pit, now you begin to trade your heroes for ghosts, do not translate this into the mindless chess of visage from which the blowing tires of yesterday are remobilized into a VW van that cries a nameless burial and encounters again the smog of the earth, paid and simple IRS attached receipts, and pursued Bankruptcy from which our united motto is "Do not go that way! Or Become the beaten Master of Mime and Games of Chance Statistics" and remember Robin Hood and the Jealous Monk bumming cigarettes from the blond hotel of Mercy, where no sisters bring forth their hungry cappuccinos but only Heaven and God can tax the rich with fragrant strawberry pancakes paid for on plastic rosaries, you the sniper in alleyways and on rooftops with two bullets for God's angry winos, a girl dead in Telegraph avenue, stretched corpse and you and your hunger and fascination, found in East of Eden's remarkable pictures the silent type that says nothing but mountains of razorblades gather in his bathtub, and until you that you say nothing rob blind the toilet of birth, and ink quills of séance return to the Wicci Boards golden remains, after the fire drill and Frankee Lee's last gasp of motor-works inside the trash of VW memory, you sat like and old Lear inside it drummed up with your fingers on the glue of is melting engine, a last goodbye to the holding stocks of yesterday's glorious retreat.
Reprinted by kind permission of the Regents of the University of California,
Bancroft Library, Berkeley. Gift of Diane Walker Murray