Dreaming Toxic Dreams in America
(from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)
1
The hangman in the balaclava hums and sings
And sometimes the words that creak and whirr out of him
Are words one's heard before
The streets are dead to memory
They are dead to the passage of time
And dead to so much else
Swept away as if by malignant winds and malignant imaginings
Only cement and iron and uncatalogued errant weeds thrive here
It's a garden of the bizarre and the incongruous
Perfidy and pestilence and the trickeries of demons
Are its flowers and its glory and testament
2
The toxic dreams of Manhattan's West 45th Street
Are the toxic dreams the rest of America dreams
In Illinois and Missouri and Mississippi and Ohio
In Vermont and Connecticut and Rhode Island
America dreaming toxic dreams isn't what it was
But it's what the chain-smoking plumber Eddie Wang of Mercer Street does
When he isn't working in Chinatown basements or gambling in New Jersey
It's what the forty-seven year old trumpeter
And heroin addict (seventeen years and counting)
Theodore H. Murphy of Brooklyn Heights dreams
It's what toxic dreams a tram conductor in San Francisco dreams
It's what toxic dreams a newly wed couple in Kansas City dreams
In bed as husband and wife for the first time
Just as it's the same for a priest dreaming alone in his Wyoming bed
Having masturbated himself to sleep three hours earlier
It's the toxic dreaming of an itinerant ranch-hand in New Mexico
It's also the toxic dreaming of a sleepless policeman in Los Angeles
And the toxic dreaming of a Federal Judge in Alaska
And as the rest of America dreams so do I also dream
In a narrow backroom crammed with tattered furniture and books
While an elderly couple living on monthly retirement checks
Up front in the livingroom of a fourth floor apartment
On Twenty-first Street and Tenth Avenue
Watch Tom Jones on The Ed Sullivan Show since it's Sunday
The old man drinks beer and smokes and hums
And his wife sips tea and knits a brown sweater with yellow trims
And insinuated in the dinner-table chatter
And interrupted by televisions jingles and announcements
And gradually broached by inference and hyperbole
And the vitriol of impatience and disgust and disappointment
Written up and analyzed in newspapers and books and magazines
From bank clerks and carpenters and part-time teachers
From US senators and Wall Street princes and schemers
To mothers pushing prams with babies in Central Park
To sleepy doormen and aloof waiters and impertinent waitresses
From young resident doctors to the bespectacled homeless man
Wrapped in three overcoats and warming himself on a subway grill
Fighting an interminable Manhattan winter evening
Fighting the intrusive eyes of strangers rushing home
Rushing home to warmth and to a plate of soup and a glass of wine
3
Trash bags and toothpaste and potting soil and bed sheets
And a pound of butter and a sack of Thai jasmine rice
Rows of heaped burned and gutted and smashed vehicles
A couple of bottles of black ink as well as pen nibs
And I'm nearly out of printing paper so I ought to get some
Fenced parking lots where there haven't been any parked cars in years
Warehouses and factories of every configuration and size
In forlorn streets backed into dark and lugubrious alleys
And compounds unoccupied and decaying and some already roofless
With paneless windows and rusted and broken and twisted ironwork
There are long loading ramps in disrepair
With cracked and punctured metal shutters
There are graffiti illustrated walls
There are holes of every dimension
And gaps in the brickwork are the norm and plentiful
And if one's willing to compromise one's eye and logic
And reverence for the sublime and the holy and the future
As one watches the street and the structures bending above it
Casting a dusty shade along with a silent hum of forgetfulness
This place is hardly familiar even if it is rather ordinary
It disorients and confounds the weary head and blinking eye
It's a gallery of grotesques at every turn and with every sound
The sky hangs low and the streets appear to be shrinking
And narrowing from either end and one starts to fret
And worry that one but dimly grasps what's happening
Oh there's no magic here to speak of and nothing sublime
Nothing sublime and nothing wholesome but for the wicked
Nothing but for the lost and the dead and long ago buried
This is a place where the dead have been shrouded and secreted
Where they have been boxed and committed to the ground
It's been a while but it was here
That these dead ancestry and personages were offered to the future
It's a place where fire and money and gluttony
And promiscuity and infamy and greed have ruled
Have ruled the hours of the day and the secrets of the night
It's a place where fire and murder and foul incidents
Multiplied and transformed and affected the ways
Of ordinary men and women and children
And affected and altered all institutions and schemes
Grand and modest schemes and plans for the betterment
When there was no betterment planned and anticipated
The wicked hand behind every action guided the results
Guided the movement and guided the intent
With a merciless recognition of its own power over others
With a merciless grasp of is own power over the wretched
It's a place where fire has turned against its makers
And handlers and where fire has ventured abroad
And has yet to go out and quit the memory which keeps it
Bolted and secured to its recess
And where its secrets turn to rust
And from river to river are blown clear across Manhattan
This fire still rules the minds and bodies
Of the greedy and the ruthless and the would-be tyrants
The fire these fiends maintain with their schemes
And ungodly prayers and rituals have altered
And destroyed all it's encountered
This demonic fire has rewritten and sculptured the landscape
It has transformed cities of brick and of cement and steel and glass
Into dreams and words and pasts and presents
Johnny and Maggie and Morgan and Sylvia lived and live still
And footsteps resonate on the sidewalks and clouds of iron rust
And clouds of memories blow and scatter from river to river
And clear across the island and years and years lapse
And the days are days of words and skies and intrusive rainy nights
And it's where Geoffrey and Sarah and Lucy and Homer live waiting
One day after another riding the subway trains
And driving into Manhattan by way of the Lincoln Tunnel
And waiting at street corners for the traffic light to change
It's days of words they expect and days of waiting
And it's familiar words they are counting on
Since they're weary of surprises and want nothing
To do with total eclipses of either the sun or the moon
But in this city of heartbreaks and loneliness
Of impossible promises and absurd misgivings and turpitude
So seldom does anything change and so little endures
Or is meaningful beyond the mutterings and imaginings
Of a drunken forty-seven year old woman wrapped in an overcoat
Grinning and swaying and waiting to cross Eighth Avenue
It's snowing and she leers and grins and feels alive this winter
She feels more alive this winter that she has on previous winters
But she can't explain it to herself why that is the case
She waits and lurches forward and takes a step and another
And feels cold and turns back and mounts the sidewalk again
And she grins and mutters to herself again
And the winter chill climbs up her legs
And hardens about her stomach and weighs down her breasts
And in another second it's stabbed her heart
4
The poet in the balaclava hums and sings
And sometimes the words that creak and whirr out of him
Are words one's heard before
The streets are dead to memory
They are dead to the passage of time
And dead to so much else
Swept away as if by malignant winds and malignant imaginings
Only cement and iron and uncatalogued errant weeds thrive here
It's a garden of the bizarre and the incongruous
Perfidy and pestilence and the trickeries of demons
Are its flowers and its glory and testament
© J. Noya, 2007
