Saturday, November 29, 2008

A Dream of the Old Pastel Bennett Building



Things fall away...

Whole ways of life are destroyed forever. Things that seemed solid are shown to be nothing but dust motes & particles, suspended for a brief moment in an aching light as the sun illuminates them and then concludes it’s mournful arc across the southern skies down there at the bottom of the city...

*Cataleptic chants emanate from the bio-chamber labeled 1003, and their echo informs the lurkers in the halls...

Strobe-Alarm Nocturne on the 10th floor deep in the underground american night
Night-crews toil in the utility room at the end of the hall—I cower in fear of what they will discover—and on & on they work, deep into the savage night of Fulton Street!

Thanksgiving Day at the Old Bennett Building—now lost forever in the mist!
Recollections cast a spell over the rooftops as I dream of things long gone...
Shards of stabbing memories distract me from my immediate surroundings...back there in the lost Bennett...
Memories and ghostly scenes illuminate my chamber deep in the winter night of Old Fulton Street...

The wondrous old buildings give way to underground poems—crumbling, along with all our hopes, as the carnage is ratcheted-up to obscene levels! A palpable sense of our impending doom & demise, as the destruction echoes all around us—back there in that tarnished sepulcher, deep in a strange night of unrest and regret
I grasp at phantom memories—seeking balm for my aching wounds and palliatives for my lonely soul, back down there at that strange and melancholy outpost
Endless conjecture and rabid theorizing—all useless against the implacable onslaught down there in that terrible din and dirge!
And there was nothing we could do except hurl a curse at the sulphur skies...back there in the fading light of that strange dream!

Help us, dear God! So that we are not swept away! Away with all the other lost things, down there in that time of gnashing gears and particulate-storm hell that reminds us that we’re in the way, even as it chokes the life out of us!

Particle-Chamber experiments at the end of a forgotten hall—-poems dark and ghostly--it’s echoes combine & comingle with the unholy night-clang & dirge of the southern end of the city.
Fractured & flayed at the end of the hall amid dreams of the family and other lost things!

A blast of sunlight explodes against the plaster—illuminating strange hieroglyphs and causing phantom images to burst from the walls... back there in that lighted chamber on the rooftop! Another poem dark and dispersing in the cracked skies
The Late & Lamented Pastel Bennett Building—it sits back there still...
As fugitive colors and dissolving scenes trouble me on a lost afternoon
The awful toll that is taken from human flesh & soul as we are dragged through the days & nights, all against our will!

Endless days rotate out of existence as we stagger blindly through the pitched landscape...

Nassau Street in an unholy light:
Down the hill past John Street, and then Maiden Lane, and further on still, back down to ancient harbor-memory squall & cry of gulls and creak of rotting wood on a Sunday afternoon of gray concern and deep loneliness.
Down by the old harbor, transfixed by all things, old and new...


Journal of Dreams and Other Disreputable Things by an underground american:
Escaping rivulets of Fulton Street on a rainy morning in the bleak light of Absentia
Aphasiatic monks worship and chant from the gloom of Old Fulton Street
An echoing curse bounces off the old buildings down around Fulton Street where I stayed for a strange hour suspended between one thought and the next.
Complaints echo through the long-departed halls of the Bennett
Underground poems and antique concerns and cancelled appointments in an abandoned structure on top of the Bennett

Cartesian thoughts amid the empty bottles and detritus of last night’s revelry:
The dense and delirious rooftop garden of the Captain. A strange and ephemeral arboretum, now up-rooted and torn out forever! Along with everything else!
A palpable doom is in the air...my toxic liver and kidneys breed fear in my mind and a black sea of ink floods in...

Many ghostly scenes of old-time Fulton come back to me at odd hours of the day
Poems dark and crepuscular
Paraphrased thoughts and holiday-stain memories project through the windows on the second floor of a building on Nassau street across from the great Repository. Now gone! One by one, the buildings and places that I knew and their co-responding dreams are rooted out and discarded.
Tremble-on-Brimstone.

I move silently and stealthily downhill along John Street on a clear and cold night, past store windows of aching regret, and stabbing loneliness—past rumor, and recanted pledge, past Old Dutch Street and the ancient church...

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