Welcome to Tomorrow

Early pretentious overlong s**t.

Listen …

in all my dreams the world ends the same way,
painted and cast in black-and-white
like a doomsday clock
or Budd Dwyer
or a midnight showing of Taxi Driver.

Cold colors, love. Cold colors.

The world ends in cold colors.

And in those dreams we take the train
rushing by at the speed of regret
surrounded by sterility and gray. Graffiti on tunnel walls
nothing but streaks of

        old

        dead

        attempts

at leaving something behind,
at letting the world know that

      we, too, were here.

And like a child you raise a hand,
in hail and farewell,
to the blind man at the other end of the car.



You’ll be wearing that dress,
lace-cut and black as the inside of sin
and in the nature of keepsakes and memory,
I’ll be wearing

the suit my father wore as we lowered him into the ground, and

my grandfather’s bowler hat, still on his head when they found him,
floating face-down in the Rhine.

We’ll listen, my dear, but as the train stops
the only sounds we’ll hear
are the doors, sliding open and welcoming us to where we need to be.
Fluorescent lights marking the ways
of the concrete veins lining the underbelly
of the city at the end of time,
and, your hand in mine,
we climb the stairs leading to a place

that is not

Eternity

but somewhere so close it hurts.



It is very beautiful here, my love,
and, oh! for you to witness it.

It would break your heart

to see it so abandoned,

like a child’s half-finished storybook castle,
built in dreams but left behind on waking,
peopled only by mist,
dead leaves
and the ghosts of rats.

Who else but us knows
what it was like to live in an age
of self-imposed exile"to needlessly fear
in cold and empty rooms;
rooms with
too few
too many
no windows at all,
overlooking streets that promised

        everything

        nothing

        infinity all at once

to those who knew how to take it.

Do you know how to take infinity, dearest?

There is a secret involved
lost now,
gone the way of
dinosaurs
world fairs
silent movies
crew cuts and skinned knees and Pogo books;
of clotheslines hanging over alleys
sodas for a dime and peep shows for a nickel more.



Silent, we walk down forgotten boulevards,
between frozen giants of stone and steel
between unlit neon and one-day sales
between the vacuum of storefronts and parking meters
twisted by the gloom into strange and alien shapes,

           like a Salvador Dali vision of Man

your heels cushioned by fog, your breath stolen into shadow,
and every sighed word
like explosions in the sky.

We’re Polaroids, my love,
you and I

flagging down a black cab in Trafalgar in the rain

smoking at the bar in CBGB

kissing beneath the lamplight at the Rue Bourbon.



Look.

The blind man is standing on the corner, stopping to listen,
his cane leaning against the wall, his sightless eyes turned upward.

I remember a time, he says to us, when the future was a place
you could get to
if you just walked long enough.

And living forever was a gift -- not a curse.



And in my dreams, my love,
in that place,
in the city at the end of time,

you press your cold lips to mine

and together we call them.



Like old tired ghosts, they arrive,
from doorways and alleys
from hiding and myth
blinking their eyes against the unfamiliar light

the shopping-cart lady, mother of cats

the musician, his pockets full of coins

the dumpster babies, trailing their cords like wedding veils

the preachers, the prophets, the dispossessed
and the damned

the students, the seers, the searching

and the child who was left behind
at the liquor store.

Who are they? you ask
in equal parts worry and wonder.
For their closeness is unnerving,
but in their presence we feel less alone.

From his altar the blind man says
The last of the victims, dear one.
Do not be afraid.
And he picks up his cane and taps it

        once …

        twice …

        three times

against the ground, and sends it spinning
spinning
spinning
into the air
and when it lands back in his hand
he is the harlequin once more,
dressed in diamonds of black and white
in cold flame and brilliant dark.

And, smiling, he says

Welcome to Tomorrow.

So merrily he leads us,
shutting down the lights as we pass,
stacking the chairs and sweeping the floors,
       
        on that final ceremony
       
        that last parade
       
        that last hurrah

to break a bottle across the bow
of the ferry across the River Styx
the mothership to the stars
the longboat of dead men’s nails.



And, unbidden, we’ll take one last look
before the fog swallows it all,
at the monoliths we created
in our insecurity and smallness,
to stake our claim in a world we felt never wanted us.

One last look
at the city at the end of time,
painted in cold colors, my love,
at the streets of horn and ivory
that promised us

        everything

        nothing

        infinity all at once,

if only we weren’t always so afraid.

Author's Note

Something from way back I recently rediscovered. It's probably the earliest piece of poetry I remember writing. It needs a fair amount of editing, and the facetiousness and pretentiousness could be toned down by a lot, but I still kind of like it.