barrooms as homes for broken generations
fleeing intently
runaway railroad cars
streaming down toothless tracks
wet with the fire of endless failures
attitudes of garnished laughter
wild, sad enough to avoid the constant barroom tv blue light,
stagnant cold beers,
fleeing the screaming obscenities of doctors’ reports
faking hip empathic carings,
avoiding waitresses nervously eyeing the quiet troublemaker,
alcohol can transform anyone
change a soccer player into a playwright
alter an inflated ego
contradict clichés
words with no depth
exaggerate whispers from flirtatious animals in heat
who realize their lives are on the line
but still choose brazen clothes
gulp doped cough syrup
homes for broken generations
abandoning the Poetry of those who came before,
listening instead to the migraine of television,
bookless and wasted on junkfood,
collapsing into each other’s intoxications rock and roll,
cool music loud music gesticulated music,
wilting beneath groomed hair skeletons
shiny silver nails,
retreating like punching bags
to revisit the inertia of violence,
more of the same
as capitalized in Vogue,
those careless generation wallowing:
where mass media has replaced self-respect,
where children happily sing along with car commercials,
where entrenched somnambulant desolation angels prevail
confused of what to live for
but the blatant repetition of contentedness,
nothing extraordinary here,
no crisis here,
no dim vague puzzling streets to glimpse miracles of a mind’s breath,
only polite cynical laughter with the trimmings,
the simple hospitality of this age destined to reinvent slavery
shackled to their barroom dreams so consistent and predictable,
where rapists and oligarchs now take the stage,
screw Lenny Bruce
Emily who
and forget Ginsberg!
the American banking system has become bard and laureate!
then where are our armies?
have we forsaken ourselves and one another
to the incessant volume of profit media?
must it take tidal waves
fires run ramped
to sober us up?
how complacent we have become
alienated and apathetic on the tip of a wet match,
humanistic suicide and romantic decadence out of control,
deodorized and passionless
obese and swooning at the surface of an apology
yes, it is for us we need to affirm,
intently gaze into each other’s mirrors
save any remaining magic
before it becomes obsolete, lifeless, and
impassable out there
beneath midnight below zero highways
waiting for tossed cigarette butts
phantom politicians to fill in the potholes,
before choosing the immobility
leaning over saloon tables to elude the violence of prostitution,
the fallout from archaic discarded paradigms,
the cruelty of planetary alienation
the nonstop onslaught of corporate greed
and the brutality of apathetic generational suicide:
before we witness the explosion of two runaway trains
that cannot coexist on the same track
1980
Tucson