Parking Lot Boy

Neon Hamms damns the moon in the city. Gray night says I’m in a cold frame. Commerce lights advertisements. Car beams high; streets light. Lights compete 10 with day-sun afternoon and win. The moon has its own domains, but moon says Hell, me too, impotently, with the parking lot boy, groaning, deep in his ass-heart. He has no light. Night says I’m bigger than you. 20 Night’s wolves killed the afternoon and the bird that was chirping. Night’s lights don’t kill his pain, his gray destruction. He is run over by every passing car. He is eating greasy dirt. 30 A car honks and he doesn’t hear; people pass by and don’t see him. Aged lady; since pretty, prim, advertising, but proud: hating fishes, feelings crawling up her legs. The parking lot boy groans with the fish, 40 flipping, slimy, up in her dirty box, in her dirty dress. Its sides are littered with night’s animals, with respectable simulations of their faces. Mirrors of the people passing, not feeling hating feeling fishes 50 flapping up legs, but doing it anyway. She’s a commercial craftress selling feeling, taking them off on pieces of paper, not feeling. She’s a prostitute of art, never to be an artist, never to approach opinion 60 nor expression but of stony poverty. She looks without seeing the passers-by. I stand and stare empty at her, killing myself, feeling for prostitute craftress: How could she feel? She would kill herself 70 as a street light warms the street. Eventually she acknowledges my lack of movement. I move. She looks but doesn’t see the parking lot boy groaning, immobile. Later, I saw an old 80 man, drunk, sitting for her. Socks don’t look like feet after they’re taken off. She was drawing his face. They didn’t talk. Their tongues had been hardened. He held a short, dirty joint, burning, his sixth finger, inhaling it 90 and holding it. It wasn’t filling. The parking lot boy still stood, feeling her fishes for, himself, her, being the harsh glaring darkness of the street lights, the pain in the eye from a passing car’s lights. Mechanical music precedes 100 my view of the bar: I Wish You a Merry Christmas from the Hofbrau. Gaiety was lost, impotent. Cotton candy at the booth, even pink is gray. The night is cold and foggy. People pass by the wax museum: advertising The Last Supper and Frankenstein, 110 seemingly of equal value, long since dead and eaten. Up, and the stony skyscraper, ridged, immobile, displays a Christmas cross: two dotted white lines, intersecting. The skyscraper wins. Each window is a mirror 120 for animals in     . never to look out     . There is no side. Neither does the parking lot boy. Birds flying far over ahead. Old man in uniform on the corner, mechanically, ignoring fishes, ringing a hand bell. Record playing 130 the Halls of Montezuma. Donations to an Army of the poor in the pot and you get a pin. He shivers in the cold, but is also greedy for a prostitute of his mind. He is a wolf, ejaculating ice, into his heart, where it burns, 140 masochist. People pass, without. Their lives are within. Their total mass unnoticed. Old scarecrow, sitting beneath a brick building. He has gray hair and spindly fingers, fingers, plays a violin: 150 a waltz, deformed. Perky, but his movement is forced. Some small change is lying dead in his empty case. Prostitute of music, the waltz is an advertisement framing his poverty; his son is a parking lot boy. People hang around, 160 listening, but not donating. His son doesn’t care either. Groaning, they fart in the dark and try, futilely, to swallow the smell. A pretty woman, plaster, more alive than she sees the parking lot boy; 170 her eyes sparkle with anticipation. She’s a manikin in a window smiling, saying I am the forgotten. I am the true virgin. But she is also immobile, impotent. And hundreds of dead canvasses, long since torn from their frames, 180 piled on a table in a dying dark hole. Commercial, there is no light for the sale, no semblance of pride, no pride. The parking lot boy groans in his box, torn from his life. 190 Birds walking in the dark, in the park, trying to eat scraps of paper. Mistletoe hangs dumb, over the exit. Somewhere south birds are breeding and chirping. Raising questions of joy. Hope, filling old men’s lungs 200 with music. Once, some flew over the city. But any remain. The city killed them. They are brown motions in the darkness, mute with hardened tongues. They wander onto the street and are gushed softly into bleeding spots 210 of bones and feathers. Some dogs, wolves, fight, sick to eat them, carry them off to a prostitute craftress, a drunken old man, a masochist, masturbator, a lonely violinist, to empty people’s boxes. The parking lot boy 220 fights among them, without moving, futilely, but there are enough to go around. Electric music echoes in the vacuum, is damaged on the walls of buildings, but passes through people passing by. 230 And wolves groaning in cars, trafficked a fight, a river, growling at the cold gray night. Animals in boxes draw their pain around themselves with blankets of misery pulled from groaning people. They had put hot water in their instant oatmeal 240 and had eaten it pretending it didn’t taste the same without water. In my car, I passed under the regular movement of poles with lights, of neon lights, advertising advertisments, buildings, 250 buildings. It had all moved out of the asses of groaning people. I stopped, shocked at a green light. I could not go. But it’s coming out now: I saw the parking lot boy, and he was laughing, 260 laughing, laughing. Hideously laughing at a dead bird in his stomach, at a dead hope in the bird. He was ejaculating ice into his ass-heart. I pressed the gas and tried to swallow 270 my fear. I saw him in the mirror, burning, burning.

14 December 1970