First Night

-In night when colours all to black are cast-

-We for the year to come may take-

[Gabriel in a nearly bare room, some objects unlighted, talking at a window, all the people in it]

Streets have been paved in gold for centuries on end.
Drag races have dusted the eyelashes of elves
In their haste to arrive at that which they might comprehend,
And the significance of the gilt is often seen spelled
    In the haze of a blink from that next curling bend
As it tours a cockcrows spirit,
                     As it withholds a godsend’s whim.

In due time
We will fail to reconcile
The aureate road to the auras
Panting from the nostrils of virgas, to cloud
Which sky has molded over, to the incised tire
Of wheeling heaven, blownout and exerting these stale airs
Upon us – flail,
                  we will flail and forget that there are silences
Surrounding the songs one shouldn’t hear, we’ll line the riven streets
To misplace our skin in pallid flakes, strongarm the wind
Til it should take and fling our hats by the brim
To skim the puddles of our stare,
                     we’ll shovel in our deathday suit,
Sporting pickled organs, and roll our sins to a score or more
Of ashen gargoyles, statuesque snowmen, sweep up bruises
From the arms of lovers, as one would sweep the ash
Of pipes which beat upon a palm, and freckle each
With these empurpled shards of evening,
Gouge into our mirror, pluck its eye
Of anthracite, follow round an angel
Moulting, sidestep his shit
And store his feathers,
For we’re playing God
Tonight,
And when our shadows
Have offended, the sun
Call to the sky, for nothing
Else, with all sins raised, could claim
To pin this darkness underfoot, swirl
It round like a drunkard sways, or nooses
Shift their rigored mannequins when a wind begins
To sigh. We give them wings for screams have been
Foretold, for we scried the leaf, clairaudient, when it crackled
Like a fortune cookie, a skull clenched in a vice, and we heard
Our teeth in your throat, our fangs pronged like tuning forks, calling
Out the sun, scream in perfect pitch.

                   Your part, then, is quite simple,
Your lines so very few, the script you carry with you, plotted in the blood;
Therefore, don’t fuck it up. For we are, now, at the deathbed of a day, pacing
To rally sweat, to work the wrecked distillery of the soul, and soak our skin
With its white lightning, soon to fashion of it what will on this fresh world,
A recreant specimen of darkness, rising from the earth like the charred spirit of day’s
Flaming angel, jarring its knuckles along the treebark like a fist along a coffinnail,
Wreak such pogroms of pain, and hate, as will fly at the Sun, sentinel to creation's slumbers,
And seek to gouge him out, strive to with shadows patch him, for there be not time enough,
You see, to wretch out all your eyes –
Ah, with the moonbeams now spiraling down to set a rifling in the night
And hasten my shot through it, we go to rouse into our skin the rudiments of a darkling
Recreation, and with its wings to soar like bats struck blind but determined to die
In the sun. And should there be enough sin in us, or enough of us in sin,
To speckle shut with our flock this bloodshot, unblinking eye?
Well then, dears, we are skinned –
For we are to enervate the necrotic trappings of the spirit,
O to roll them and to raise them by the river’s silver reel,
To find that we are frozen, that like to warts
From Earth we peel.



Hm. Nonononono... No no –
Let me say again:

Tonight, we will be raising what sins
Were lain in the cellars of the soul, sins so old
We’d like to term them vintage, roll our tongues
To trenches, slide down them brokeneck bottles
Like through a whistling gaptooth the stalks
Of gangrenous geraniums, lick off their dust
Like dynamite sweat, lean back like bowing spiders
And spit into the air what our corneas must catch
To blow the storm panes out, so we may leer
Back at the tempest –
            And that bottle we keep
For the sun, when it comes, a demon at the hip,
Teeth gnashing roses, tango in bedlam
To the cut-time tempo of a punctured lung
As the wheezing organs grind,
For in our soreknuckle soiree at sundown
We’ll have corpsied up the clime,
But saved her one half glass of vintage sin
When she comes bloodshot through the sky,
Scraped our fingers on the rim, finetuned it
To a scream, let our switchblades whirr
With indecision, watched the old crows
Blot our vision, picked which bodybag
To writhe in, twisted our necks to cluck
The wrens roosting in our spine –

And she comes, boughs dripping
The aurorean ablutions of her rays,
To swish the night from off her brows
Like bangs tucked from the eyes,
To on the tiled fields like dancefloors
Thrash us, arm in arm,
Til we lay on back to bleed out
Like through a leeching Autumn the ancient rage
Of dying hills, and watch her bounce,
From cheek to pinking cheek,
What was nightlong in the seeping.




Pfft, or think again, that on the river’s silverscreen,
With the freightcar’s calamity of iron
Grogging by, where the mirror of the moon in inspective look
Gives rippling itself over to hurtling levies
And pacing the conductor’s whistle, that we are only those
Offshore, knee deep in a water
Which means to tug until the button slips, relieve us of our clothes,
And on each shore from North to South
String them out to dry – the dancers and the weepers,
Those who at sandy riverside
Struck just such a pose, those who lipped the bluestocking’d soles
Of the dark upon the water, who endeavored,
Persevered, in a belief that skies shall not, in truth,
Possess suck slack and beaded eyes, or wreathe us all once
With dusking, golden, silvery sighs, or tenant us of the medley,
Compound us drowning to the culvert's croon, or bid us
Collect by cup of tin the tears to dash them round the room,
Or turn their flanks upon us, say:
“To the canvas of our skins the art must be subsumed.
And you there, you in the corner – Ostler,
Take a memo:

All horses were meant for Earth’s end
And beyond. Henceforth, we shall each be bridled
In shoelaces, and broken to fit the heel of the morn
By wearing us
Day and Night
Til we have done and arrived
At the intersection of Art and Life
To enjamb your whispers in the shore with painterly fingers,
Fingers slight as the waddle of wasp when coaxing
Their sundenched surmise from the summit’s comethole palates,
Fingers which ensnare the saddlehorn moon and grind cheeks
Close against our beaming manes in a luminary canter, pliant fingers
Caked in wet sands and working their ways through the endless knotting
Tresses of the corpse which they had lain.”

But still, this night, with the ivory tusks of beams
From their skylight tilling the natal darkness
Of the Earth’s all too walkable soil, we shall reel
By on the moonmade silverscreen, our toes implanted to the sand
And our joints then shifting to shave off the ice
Of all we’ve ever been, lean back with penknife eyes
To slash into the wheeling tempest, and with this breath
On our fresh sweat, kneel and dig a hunk of road
To polish with our calloused hands, skip into the screaming mouth
Of one mirage of those which screen before us, reflections kept
And rippled on while splayed there,
Like the dream.



Now still. Be silent. For a moment
Hang your head, meet it to your lover’s brow, swallow
What you gnawed from your pillow, at the distance
Listen

As the raven in the black wood
Is jaunted slightly west
When the flapping gull of gray coast
Decides that east is best.


Carry on.


[Gabriel turns from window, to the objects]


Ya know guys,
It’s been awhile since I’ve listened,
Haven’t heard a thing, corked up my throat
With the tongues of women, became a connoisseur of bone,
Thumped all night on the ribcages I played like xylophones;
Seraphs played the black keys til neckhairs stiffened;
The Earth – she stained my knees,
In the truculent drizzle I stood shaken, shaken
While clustered trowels o’er turned the leas
With the tune of a doorhinge.

Oh, I did what men will do,
Changed out my skin every sixthday,
Fattened my scars on steel, crooked my neck
And cracked my heels when dancin to a bulletslick and bluesy peal,
But I took my ear from the ground, eyes from the dust
Risin at the horizon, felt up the storm without lookin at its face,
Threw my marrow to the dogs when it would simper
Like chestnuts on a stove, followed round the carrion crows
When I was in need of some new bones, dress my corpse up clean.

Well, like I been goin on about, I guess if I’m
The collector of bones, then there’s nothin
Left to say, but –
          Hey, Hey
Roaches, don’t you roll your antennae
At me, I know this ain’t much to hear, but neither much my time,
The sun’s comin to bowl me over with one last X for that scorecard,
And anyway, I don’t herd you here with my flashlight for nothin,
You keep this up I’ll use all my batteries drivin every last one of you
Off the balcony.
          Now now, don’t fret like that, when I go
I’ll leave you some dragon gizzard in the cupboard, half a pint or so of cherub slobber,
Lord knows you’ll be in there anyhow, and I’ll pull my last leg of fried grypon
From the fridge for ya, eh? Oh yeah, chesspieces, I’m gon stack you in the window
So ya don’t get lonely, but you gotta listen up, or I’ll play myself one from mate,
Leave you there, bloodlust coursin through ya like knives
That zigzag through aching fingers.
And corpses, sit your asses up.
Ahem.

[back to the window]

Well, after all that I better say again:
Streets have been paved in gold for centuries on end,
And for every man who followed his own lead from king to clown,
For every king to sport the cap and bells, there have been hands
Of alabaster damned to saturation in dishwater hues, orphic lungfulls
Pent in grunts by the nails held in the teeth when one is patching
Up a roof, this and more, nations of three score and ten by the scores,
Cohabitant years, taking turns in tumbrils, weeding
At their children’s graves, checked and balanced at the gallows,
Saving lint in their navels, for they’ve nothing else to offer Charon
But a proof that they’ve worn life’s raddled garment, and by life earn their way;
And with all this in the doing, they still give their kings their dues,
For though their backs be lashed, they melt down each discarded crown
And with this bend to wax their toil’s scuff from life’s sleek golden road –
Smiling with the jangle of the bells.
So you kings, should you go clowning, would do well to remember,
That your people can’t be kept so busy that they won’t stop and laugh at you.

For kings, these people, and mayhap you,
From the first of the souls which crowded into the strictures of form,
(and were, so I’m told, immediately sorry)
Have been kneading the soil with their toes, their brows into wrinkles,
Their thoughts into tears, their vivacity into stillness quietly miraculous,
The sky with their towertops, their dogs’ ears into tailwags,
Their lovers into moans, have gone imaging the immortal,
Leveling inquest at rainbows, striking out at the moon
When, aghast, they find themselves moonstruck.
And if they, through slow, exacting tabulation of the crux’s reliquary,
Have divvied out their hearts,
Like to blood through each sectarian soul arrayed in eyewhite,
Undulating their tongues as each is edified, saying:
“This is rain and meadows, this is the growth patterns of grass,
This is the thrill in walking home to find I left my clothes back at the shore,
This is when I beat my child, this is when my toilet seat fell around my shoulders
And we savored a long hour of hugs, this is the doctor’s lazy left eye,
This is my mind somewhere below it, waking up, taking notes as he explains
What I’d done, and why the suicide failed, this is the chipmunk living in my gutter,
And this is running two miles to a payphone for two minutes of a voice, this is silently Considering heroin as a dietary regimen before prom, this is something which I
Will not say, but will feel, and this is sympathy for God,
And how bitter he must be to hate the Devil so much”
And such and such, and so on and forth like fire into the granite channel of the forge,
If this, then there is always a portion rationed off to keep the mortal starvation
Of eternity, the wonderment of the sepulcher, from teething at the keystone,
Collapsing the honed architecture of the arching ribcage into a cataclysm
Of unsettling dust. So a man is immortal enough. Granted,
Were man to have the age of oysters he’d forget to cherish pearls,
But Gods and baubles are what we stock, an allotment of mortality
Which phases the immortal through its waxing or waning on the crisp
Firmament underside of clenched eyelids, the meter of a man struck out,
The standard of the soul, what stowaway company a man may find
When sailing lonely his whole fleet on seas which he may name,
But not yoke, never once give sound edict, tamper with decree, that unroll their rokes
Within him – For kings, lest they be tagged with value, to a pantheon shelved, mean only a thing, though we die when in their stocks.

So call me king, yes, stammer it at me,
For to chide a rapscallion with kingliness
Must seem a peashot where a cannon had a bit more use,
But I with my collective am certainly “We” enough for it,
And I have everlong lorded over death the pinion of my hair,
As he gains on me in huffing spurts, and I again outstrip him
In the fabled race, or I have quipped at him in quailsong
When, always at the hunt, he sights me, only himself to lose
In a labyrinth he himself erected of misfires and musketsmoke,
And in his closet where once leant a sickle I left a plastic pink flamingo for a scythe
When I picked my way into his house, re-wound all the death clocks tolling nigh,
Carved his candles into angels so that should he need to see to piss he'd see
How beauty dies - and then I raided his fridge and walked out with him snoring.
So call me king,
Tag me with crumpled hangman's ledgers, shelve me into a burn barrel,
King of refuse, whose coronation was held on the scaffold,
A stick of gum that Death the custodian could lever up the world before he loose.
So call me king,
And tonight I will go and be with my people.

For I have heard them gathering, in the day, ceasing the city’s clangour to unleash
Their opinions like junkyard dogs, leaving them unwanted on doorsteps,
Handing them off like a litter of kittens, one at a time, those filling risers
Opposite, and by turns sounding – “It’s Life, It’s Life, It’s Life”
And “It’s Death, It’s Death, It’s Death,” or those who turned their tongues
To slur them ‘gainst each other, see what they might hear, or those
Who merely sucked their thumb, had no will to turn it up, or slash it down,
Or steady it at the middle. In a feat of misdirection, I will bite off my thumbs,
Perhaps.

In summary-
It took, you crowds, a King to force the guillotine from his people,
Until, in being with them, he spread his voice to spill across them
Like spoiled red wine. Only one of us ever walks away, and to this end, hear it,
Tonight I divulge a shower of blood,
Forecasted in the eyes of killers, but one other rain no man outruns,
When it rambles on to tryst at the horizon, where the sun will come to refurbish
The downpour into the cull of a scarlet cloud, flood a new slant to the old brook,
And purpose me to say: “I, the collector of bones,
I spy with gerfalcon eye
Which joints I’ll slat them to tonight,
And as I’m a fair remembrancer, I’ll leave your teeth at the curb,
Should you have need of souvenir this jingle jangle January 1st.”



Or something like that, whatnot and have you.
Ahright, let’s roll.


[Out the door goes Gabriel]

* * *