SUNDAYS

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.