Well Bottom Blues

No serious hope of ever publishing this so sharing here for those who remember

The Goldmine is an old biker bar,
where Galloping Gooses once drained
Odyssean pitchers of the Champagne
of Bottled Beer in the dark of afternoon.

Now college girls & their boys &
the old men who want to fuck the
college girls dance in the wee hours of
pirate shots & scenes of madness.

Once there were secret ceremonies there.
Words were spoken known only to
the finest dive bars of Decatur where
juke box oracles spoke the enchantments

to conjure dawn from a litter of ones
and a last cigarette before breakfast.
Here’s a quarter, my sister/lover, play
Ride of the Valkyries one more time.

Weird Scenes in which poet’s spoke
in the Goldmine of the trauma of beauty
in a world where darkness is not treasured
for the shelter of an occluded moon,

of the transcendence of cigarette smoke
in the stillness of silent pillow time upon
sweat-stained sheets twisted into
the skeletons of forgotten agonies,

songs of wroth against foreign cities
of cold-stone & alien gods denominated
in Moloch dollars, peopled by tourists
hungry for an antipodean adventure.

When the music’s over.
When the music’s over.
When the music’s over
turn out the lights

upon the brick wall before which
jazz & poetry flowered in fantastic rage
& still echoes as a buzz in your ears
you can never escape or want to.