The Subway Cities

Your crown of thorns aloft my heart

Squeeze, tease and leech my love, gone of love

Bled in wars of childhood’s distant thunder

The rusting tin solders dissolve and fade

In autumn rain, the blood of summer

Like broken toys, love’s remnants drift away…

no ochre, no scenes, no crimson soiled cannoneers

no moods, no noon, no echoes of love will soon resound

In once rented, now owned, the chill and bitter winter rooms

The graffiti of dull lies etched across our loving lovers one face

Ensconced the groaning blighted concrete prairie of the City

And all love is the last love when you arrived

The sweet summer days all swept away

In some designer’s winter grey – the surging tides of your eyes

no sweat, no moans, no lust, where all’s a carnival of lust

no symphonies, no urges, no clarion calls of lovers undressed

It’s a treacherous, lonely trek, weary in the stealth of lies of self

Down that tortured lovers walk, I walk, glyphs to my many selves

Unqueued linear waves of decryption, boundless is the blood black night

It’s the skulking lurid annum of dread desires that freight my being

Whose dark and roiling cargo I must not own, the cruel words of love

You said, I said I’d own, the unending whispered words of a returning lover

no stone, no city, no carapace of fallen castles

no victory, no siege, no cringing black limousines

My soul, a thin rope I hold around my frantic twisting neck

To see the joyless leap, the cruel and freezing timeless descent

The sudden shock, the knot so tight

As constellations slowly twist and generate

A fraudulent midnight – that dreamy Chernobyl of your eyes

no muse, no crosses, no lust for murder

no chaos, no order, no total of zero in life’s empty sums

As my soul slices thru tendon and bone, bloody as the newborn

Taunt as a tsunami rushing towards twinkling neon far east shores

The remnants we dreamt, burnt out driftwood of western shores

The ghosts of smoke, your soul, ashes interned – the urn of your eyes

But what’s let go means how much of me do I still own?

Or really need to know, is me, or you, or two…?

Do you need to know…? Do you really want to know?

The true math of our attraction, add up our dissonance…?

Loves hard chalk shrieking across the blackboard of our bitter angst…

The numbers, even in astrology, never added up…

no mitered bishops, no dead princes, no plucked roses to deliver

no blind horses, no ruses, no stones to turn over in the forecast storms

I slip torqued by fate twisted in loves awe

Bludgeoned by self-inflicted lust of your unknowns

Old flames tempt as Aztec gold, enslave and slaughter memory

The dark bloody marbled mist of unending dawn

Entrap and laugh and please me

In all their fake ruined temples – I am sacrificed

no glimmers, no moons, no tears

no gods, no fates, no tease of love’s trap doors

Not so lost as unknown to forces of

Unspoiled mysteries of that vogue, you are, I roamed

no harness, no cape, no brimmed chalet

no roofs, no caves, no wonderment

no old feelings to embrace, stroking your cold armament

no autonomy, no grey conformity, no elevated trains to chase

no blood, no warmth, no hope

no silence as your chill reef of bones wash over me

no truth, no lies, no moon to loom the night of its cover

no rising tides, no rapprochement, no boats to tempt your distant shores

In autumn’s muddy streams, the fallen shredded leaves

Filling the rampant subway tunnels, is the bitter end of all our summers

no love, no light, no shadows to escape loves doomed twilight

no tickets, no turnstiles, no bitter embrace of our fates

And so, I lied, and finally leapt and flowed

Down the rimed station stairs, slipped along

Your flowing stained dark lace

I lost the chase of you in this and other underground cities,

Where hearts lie in stealth and palpitate, the Stations of your Cross:

Penn, Charing Cross, Gare de Lyon, Roma Termini, Ostbahnhof, Puerta del Sol

Your trains always departed in a shrill and freezing shower of sparks…

That ignites all the glowing and doomed subway cities:

New York, London, Paris, Rome, Munich and Madrid…

Where all lost loves pirouette in that maddening tunnel vision

The final riddle of doomed hope, never to touch each other again

The endless temptation, the infinite parallel of subway tracks