42nd Street Satan

When the screen came down on
the movie of his life, one side of the spilt
screen was of a 42nd Street Satan wasted on
Purple Jesus, Peyote buttons, and pale
as death tequila, all of it Dutch Courage
used to coax little girls in mini-skirts
and tight tops into blind alleys where
Artful Dodger cronies pushed roofies
down their throats as if they were
Smarties making them prey for candy
colored clowns, white slavers accessories
to abduction and murder, working at his behest.
The other half of the screen revealed a
tweaked out his gourd self-appointed messiah,
selling End Time Insurance, indulgences
like Richard Nixon faced three dollar bills,
on street corners dressed in king size fitted
sheets with pillow cases for vestments,
the last player piano reels of his mind
droning out of his mouth like incoherent
babble, speech like something after the tower
fell; a devil's disciple psalm away from
a rubber room. All these conflicting,
wasted images in his mind competing
for equal, time and space, creating
thought jumbles no one had invented
a term to define as of yet. All of what
he said, dreamed, conceived of, headed
for the cutting room floor, little more
than an autopsy-in-progress report,
a field study in fried cerebral cortex,
brain matter as sponge to be wrung out
by hand after weighing, the matter
extracted bottled in glass, labeled toxic,
acidic, do not allow near exposed flesh.


           alan catlin