04-22-2018, 12:36 AM
Your Egon Schiele colours set the right
ambience of decadence, like bruises left
glowing and putrid, highlit by black
exhaust fumes, or clouds of chimney white.
You are every sad face on a subway wet day,
the blind eyes of orphans that stare from the night.
You’re the thorns on the treasures that wind through the night
like corpse-gas from graves when conditions are right,
night flowers that fold with the coming of day
to hide the ravine where nothing is left
but the gaping of wounds, lines powdered white
to define all the edges, to hem in the black.
Your background is scumbled, all South Side and black,
red stage lights and flashes of blue through the night
where your mother’s for sale in her nightie so white
and the scent of gardenias. From the church on the right
comes the chanting of flagellants, offerings left
on the altar of excess that mounts to the day.
No cocks in the city to thrice call the day
but you need no reminders. Betrayal is black
and addictively sticky. No dragons are left
unchased through the foils of gas light at night
but your mother retreats to the nunnery, right
as you start to dissolve in her veil so white.
All the walls and the sheets in the hospice are white,
you can’t hide from light, you’re marooned in the day
and your mother is dead, too late to make right
what you stole and you squandered. The Jesuits, black
in crow suits, still wait at the edge of the night
to lay claims on your soul, or what portion is left.
All that sound, and that fury - just what is left
of a life when the pages are reset to white
and the lines all dissolve back into the night
that gave birth to them, nurtured them? Hidden by day,
the shadows wait patiently, curled up in black
edges on everything. Nothing looks right.
And you’ll always be left, at the end of the day,
in the White Hotel by the ravine, black
roses of nightmares. And that feels right.
ambience of decadence, like bruises left
glowing and putrid, highlit by black
exhaust fumes, or clouds of chimney white.
You are every sad face on a subway wet day,
the blind eyes of orphans that stare from the night.
You’re the thorns on the treasures that wind through the night
like corpse-gas from graves when conditions are right,
night flowers that fold with the coming of day
to hide the ravine where nothing is left
but the gaping of wounds, lines powdered white
to define all the edges, to hem in the black.
Your background is scumbled, all South Side and black,
red stage lights and flashes of blue through the night
where your mother’s for sale in her nightie so white
and the scent of gardenias. From the church on the right
comes the chanting of flagellants, offerings left
on the altar of excess that mounts to the day.
No cocks in the city to thrice call the day
but you need no reminders. Betrayal is black
and addictively sticky. No dragons are left
unchased through the foils of gas light at night
but your mother retreats to the nunnery, right
as you start to dissolve in her veil so white.
All the walls and the sheets in the hospice are white,
you can’t hide from light, you’re marooned in the day
and your mother is dead, too late to make right
what you stole and you squandered. The Jesuits, black
in crow suits, still wait at the edge of the night
to lay claims on your soul, or what portion is left.
All that sound, and that fury - just what is left
of a life when the pages are reset to white
and the lines all dissolve back into the night
that gave birth to them, nurtured them? Hidden by day,
the shadows wait patiently, curled up in black
edges on everything. Nothing looks right.
And you’ll always be left, at the end of the day,
in the White Hotel by the ravine, black
roses of nightmares. And that feels right.