ERIN BURLEY
 
 
 

       And we have known other cities burning in the blue iris of morning under
  the eyelid of God, and a thousand prisms in the crystal chambers of dragon
  tears dawning on infant skin, and a thousand starspill portals on the
  scalloped shuddering cheeks of lakes, and a thousand salvations in the
  gutters of Eden----a thousand angels in the helix of solar sandbars
  stretching acid cloudwalks over the crucible of the sun. We knew such skies
  before birth, the gasoline dream slipstream rainbows and crosswire crucifixes
  stenciling the coal ocean, the haunted astral tides of Alcatraz in the
  luminous air. Somewhere in the smolderings we have returned to the gunmetal
  mystical halls of Newark and found Christ in the concrete canyon metal yards
  among the graffiti lepers in smog-lit colonies and junkie apostles of Druid
  dusk pierced by ascensions and assumptions in streetlight illuminations
  sloping to the cradles of dust rocking in the pulse of subway Styx, Charon
  ferrying crackhead martyrs to the glitzing gate of Golgotha----the
  technoscream American dream. Bethlehem is just a hit away and the lunar train
  station with its phantoms coasting to New Jeruslem rings in the grips of the
  final skeletal train-whistle scalpeling the smack silence shining, calling
  home all lost souls in the shadows and the heights.
       Such cities rage while we flash lava kisses in the eclipse of death
  while our palms skim the paradise in molten beds of firepit motels passion
  swirling down while we swing against the dawn shot through with the melting
  moon and our heroes confront wide faceless sky streets with arms outflung and
  brains smashed with love, while we exalt in brilliant waste thrills cheap
  charge junkie jumps traffic tag in infinity; our unborn children radiating in
  our circus spectral eyes that we turn away from bonfires in the sky, the sky
  that calls us home. And we blade through the barriers pouring swollen light
  and the misery of sidewalks rolling ivory into the hell of harmonic silence
  drifting in our gutterglow avenues. Catch us on the street someday and we'll
  tell you of the tender vodka mornings that cover the sticky scarlet secret
  hooker's night, we'll tell you of the clouds----lipstick welts against the
  whiskey floodgates. There's no meaning in such sleazy sapphire superfine coke
  city celestial uprisings of sun, when suicides dream porcalain hotwater
  cascades of pills ceremonies of razorblades overdose crackup face-down in
  Arctic bathrooms----no meaning, only naked air and naked truth blaring in the
  atmosphere of divinity under the soaked sheets.
       Pasadena twinkles in mercury valleys of skyscrapers where saints sit in
  billowing robes of neon mist shooting stars, and Buddha mourns in Motel 6
  Nirvanas as lovers cry the black away on the rim of All Souls' vast
  courtyard.
       These are our faces and these are our judgement halls where our hearts
  streaming such lithium landscapes tip the scales leaving us silent stoned
  empty in eternity.
      And the judgement is this:
       Man is God's poetry----
       and He is weeping among the pulsars and atomic meadows in the kingdoms
  of the chrysalis of chemical christenings as humanity rinses the dark
  brilliance of jungles and installs the shriekings of the nuclear
  constellations in the supernatural dawn sculptured into lunacies of light by
  neon hands.
 
 
 

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  Love and Death on the Electron Highway
  (An Ode for the Why (y) Generation,
  which of course comes after X)

written with John Ritchey

 

  ....and I'll go shoot up behind a supermarket
  and hallucinate Tibet.....

  Poor, sweet Jen,
  bowling alley hooch girl
  on the highway to baglady oblivion.
  anesthetized by her education
  letting strange, artless
  men tap out
  erotic odes
  in monotone
  on her thighs
  in the back street,
  back seat
 
 

  desire of their daddies'
  second hand limousine,
  blind with pleasure
  dreaming of her Himalayan's
  like another
  paradise lost....

  Choking on skaterink seizure transits
  of purgatory under a linoleum moon
  in clinical landscape......
  Lying
  on asphalt revenues of dawnhaze
  choking on booze
  seraphim staggering
  across dumptruck skies

  life sensed,
  unseen
  through an auburn haze
  as she nurtures
  a universe that only says no

  Orchestrating opium crumbles
  of superhighways all leading back
  to Jerseys of faceless faces

  Marathons of legless runners
  breathlessly

  outpacing
  the memory
  of a football hero
  who passed them by...
 

  smearing her own face
  her own face
  her own face
  with skate-smoke palms
  greased on moonsweat

  Like an artist without a scaffold,
  Cistine Chapel Painting
  above the lechers and literati
  and the leprous mourners for the fall of idols.

  Staring into sewers in search of stars
  fallen into gutters,
  gushing the multitudes calm tears.

  campfolowing God's war on God

  Purging chapels of gravel
  swept in headlights hammering Prom-
  night thick in armies of Armani

  nursing the wounded to their next injury
  as they paint
  their last angel hooch
  in the fading memory of their delirium

  seeping from formaldyhyde corridors
  in hospitals of teens
  pierced by starlight
  Bethleham the next hit away.

  Mad wise men
  ragged by their own desire
  smoking,
  terrorizing kings
  with the promise of a star.

  Ice Antarticas,
  blooming in smokestacks,
  above Herod
  diving doom
  in driveways,
  grey children hurling pebbles at boats,
  silvering narcotic formations of cloud,
  in the novacaine chamber of night.
 
 
 

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