a poem by James G. Carlson
the City Earth A.D.
while the sun descends on the western horizon, casting off the last of its golden garments to sink naked into the slumbering abyss, its halo lingering briefly among the pollution and far-reaching artificial lights of the city. a strange creature waking to indulge its nocturnal self-- while pedestrians and vehicles move through the streets and alleyways like so many living cells through diseased veins (just beneath the pale flesh, just beneath the red, swollen, scab-covered knot into which the junkie inserts his dull needle.) and the drunkard's raspy howl is drowned out by the wailing of police sirens, ambulances and fire engines, all rushing to extinguish an inferno right at the intersection of 2nd & Lehigh, in the north side ghettoes… morning creeps toward the city, like an injured animal, and many of the whores on the Avenue still have a fuck or two left in them, while the pushers retreat into shadowy doorways, men with the ugly, misshapen faces of seasoned bareknuckle boxers and hard-life women with switchblade purses all stumble out of barrooms after whiskey breakfasts, and the skeletal scavengers abandon their rummaging to wait at the doors of the local shelter for soup. the city suddenly looks clean, almost as though it's been bleached, like a dirty hypo shared between fiends, and the sun's royal crown rises above the horizon in the east, where the traffic on the highway is just so much build-up clogging the arteries of the world. the city rises, stretches, yawns, and finally settles on its steel and concrete haunches, before laying down between the shadows and inconstant shafts of sunlight, while the streets and alleys come to life with suits and skirts, with public transit and strange machinery, with footfalls and conversation, with church bells and clocks striking the hour, wiping the crumbs at the corners of eternity's mouth. pigeon shit, dried wads of bubblegum and the accumulated litter of passersby, to their various places of employment, to their friends' and families' and lovers' places, to expensive cafés with horrible coffee, to overpriced restaurants with indifferent waiters, to shopping malls and hotels and hospitals, to barrooms and whorehouses and shooting galleries, to basement gambling parlors owned by old, arthritic Chinamen, to filthy subway cars crowded with strangers, to the many indirect routes that lead to the end of day and to the night itself, where, again, we each come just a little closer to losing our chance at heaven. |