Arms of Night

The head ground

   stabbing devils

   whirling throb

Driving spirals

’round dizzy traffic

ruts clustered through

the lost city night

Civilization

The beat

Bricks and rats nestle in

Primal brain crevices

Threatened by barren

Suburban mazes of baseball

Caps and chartreuse lawns

                  the clockwork orgies

                  of generic citizens

                  flocking the pallid

                  streets with celebrated

                  delusions and embrace

                  the cloven hooves of

                  the polyester calf

A delicate sheet of

Glass sanity held

High in vertigo fingers

Over the deep veneer

Of summer night seduction

                  which abducts

The fugitive spirit to

The sultry sanctum of

Its cryptic urban lair

Static car radio chants

                  ragged rhythms

                  paranoid traffic

                  closed shop facades

                  clothed in bars of iron

                  in shrouded alleyways

                  ladies beckon their

                  satin shadows

                  scorch all thoughts

Flushed through

Double deco doors

Side-by-side stepping

Empty clip-clopping

Down the nervous blank

Corridor up the gray marble

Staircase through twisted

Labyrinths of senile hallways

Seething with old age smells

Arriving at the chamber entrance

As the heavy wooden door

Slams shut behind the

Lies and the madness

Beneath a hanging

Bare light bulb like

Odwalla’s golden sun

And its kingdom’s ruins

Of forgotten past glory

                  Crippled white sink

                  Stiff cankered sheets

                  Cobwebbed corners and

                  Brittle conversation

                  Impregnating the cracked

                  Plaster walls embracing

                  Their last few miracles

Senses are stripped

                                    into

Bestial pulses

Invented faces

Shrill spinal pricks

Limbs entangled in

Consecrated fever

                                    above

Beige plastic curtains

Their ninety-nine cent

Souls peering down their

Moonlit squint finally manages

A half-smile, haunches basking

In the baptism of Saturday

Twilight

Descending back through the

Empty, aborted corridors,

Visceral shadows,

And into the cool night air

Which swallows the salty

Perspiration like an explosion

Of gulls

The car shuttles and bumps back

Along crazy neon avenues flickering

With virtuous dreams         the radio

Plays some Puccini                the head

Feels warmly inebriated      and calm

Angels spiral up

Through the placid clouds

Into the ethereal heavens

Beyond

“un segno risplendente

                   della bonta di Dio!”

                  (a miracle of her good grace

                   to us will be granted)

The car rambles on up

The jagged jive-ass city street

Boasting of one more salvation