Watching the Urban Gods
Marcel Feldmar
Old man, medicine man with fire in his eyes. His eyes as ageless as snow that doesn’t melt/burn. Hot to touch too cold to touch.
Old man medicine man sits steady/pretty watching sulfur rooftops and silent radio waves shake the city down. His mind reaches/searches/touches and moves through passing/passed time feeling the past/present mix. Oil and water, milk and sugar, and a man an old man sits on the rooftop thinking about days gone by/still to come. His heavy brown eyes open wide to the sun.
“god_centerpiece”
Old man, ageless man, shaman-medicine man sees the straw colored hair flying in the wind touched by a lonely radiator. Holding dress down with death wish hands. He sees the purple haze growing into a cloud, a storm-collision/wreckage. He sees a generation sucking down stale screens under nuclear winters/atmospheric meltdowns and letting the words of those too old to think define the roles they play. Hurtful defining words crushing aspirations/inspirations, breaking waves and crashing against the walls of belief. Old man sees shotgun pain as an entire genre of music is maimed. Cinema expanding until it’s too small to watch and mass communication destroying emotion.
Adhesive eyes shine and latch/catch on the trails of the urban gods traveling in invisible patterns. City to city, town to town. Televisions tuned to the thoughts of the media goddess. There’s the God of the eternal ashtray. The smoke, the cig, the fag, the butt, the drag. There’s the Goddess of the garage. She the automotive queen. Lover of the master of the highways… following who she wants to follow. Lady of broken headlights, Mistress of the sidewalk. The drive, the ride, the glitter and the grime. Inspiring movement and night light electricity.
Cruci/fiction through the eye/cons of all religions. Suburban demons. God is a rocketman. Junkie dreams, cocaine screams, play for the nightclub deities, and hiding out from the Gods of the skyscrapers. Tearing at the impenetrable skies. The guitar burns in lighter fluid glory. The fat bellied saint doesn’t see a thing, the cross falls into an eternal pit of hypocrisy and even those still pure and true cannot save the screams of the sanctified.
Old man, medicine man, sits steady and pretty. Watching the rooftops rise, watching the old world melt into the new world, watching the jet planes scream into clouds of consciousness-and the man the old man sees a thousand visions of strange lands/strange ways of being taught/caught in the frenzy of the sixties the seventies the eighties the nineties the dreams/screams of love and drugs and guns and opium whispers against hallucinogenic minds. The rhythms shake him.
“god_icon”
He watches the gods as the gods watch all. The waiters and waitresses, salesmen and news announcers. Poets and musicians, politicians and thieves. The junkies and bums, bus drivers and cabbies, dentists and lawyers. Disjointed stinking alleyways and the boredom of the skyscrapers. Reflecting in water, the polluted mirrors are the stigma of all drowning cities. Sing anthems of decadence, send love letters and flame-throwers, read the poetry written on the walls. Poems from the urban pantheon. The construction workers and clientele, doctors and businessmen. the scientists and technicians, the priests and monks, artists and dancers, the children the elderly the religious the sick and the dying.
Praying to the icons of our new land. Cups and drums and guns and cars and light bulbs. Worshipping unknowing. Touch an umbrella, watch a telephone. Wish that the stoplight turns green, wish for a new hat. Barbed wire, the pen, the paintbrush. Tombstones and the dollar bill. Faith that is not blind, but unconscious. Life lived with hypodermic accuracy. Strung out on desire and living in the fire lands.
Apocalypse right now, and this sky is the only one there is. The pointlessness of a double decaf latte. The animated thoughts of cartoon minds. Telemarketing telepimps and the urban spread of nomadic existentialism. Psychic transmissions through the stratosphere. Synchronistic television.
The preachers split gods like atoms like dogs and the fission is fusing/fucking into the white light/white heat/white noise that is melting and merging and the sonic walls between the decades are crumbling around all minds. See the teachers are students are teachers are students.
Old man, medicine man, sits and watches and sees the world change. Watches as sonic youthful surf heads thrash against reality with dreadlock angst. Caught in rainbow sparkles like a CD hit with a flashlight. Too many people listening to audible pabulum and too many people hanging out like lost sheep at the 7-11’s, the Circle K’s the Macs’. Those 24 hour churches of neon technology and religious beacons of convenience. The false prophets of Rock ‘n’ Roll praying in the church of MTV. Every car a tombstone in the dark, every glance a bullethole kiss, and all eyes are shot like the tenderest kiss from between bullethole lips.
Old man, sits on the roof, and sees the world go by with fire in his eyes. ◼
