The Nocturnes IV

NOCTURNE No. 13

Octet for GB

Trumpets,
their electric air a blue fog
curled around bar lights.
Prisims jump from mirrors:
Greenwich Village in the 1950's
was Ginsberg Howling,
Kerouac and Duncan somewhere ON THE ROAD.

Words were dark holes to fall in,
stanzas on ice
flashing in winter's lamplight.
Words fled to California,
words leaped from poet's mouths.
Benzadrine,
Morphine,
the best minds of another's generation.

You were married then
plugging your steel guitar into her socket,
making babies,
a wail of jazz down her tunnel.
The two of you leaped from windows to beds,
where once the cup was forgotten
and your trumpet wrote the unwanted Third Psalm.

I was born of this season
(J. Robert Oppenheimer on the cover of LIFE)
and I grew into you one day like notes on a score.
Our music spun you counterclockwise,
gave you a face and a nose full of reefer.
(and I am of the mind that the minds of my generation
steep in black magic and supersonic sockets,
steel stitched blue jeans and lysergic detonation).

All the while the bomb in my groin ticks
with what science has made,
leaves no room for the second coming;
you fucked Hiroshima in my nightgown,
I cried, for the ice cream trucks melted in my sleep,
cried for the convulsions in your sleep,
the murmuring in your deep sleep chanting,

There is no time,
there is no time.

We have watched the power of the elements
crush the great Olives in the Sierra Nevadas.
I wanted to speed through time
to meet you at your great age,
but you have spun backwards locking your fingers
in my green bones.

Now oil slicks and a million dead birds
fold their wings over our faces.

The great cries of animals in extinction
send impulses up my backbone.
My hair falls out,
my gums bleed down drains of this purple city.
I was born of a desperate season
and want one love.
You have peeled the skins of Dilatin and Phenobarbitol
dreams and cannot stay with me.

We waited for one to turn to the other and sing:

Las Edades y la Muerte,
Las Edades y la Muerte,

I have taken to the road
with your grayness lining my baskets.
Waving the green of Spanish palms
I have danced away from you.
There is a tomb where I have lain
our remnants.
A sarcophagus covers it
like gently folded hands.