Paul Giles | litchaos.com

New York ; 11:59

Falling leaves, molten lava seas
Taxi cabs, black blur, driven mad in the night
Silent ice cold the rain river runs
We¢ll never get our generation right.
Chrysler needle stabs at the vein
Black encrusted diamonds distort my sky
A fix to alleviate our pain
I¢d die for the heart
of the pale, brown-haired girl
who never knew I was once alive.
They¢re all piranhas, carnivores here tonight
In the club of the Puerto Rican, Asian and White
They¢ll suck the meat right off the bone
Leave them as quickly when you take them home.
While uptown, debutants, debut taunts
Designer dresses hide
their cocaine carcass ass
amidst orgies of white glove limousines and
paparazzi irrational feeding frenzy
Soon to grow fat, old
& unfashionable off the misery
of the lower class.
All I have left is the city now
And I¢ve made it back home alive
in before midnight, somehow survived
To some brief, existential play
Where sanity and madness meet
& no one ever comes down my street
Except the hookers, the pimps and the cheats
And the cops all stay away
Where society never speaks
But mumbles to the deaf man.

This Mad Season

Always thought you end
up this way
With or without me
February was never so cold
When you chose not to stay.

Monet, in the afternoon
Walking the Luxembourg Gardens
in cold embrace
The winds of change had already taken you
from me
No longer to recall your name
Your face.

In the Spring, you learned to
love another
the way you once did me
And all along I kept on
fighting words of dread
Paris, never to be
the City of Lovers
For our love was dead.

Heat Wave

one later summer day
I sat and played
with desperate thoughts of you
high upon the rooftop ledge.
While the City melted around me
in thick tars and black gleaming streets
in the middle of the century's worst heat wave.
The radio said there had been a murder
committed a few blocks away
it's not the heat, it's the stupidity
I always say.
In the evening
I sat and watched the City drown in buckets
of rain that steamed
the sweated streets
and cooled my brain.
The seconds ticked away
like small atomic bombs
each and every one of them
an irradiated sweat poured forth
from my skin
as I stepped from the ledge
into the cool darkness
and the sun fell like night.

A Recent History of Man

In the great
theatre of night
we are just
witnesses
chasing the tail
of dawn.
Technology.
Communication.
Neo-ideology.
With no mystery
to interrupt us
we calmly await
the trial of life
only to find
the jury insane.
We have become
mindless gods
through
thought
& thoughtless violence
such is the
great cause
of our shame.
We had begun
to carve
innate cathedrals
within ourselves
only to be
written off
in the second act
with a gun
in your hand.

Night

It is now, in this dour, tenuous blue hour
We speak in hushed tones above the evening teal
As the light has shone itself to be but a ruse
And all the darkness of our secrets revealed.

When seeing is not believing
In the blackened cathedral of the religion of night
Putting out false faith in the specter of the dying sun
Wondering if it will ever again come.

The lights of the city burn bright like one thousand eyes
Fearing what cannot be seen in the dark
We forbid what lurks where the shadows grow
And do not want to know.

So when we may rest our weary heads
The very thought we cannot bend
Is one we think not to dread
>And something we don¢t want to comprehend;
The chance that day will never come this way again.

Joseph Grant