At The George Tavern, Whitechapel,
“I wanna be a green-eyed popsmith
Loved by a twenty-first century fox,
Queue as ammunition for urban myth –
Poets never wanted to stop the clocks,”
Said the miraculously fabricated blonde,
Aligning the scan of her garter belt;
With the spartan regimen of a dedicated bard,
She melds exclusively with bonafides.
Authors’ tweeds and philistine Hollywoods
Write cochlear rhythms and reels of rhyme
For mere craftsmen, who’ve sung their songs a million times.
Panting for screen tests, frenzied by Mad Ave. hype,
Centrefolds flock the lobby – tell Godot I’ll get back to ‘im
– For a new treatment cut with a stylish Valium,
Hoping they’ve gotta pair to script a million shorts.
Tell me when his olifactory compass finds north.
“Dance like an organ grinder’s monkey,
You whiskey-soaked troubadour.
Crawl the King’s Fucking Road Darling,
Nobody wears hearts on their sleeves any more.”
Noir’s father was a neighbourhood
mensch and Machiavelli
of phonebooth and pocketbook,
“Surrendering his wealth,
he followed the Colonel,
rolled heads at The Palace
(Before Rubix) but left us
without notice one night
as we slept,” – his calls blocked
as his friends stopped turning
up for work, their absurd
time-cards gone, their letters
cropped; at their doors
he’d morse’d dead knocks
and uttered dusty whispers
into lobby tin-speakers.
“His documents, photographs
we had to burn; medals
in a tin buried beneath
a birch by the railway
bridge to the steel mill;
I’m a girl fixing the memory
of a long line of railmen.”
The Balladeer cuts an expression
into her harmonica and begins
to play with messianic hint;
the milieu echo Cecil B. DeMille’s
name in the realm of question;
with the roseate breath in her lungs,
she appears to paint freely with
the caustic saloon air.
The mass of canines without
eyes in front, dripping entropy,
produced from the bar
on some vast Martini loom,
swarm to her like flies
to the sweetness of rotting fruit.
Dusted by a pollen of kisses,
lovers stretch gratitudes
toward mistaken donors, create
illusions later perceived false.
A stewardess hands out scented towelettes
to mop our cephalic sweat
(not a flicker of interest
across her vampirically pale
features). Appearing in seriatim,
sciatic dancers null our osseous pains.
The green pharisees turn and run
to The Juke but he’s wreathed in love.
His body speeds, all bravado,
feet barely beneath him,
the slender amandus dynamos
around her, lashed by pinball
awareness, running wild and bold
- a distracted chatelaine failed
to tether this restless colt.
I’m tipping brown sugar
in a filter coffee, sighing
at a saucy type in a fur collar,
as some of the crowd begin
to fumble for their chalk,
pull at ties, palm their lips aghast,
become fixed in poses
stricken for no purpose.
The Juke on the floor:
three bullets sewn through
his chest – he wouldn’t
have died in the matinée show.
He really makes mosaic
of the music box he was
leaning against as Noir
pulled bashfully at her dress.
Rubix claps the revolver
into Cassis’ hands and
everyone knows it was him.
Troubles not original
in these parts, the paranoiac
revelers, the pleasure sucked
from them, become
brainless insects, delve
into the battle waged
knowing nothing of the aims;
as a general is forever
enacting stratagems
from the previous war,
I pluck Noir and Dr. Cassis
from the vibrissae
of the dimensionless beast;
we hide among the pixie women
in the street selling trinkets
ankle deep in peduncles
and hat ribbons, waving feathers.
