Visions of Louisa

Visions of Louisa

(Today you play jazz; tomorrow you betray the fatherland)

The room was often stuffy with people’s words and flowing stained carpets of dehydrated brains,

Crowded as droplets in the rain, piling down the matter of an unforgivable storm,

And small metal cases filled with pills ceased in their overtaking of your youthful days,

And alcohol spilt into cushions with the bottles left on window sills,

Acid pain and backwashing, lava state towards the back of your nose.

Tried but not tested and yet tasted in full.

A bowl of stones and seashells,

Filling garage doors with painted fingernails,

Playing cards cut Jesus on the cross while the sun creeps through broken blinds,

My Dark Side of the Moon records gatefold covering is matte,

And the water stains from wiping away flower opioids are still on there.

Talking music with strange girls—bathrooms of powdered noses are daytime heaven.

Walking into sex, jumping in and out of strange beds in the red and holy nights,

Forging moments behind large doors with hands linked, clapping, spaces of light air, and hair, and poems,

Talking of brilliance and the draining sound of innermost dreams,

A lost battalion of excited conversationalists met with the long walk of the next morning,

And swapping partners was a currency of friendship—weird scenes beginning inside the goldmine.

Strange things were made possible with red and white polka dot tablecloths in the kitchen,

Sitting on high marble benches and trying love for the first time,

Caught behind the flagstone wallet chain, chomping and churning rock climbers,

Strawberry Fields will become purged and pure in a moment and begin again,

To fly the mountains of Ethiopia and then crash land on the gardens of Babylon,

Whistling and screaming and fucking—weeping myself as not to hear your silent weeping.

Make sure you get it while it’s there, then be sent off to bed forevermore.

(Tricks of hallucinating confidence, chemical pyromancy, were as real as ejaculating).

Howl and scream in the dark forest, bite the moon, and throw stones into the sun,

Remember God is dead, (they’ve told us as much many times),

What takes its place—you? Acid? Alcohol?

Anything is better than modern-day blue ruin, especially being a God, don’t you know?

There is no God in a room full of wallflowers blooming together while striving apart,

Noah’s waves parting gift for the uninvited guest who stays till the end,

Bush burning, talking black hand blues with the people stuffed in the back of a truck,

Each one asking which of them was the first to arrive.

In those days, I met those who kept a matchstick in their mouth and a lighter in their back pocket,

Those who lied to strangers and friends with stories that didn’t happen but almost happened,

Those who spoke in radio phone-in opinion language and pseudo-fact-checked everything said,

Those who danced in Van Gogh Tees, trying not to challenge his pressing feeling of loneliness,

Those who felt unbothered by everything at all times except when his parents left for,

Those who wanted desperately to lie so he found a church girl, in all her hollow victory, cut him to his weak heart,

Those who drown in milk wooded bannister beams, powdered, fixing the lining of their overcoat,

Those ordered to listen from the moment she could talk and lock eyes only with the floor,

Always stirring her straws around her drinks while her lover requested indie songs no one has ever heard,

Those who permeate the gates of the fairer but who wake up alone, caught and trifled in their mud-bound pity,

Those with dancing lips but nimble souls carving any vagabond into the hedge-cliffs of Eden’s pavilion,

Those who blackout like Lorca but with no less ability in the pitfalls of pleasurability,

Mouth of ash from smoking cigarettes stood on tables of beer-soaked wood beams,

Those who came in with strange armour, leaving their nightmares at the door and smashing windows with a fist.

So I say goodbye to the railroad Earth and Mars,

Say goodbye to Philemina, Bethany Meikle, and the lost city of Atlantis,

Say goodbye to the dreamers lost in the wind and wine and the whisperings of rain-dogs,

Say goodbye to those friends and lovers once known,

Say goodbye to birdsongs and writing Strawberry Lemonade with a click-track,

Say goodbye to lacklustre love dripping in my veins from here to the Philippines,

Say goodbye to parrots, to dogs, to bears from yellow-signed window shops,

Say goodbye to band thoughts, to art installations crying for approval,

Say goodbye to circles of jabbering grain fields and the soft highway noise of the city,

Say goodbye to the prom-night bridges and to hotel rooms with blood on the doors,

Say goodbye to confetti dance-floors, cardinal statues, and vibrating idiom talk,

Say goodbye to rolling cigarette paper and bleeding noses and bleeding hearts,

Say goodbye to denim jackets, sunglasses found floor-side with red Jägermeister talisman marking,

Say goodbye to cold stone underneath painted murals of eyes and orange and green,

Say goodbye to small victories of the body with catty girls on commission pay,

Say goodbye to your youth as it falls into a hellish eclipse, throwing daisies into a hole.

As all those things are pretty lousy now, especially for an old-time calendar girl,

And things are now getting harder as the train pulls away from the floor,

Watching you grow smaller as the people’s faces turn away,

And Matilda is asking if the band can play the waltz once more,

As the mouse in the club is curling into the cat’s arms,

Because it’s fun every now and then to see the world you once knew,

But then you see the memories are the same in every dream you ever visit,

And the way they talk never changed,

And nobody waits for you anymore,

And you have to sit alone in a room while the bandages get taken off,

And now everybody is a laughing dog while nobody brings anything new,

There’s probably no chance for any of that again, I say,

Not for chewing Tabasco or day-breaking a bag,

Not for shooting targets of herons with chicken wire around your legs,

Not for coughing and spluttering rhyming songs of desperation filled glasses,

Not for sucking on someone else’s opinion in the corner of a room with your eyes closed,

Not for leaning into calming wave noises overlapping under bus stop shelters,

Or for tractors or the backseat of cars, carving their name into your arm.

And everybody is cuddling and scratching for the drags of a smoke, and acting like junkyard moles in a daze,

Trolley-wheeled rats sucking on straws and doing cartwheels in the alleyway,

Swinging arm propeller motors carving their signet rings into the sides of faces,

Steam whistles from drain grates as if the whole town is built upon lit dynamite,

And the cars line the streets like prostitutes or swaggering thumb hitchhikers,

Mixed in with the night, and all the lost lands boot-ran on,

The smog is filling the lungs of children in doorways, asking for a doughnut,

And all the tigers have fallen asleep in the pocket of the government’s raincoat,

Six herons fly into a pool and take away all the things I can’t remember,

There’s a clang and a thunder now, a taste of metal that doesn’t sit right,

As the pressing weight of sadness leads with a smile and a hand to hold.

I reach out for desire,

I reach out for those strange bodies (momentarily),

I reach for the words and the words,

And the words, they reach for me,

While I reach out for a hunger that flew by with the laughing clouds caked in the blood sky,

Turning and mocking, then sways on again, making me carry the bell-drum boxes at 3:15 am,

And I’ve seen it all through white guarded windows etched into intimate walls,

All through the mind of someone wishing for something better than what he’s got,

All through debauched brain stems and coloured cells, beguiling nothing new,

I found it at last, I suppose...

It’s the word,

And I reach for a word,

I reach out again... I never stop.

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