A Diet Of Worms

She twists her pretty fine-featured face/ walks
on fragrant heels/ bubbles wine 
and tinkling laughter all over the place
and coy depreciating smiles
to all the boys...

I strangle her in my sleep/ dark, 
amphetamine-comedown dreams/ wired 
as a heated knife cutting through flesh,
so hot, so hot/ helter-skeltering
thru’ sweltering bedclothes/ reaching out
for her cool, ivory hands/ and cried out,
because she wasn’t there.

Mother mother, 
you were never there...

No good now wishing for sweet sleep
to overcome/ to dowse with clear water
the flame that fires this frenzy
and twists the knot untwisted
from the brow of dead head
of red raw screaming/ thrashing 
in naked sweat/ arms and limbs 
and sex bursting/ thirsting
for the touch of a cold clean hand.

Mother mother...

Pulling back the blankets,
squirming in the wet raw
sticky stuff.

Enough, enough/ I smash silver fingers
for mirrors of light/ scrape cinder night
from the pit/ admit defeat,
let me sleep! let me sleep!

For God’s sake let me sleep!

*	*	*

Joe Silver talks rhyme & rhythmic nonsense,
plies me with cheap vodka, loaded joints,
amyl nitrate & deliverance.

I wake in the city/ with blood on my hands
and staring in the mirror
I begin to remember...

Oh mother!

We drove thru’ the forest, thru’ shadows of
blackness of night/ then he fucked me
like a dog/ in the snow wet grass;
and I was penitent, searching for atonement
in the black hearth of my black soul.

     
*	*	*

Whisky & wine smelling mother-lover-whore,
she would take me to her perfumed bed
and smother me in her raddled, greasy limbs,

but in the softness of candlelight
I was fucking an angel; and we were praising
almighty God, in the only way we knew how...
and for a moment there it was easy to pretend
I was more than just the price of another fix.

*	*	*

Alone and unresolved/ I burst in a cacophony
of monochrome/ sullenly reborn:

crawling thru’ bushes on Hampstead Heath,
a stranger emerging from the mist.

My clothes torn/ my flesh marked.

With no memory, no name/ I sleepwalk
along paths of broken dreams,
into the morning glare
of the cracked and sunken city.