Bu'gly
by Bean
Newton
I slaw the best limes of my generation into meringues, pies, the dies
are cast to the shadow of the last Heathrow night! Stop scratching,
Hernando, there will be no powder tonite, no powder just soul-searching
fu'gliness, deep-scratching fu'bu'gliness, the pungent scent of an all-day
foamy to the rooftop Colosseum, to the God's wide eye in the steel-grey
sky, to the menacing heights of the police-helicopter zone, the place
where shingles get nailed on the houses, tar gets laid down, seedlings
grow in gutters from the cottonwoods nearby. I have seen them literate
and well-trained, drunken and stooped-over phonographs playing "My
Melancholy Baby" in two-four time due to a defect of the belt.
I have seen them rescued from wells, from overseas raids on Taliban-controlled
caves in the middle of a decimated, desiccated landscape. I have seen
them bouncing off walls at raves and police-stations, green-haired and
trancing, smoked-out and falling out of Dodge vans onto the streets
of Leadville out of season. I have known them to hurtle down sidewalks
on monkey-bikes tripped-out on licit medication, Percocet, caffeine
and wine. I've seen them lay on tracks for the idiocy of it, slam-dance
to glam bands and speed metal, to punk and Puccini, to the dancing valves
of alcohol-fueled funny-cars and gold-tone Aztec lo-riders sporting
Jesus as the Jaguar Prince on the hood hopping down Broadway at midnight.
I have known them in the backseats of Buicks, felt up their soft tufts
of pubic hair and breasts like white gold in the sodium arc-light, Amerasian
princesses and Welsh goddesses twice removed. The Indian blood did not
move me until I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. A doctor's
son, he was the rich kid 'til he ditched that track to follow The Dead.
And great minds aren't born alike; some are poured into molds and crack
later on like the Bell that rang out liberty, and some grow up free
as the weeds and have to twist themselves around textbooks and the thighs
of fallen angels--and I've seen these too, too soon gone to seed and
spread out over straight fields of hell that are the city streets, the
rows of desks at our institutes of higher learning.
This much is certain: we'd left the building even before they'd poured
the stucco.
