THE IMMORALITY ODE...

I cruise a black and white womb namah H.G. Wells
A slick sliding embryonic space slicer
Don’t respect just saying no
Don’t hold with no time delineation

Kevin is dispatching crusty orders through his plump purple lips,
That man got chins flowing right downs into them button-up shirts
Says one day he’ll be bowling in the P.G.A.
Got a God complex and wears the darkest damn shades
He fucks the cabbies who won’t ignore him always feeding his favorites
He don’t appreciate no ‘ass hole college boy’
claiming he has rights’
ain’t taken none of my shit.
He spits out, “96, go to 4444 St. Louis, compartment 5�

I scoop up a gray pompadour moussed slick
He wants to go to his ‘property’
He keeps saying property so I ask what it is
and have to twice before he
says Rally Hamburger’s.
That man’s got secrets don’t nobody know.
His hands talking away like Horatio Alger got puppet strings hanging down from heaven.
He brags on them burgers.
He’s got that fucking boring ass glass-eyed script down.
A greasy cardboard after-taste coagulates over my Marlboro morning mouth.
I mumble something having an ‘eclectic palate ‘
And don’t eat no Rally burgers – catch myself too late, can’t salvage no tip


Careen under a viaduct and confront the Jeep plant.
Them Jeep boys got blue jeans pulled up high over their hips
Got wide belts with Harley Davidson buckles bold
Got steel toes & diluadid in their pockets
Crack & H & anything that will make eight hours fly by, fly by
Cadillac’s and Catalina’s are posted in an open-air market across from the plant.
A lot of money moves through those gray winter shift changes,
Buys all the feelings needed for a good day.

At Detroit and Auburn the stores are ply-boarded up
On a white poster huge black word read WARNING
If ya look close, the fine print says that the Vatican has control of time and Newsweek and ABC
Ya gotta look close.

Pick up a salesman from another life
He asks me if things are ‘okay.’
Like he cares,
Like something bad happened for me to be driving cab
He asks about the wife and I tell her she’s dead just to have a story to tell
I lie so unconscious to the rubes that I half-believe myself

I blast the radio over Kevin’s orders
Guns and Roses mourn patience
Implore patience
Park by the courthouse and read a little Whitman
Afterwards I start seeing bards under the wino’s stubble
Hear Bukowski mumbling about needing some change

Take an order off the crackling waves
Drive by Beko Brother’s Oakwood & Lawrence Corner Store
The bloods have spray painted their name in blue dog piss
The crips pissed a red x over the blue
There is gonna be war at Beko’s

Slip under Starr Avenue
See orange paint
dripping like blood
Say
THE AGONY OF MY SOUL GAVE VENT IN ONE SCREAM VIETNAM
I feel that graffito man every time Old H.G. slices a womb
Ol H.G. is collecting screams like flotsam on ah white wave
H.G. is gonna make sense
of all the images splattering on my eyes


Drive past a waving shiny woman in a purple jumpsuit
she lifts up her skirt to show her pussy and
I almost check to see how much I have
before I remember that I hate whores

Silent pocket comes between fares rapping with Rimbaud
Watch him grow into a mile high symb-o-list
drunkenly laughing at the madness
He got one foot crushing Robies bar 6 am serious sippers
Got the other foot crushing those Ottawa Hills rose gardens.
His hands are earthmovers
lifting Toledo up into a tweed colored sky
He tosses that shit around
Tastes it
Scrunches up his face and spits black bubbles
That drift out over the sun and make dark from day

My twelve-hour shift stumbles deranged into the cityscape
One drop of tired sand in the city
I hang out in the dispatch office and breath in misty morning might
Listen to Chuckles caress the voice of some Parkview nurses
Hear him saying it ain’t our fault it ain’t anybody’s fault.
A late blood delivery cost one gushing life.

Paite parks his carnie camper on the taxi lot when the winter white shuts the mid-way
down.
I trudge out there swollen with the streets
feeling like a 21st century poet
One Godless motherfucker drunk on drama
Tainted well beyond media accepted standards of electibility.

We smoke fine dope
And scramble the streets like eggs

Paite can tell carnie stories that make ya smell popcorn
Man got 5 voices for every story.
Tells about escaping from a chain gang and getting shot at
Because it was the sixties
And he noticed and some red neck cops didn’t.

He tries to teach me to short change customers
I say I’m too honest and he tells me,
“Kid, that’s a handicap like any handicap, and we can work on it.�

I tell him that I read a poem that said
one breathe away,
I might of lived differently

Paite smiles forty years of doing what he damn well pleases and says
“I know, kid. I know.�


This is dedicated to Paite, who died a couple years ago.