Rue St. Famille

FROM FELL STREET, HAIGHT-ASHBURY

1

Hallways I run through naked from an orgy

where genitals join like coiling

hookah tubes, boiling and bubbling,

hallways I wander filled with the broken notes

of the jamming pattern the out-of-work band plays

night after night, as long-haired men squint

out of cracked doors, coughing and beckoning

towards the back alley I know where hands reach

for drugs dispensed from windows that gape

like the toothless mouth in a dealer’s face

bloated from heroin, cut with poison.

Hallways where I trace greasy fingerprints

and the blows the drunken landlord’s fists

made on doors, thin as cardboard,

opening onto rooms full of the soundless shuffle

of milling cockroach armies that swirl

under the sudden blare of a naked blub,

where an Italian gangster’s son practices

Kung-Fu and an artisan beats his wife

like the leather he softens to bind

I Chings and Bibles. Shadowy hallways

I hurry through where graffiti stickmen

run out of the cracking plaster, their souls

trailing behind them on strings about to snap.

2

At the end of a hallway,

at the end of an endless hallucination

I move in a sugary darkness

like some bug drowning in syrup—a fly

in a deadly sweetness of patchouli oil and ganja,

I struggle towards the redemptive steam

of a bath in a blue tub, above whose comfort

Krishna and his green elephants

wear golden lotus crowns

in a poster dissolving into a wall

of blinking peacock eyes.