Sunday mornings, 4:30am,
walking past the last houses on the hill
painted in psychedelics, purple haze
and sunshine acid orange, redbud gold,
abandoned by the paper mills hippies and
left to squatters—those houses with the stark
and narrow windows, yellow shades, bloodshot
porch lights, one house filled with cubist nudes,
deconstructed whores languishing in
celluite and cigarettes, waiting all night
as the fuckfest continues in the great room
while the Rolling Stones bang out “Gimme Shelter”
and the Allman Brothers play “Ramblin’ Man.”
Next door a roach squalor booze fest, bottles
of Wild Turkey and Cactus Jack and shattered
Mad Dog, it’s all Merle Haggard and Dean Martin
and “Little Ole Wine Drinker, Me.” Now it’s
a philosopher’s den, epistemologists
and phenomenologists, goggle-eyed
anarchists and neo-Platonists holding court,
rolling Bugler cigarettes and drinking
Carling Black Label and chomping cold
french fried pickles, it’s Chopin’s etudes,
Ravi Shankar ragas, and of course The Doors,
“The Peace Frog” and “WASP (Texas Radio and
the Big Beat)”. Then the graveyard. The long
descent into the darkness and the city’s
stillness, the cold wrought iron fence,
the hill busting through the iron spikes as if
the dead, burgeoning underground, seek
redemption. The stones and mausoleums
of the city’s great fathers and sinners
are not haunted, they’re just buried in
bottle rockets and spent rubbers and
Michigan dirt. Comatose, like the city,
like the bums in the rail yard seeking
their hovels, the psychotics released from
the State Hospital for the Insane
scurrying in sumac like opossums
from the hill’s pre-dawn corona. Cross
the tracks and spill into the main drag,
furniture stores and failed banks, and finally
the News Agency, where bundles of papers
wait among bleeding-eye men squatting in
Greyhound diesel fumes, news from Chicago,
Detroit, Cleveland, LA, New York, everywhere
that matters but here. Switch on the neon
sign and the first drunks and scholars and
stoners stumble in from the pureness of Sunday,
sanctimonious, baptized and redeemed.
The headlines confess that the day’s begun,
like every other, interminable, precious
and smeared across flesh and cheap newsprint,
desperate for the future.
