My eyes are hot -
Not from seeing, but the scene:
Alarm inside this helmet invades
A sound convulsing to displace me;
Even the callous breeze is shouted down;
Pouring over Munch's accelerating vision in desperate hours:
Nothing to put out the flame.
As if 'you're fired!' were an expression of unknown malaise;
Now the carefully painted trompe l'oeil pealing
Affection of wives comes off the walls;
Horrid revelation:
Nor does a wall stand behind!
Except the near one of jagged nausea
That knows the spider's space between two gibberish dictionaries
From a nightmare fingered third-grade helter shelfer whose fingers
Touch (from inside themselves) too many sorcerer's nausea eggs.
Below, sirens riot at the fiery heaps;
Shaking poets throw their cooling booze with daunting swagger aim
In the wrong direction:
Spray those liquors at the red hot bus seat
That startled Sartre, a kindled spirit, civil servant,
Classic, steady firemen all; pick-ax punctuators.
All of me
Inside thirty-seven floors
I try and climb the greased brass pole higher in
Clever suspenders, posed and clutching at myself like a lone telepath,
But the levels flip past, baroque pages raped by the elementary.
Standing in missing waves
Now lost audio invades
A cranium carved out by echoes,
Feed-back images interpose a scratching
Early Toscanni Wagner Ring Cycle
Breaking intervals to bits, bouncing needle
Rusty jerk tin stereoscope of my old self-portrait;
Burroughs' involuntary strobelight hands can't hold my splices -
He is roaring in ozone-smoke, circuit-blinding, clock-faced footlights; face-blur-Screams invisible world audio:

"Pain...can...be...neutralized!"

High up on a cliff, the vatic response as I fall through is
A slow-moving slate of grey clouds behind
Three distant silhouettes, firing-squad figures
Shouldering large calibre trombones -
Numb Götterdämmerung; no golden tones, but slush pump sucks
In these players.
Splices spin to the realization that Klaus Kinski has cut
To the circling scene, his
Rattle saber goo soft within a hard amber mosaic of Aztec insects
Microcosm of a sticky hardening stuff (cf. film: "The Creeping Unknown")
Oozing from that meteor under U of M
Window Sans Ginsberg's
Once gentle grammar life (Pats-her-son), fine lace, now acid-stain horror inside
People
Whose berserk carnival ride hell-ucinations stun
Non-Whitman floats of lifeless parade: I
See in the crowd
Mutant crows micturate in formations along Fifth Avenue
Curb in a trance, channel for the grateful red engines;
Raising a beating, yellowed vortex.
The 1897 Mary H. Kingley jungle arrives soon and violently.
For a while
Spies with the wrong heads on - heads of historic hunter fen-fen friends -
Discontinued because of association -
Bend to Fon tribe ad witch doctor murder perp finders, Sierra Leone,
And yet not one TV in the hut,
Hold a net for the fire fighter;
But, soon, even the doorman is gone, and now...
Looking down again, only spreading orange and blue shadows
Of flame.
The flapping white coats rustle
To a blazing barn I'm trying to save.
Riderless schizophrenics
Have frozen in their stalls;
Preempting motion on either flank with powerful magical thoughts -
Far beyond feathery hoots of harlequin-sophomoric Psch-owl-o-jests,
Try to hypnotize Sulfuric Acid in a paper cup.
Still moving on the beach,
The drum inside and slow thighs;
Once supercilious colorful peregrinations of the fireman now reduced
To Voodoo Fetish charms
Can't drive away these flaming shores.
And sunward, stranded, futile warriors gobble
Campbell's Soup can wrappings. Naked backs in the din.
His last headline glimpse is of a crackling hemisphere
In the Grand Central Businessman's Restaurant,
Staring through an empty eye,
Closing early in the middle of a dark forest - while
Fish scream the only clue, quietly fireproof in streams
Of consciousness;
With the diner alone at his table
Sunken-cheeks and bloated, burn-black belly,
In smoldering rags, lovingly seasoning a Wharhol/Klee filet.
Off...somewhere, the firehouse Dalmatian barks in a friendly way.


© W.D. Brindle
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