stark raving naked

by Christopher P. Mooney

This city in the early hours reminds me of the dawn streets of my yearning childhood

with its brown-stone tenements caked with mud and grime and putrid semen

trodden on by barefoot angels starved for attention with guts swollen on lard

The empty silver lifts with illiterate obscenities scrawled on filthy damp hollow walls

reek of wanton poverty take-away vomit and alcohol piss

Thick darkness and naked madness are everywhere and all around

as we sift through the wasteland detritus in broken-down alleys of eternal sadness

where intoxicated juveniles gnash rotted teeth at the uniforms

cool-cat hipsters turn tricks for gas money under yellow street lamps

and the pungent smell of cheap dope lingers always

in the dull bluish haze of lost souls and dead abandoned lives

The houses are eternal tombs and the beds mere graves

that play unwilling host to vast human souls laid bare to life’s carnage

who gave it all over for the quick hit the short con the long night

amid the sounds of ghoulish screams that could fill Golgothan valleys

and non-stop violent talk where nothing is said

as voids are pondered over and filled and emptied again

Suicide dames with bleached hair bawl in empty movie theatres

and bored subway drivers long for the body in flight

Soup and sodomy are on the menu tonight

Naked flesh will be chewed slurped eaten

and we will choke on the wet porcelain bones of other people’s straight-jacketed dreams

Time marches forward with booted feet on gravel

cast-iron ashtrays overflow with the doubts of the nearby world

and torn remnants of first-draft poems float away in the damp air

as I suck turpentine dregs from plastic bottles

aching for the end of nightmarish day and maybe for the end of it all

Glaswegian Christopher P. Mooney lives and writes near London. Various publications, mostly of short crime fiction, in print and online. Details and links on his blog.