Just me, just me and nightly MacDougal Street
parading with white flesh and a pocketbook
filled with face paint, a box of round pills, a sweet,
I zigzag around a cardboard homeless nook.
Eagle-eyed and nimble I am out
lusting for a musky hunt.

Cheap tunes around, mascara bleeds its black tear
as I peer into the lightened bar window
the red obscurity smells of piss and bear,
and cramped hall promises an innuendo.
People drift and disappear,
I know, my prey is not here.

Again, just me, tongue-soaring with cliches
with the holes in my shoes touching the sleet
I enter one of those falafel cafes
hiding from the midnight pumping on the street.
A loud, fox-like, barking laugh
I hear. I see a scarf.

A cotton scarf with daisies and forget-me-nots
when my eyes command the guest’s mouth to revive
I take him outside juggling the casting lots
in my veins, in my throat I feel it. That drive.
Nothing’s left for me but wishing
that tonight will be bait-fishing.

One look, I need just one look, look of my eyes,
look of my body, look of blood-thirsty lips
to send me to that dark wood where no one dies
serving and savouring delectable meat-stripes.
“’Tis my companion”, he points at you —
an animal who escaped the zoo.

A crooked woollen-sheltered shape on the porch —
this is you whose name I forget and christen
with the title that can devour and scorch,
I call you Steppenwolf. I wish you’d glisten.
but with the mastery that I lack
you howl as one from my beast-like pack.

читать дальшеWe walk and talk and life’s a frozen close-up
of your V-neck coat, wool at its finest.
Glasses, silvery tinted hairs, all buttoned-up,
you say, you’re from Paris, you’re a pianist.
I say, I like illicit French wine,
you bow, you buy and you pour. Fine.

White is screaming of colours, violet and blue —
the napkins and tablecloth and walls snow-white
my guests ask questions I don’t have answers to
and the loot-driven intoxication is tight.
“Whom do you want to be?” you cry
“I’m what I want to be”, I lie.

The roaring sticky childhood is my true demise
and what is left, damaged but yet untouched,
is a cracked velvety box between my thighs —
that the fowl, the Steppenwolf inside me, has clutched.
I seize your piano-player’s glance
and carry out the ritual dance —

it’s motionless and marble-still and gory
I say, “I can make real three of your wishes”,
you stutter in response, mutter ‘bout glory
I say, “Beware, I am the worst of the witches
My wish, tonight, I want to fuck”
You look unmoved. I know, you’re struck.

The master of dandelion scarves grins,
he’s a bicycle thief and a barber
made of tricks and mustard and safety pins,
a married man, he leaves our harbour.
You play it gently, “I’ll walk you home”.
I wanna shoot ya. Instead we roam.

You tell me that you have someone left in France —
she. She plays viola and she’s thirty five,
but I’m wild and starving and with ghosts I dance
and in my arms no man can ever survive.
This savage innocence ignites you,
eats your system alive like a flu.

Our shadows ricochet off the puddle
I stain your neck and chin in lipstick
you look beast-beaten, all in ruddle.
We are wolves, we eat wretched and meek,
infected with clandestine starvation,
me and you. Alone. One aberration.

Protesting you flinch and I follow
as you mumble words about the light,
the torch and the bonfire. You wallow
when I clutch your own light quite tight.
It is between your legs, fiercely frantic,
mothered and smothered by the prickly fabric.

After you tell me, “Stop”, I stop
my canine attacks and I hunch,
bare my teeth pretending to lob.
You feel guilty, o my dear lunch,
Thus you take my furry wolf-paw in yours,
how sensual it is to feel your claws.

I lead you to the lonesome bench
burying my head on your knees
like a soldier did in his trench
allowing brothers’ limbs to squeeze
His. Your face gets squashed with the starry spits,
the Moon shuts its cyclopean eye. Splits.

You beg me for a story
I tell you of the woman
who loved me and black coffee
and had bouncy bosom.
She kissed me near the old chocolate factory
and then I kicked her out of our menagerie.

My dark curls around your fingers —
just black, just black piano keys
you touch them and sound lingers
amongst the dead end murky breeze.
The slit in the sky pours ink right in my ear
with your words that my memoir beats all you would hear.

The saccharine is begone for now
Instead your mouth feels like vinegar
when speak of days when you did sow
and trees were tall and life was linear:
she was your black and abused dearest Miss
the first lick, the first bite, you whisper, “Gla-‘dys".

Me, using and misusing ten-dollar words,
I flash such names as Thomas Mann and Mahler
while people return from night shifts in small herds,
I’d stack their cadavers in my parlour
incited by black bile and blood and phlegm
I’ll do the job for you and butcher them.

No tails to wag, howls to voice, consent to bed;
my nose sniffs your confusion, then — comes the bite,
we move to Chet Baker playing in our head,
at last, your mouth recognises mine, its blight.
I hold to the cold iron bar behind
and feel you as a wolf. I know your kind.

The notes are falling into me, I’m falling
Too. It is snowing, snowing inside of me
From your bristle my whole body is galling
I imagine the pastures and Europe and scree
We could imagine together
at the end of our tether:

ice-skating on the rink, ears are ringing
imagining a black-water eerie lake
and falling on the knees when frost is stinging —
In the places where nothingness reigned I ache.
The fantasia of closeness
Closes freeing pitch-black coldness.

On the corner of 4th Avenue and 12th Street
you delude the very cul-de-sac of doubt
and plunge me into the sweet-tainted defeat
leaving this corner and leaving me in drought.
My grey wolf of forty twice my age
with claws still strong to rip my rib cage.

There should be somewhere a treatise on us,
an instruction to stop you from going away
my bones turning to sand and saliva to pus,
but promises are sculptured from cold river clay.
Ashes to ashes, warm bed is for lovers,
you turned out to be the beast not like others.

Down in the hard groin of the city you live,
avid and caustic, in the abdomen, their
you often mince strangers and take them through a sieve.
But I’m no intruder, nor I’m no pair,
For the werewolf like you
I am to nip and to chew.

I might be not a Steppenwolf yet, but a cub
and mine patched wolfskin is not for you to tend,
no Magic Theatre of bodies, but a stub
of uncooked meat is your pagan whim in the end.
I think of your she-viola
who’ll feed you for a payola,

not like me, who disregarded her own pack
for the lost gallery of the Immortals
where we, wolves, go forward while going back
and moon-struck frolic and gather in circles
but I’m gone and you are gone too
so I make a list in ado:

my face is cancelled by you like a pointless flight,
my skin is left to dry out like a red raisin,
my hunched posture is hungry when out of your sight,
my eyes wait to be pecked up by the Poe’s raven,
eye-lids, finger-tips, toes, teeth, sex,
when you leave I’m doomed by a hex.

Leaking with Debussy’s suites and acrid oil
I lie counting the bed-springs with my spine,
let thickening insomnia take its toil,
but tongue is still sour from illicit wine.
I can not couch when owls do cry
when your fang and your claw aren’t nigh.

And now blood and Hudson waters flow slower
I’ll get a crew-cut from that sidekick of yours,
like you, I am no reaper, but a sower
and I stand facing thirty three closed doors.
Shaved should be my charcoal fur —
bare skin of prey that we once were.

Virginity for a viola I’ll trade
and will stuff my circumcised rhymes in the flute
where they’ll choke, until be blissfuly dead
so you’ll nibble on the instrument’s rotting root.
The Hunting Moon of October
is eclipsed. Our rite is over.

Gathering crumbs of feelings and caresses
I’ll parade my flesh again, just me, just me
and then I’ll send this poem to all addresses
the phonebook contains and ruin all your spree,
scratch out the door-lock and then flee
from the Steppenwolf inside me.