Girl sitting alone in a black jazz box theater,

two complete stories above without endings, end

 

in this place graced by the sad jazz of Star Luck’s

Coffee house and Café on a street without

 

a name, in a neighborhood that has forgotten

to be ashamed of its own cracked-up sidewalks

 

and white trash reasons, broken blue beer

bottles now empty of any promise at all. Allyson

 

is the name assigned to this whiter than white

white girl who wears the mistake of black dye

 

in her  platinum blonde hair. She doesn’t care

to look into her own black-eye lined eyes, but

 

tonight she is looking through john Lennon glasses

at me. Me, I am listening to the Rolling Stones

 

rolling out a radio talk- show of rock ‘n roll

in a bowl of red beans and rice and jazz, so nice tonight

 

in this Sad Ballad Cafe afraid to face the reason

the morning sun does not want to shine brightly

 

upon either of us, unwanted cornfield children,

forgotten because we forgot that color matters in

 

South Carolina during the height of hurricane season.

A storm named Earl is on his way. We both refuse

 

to evacuate tables of impending high wind, rain. Love

is love and no matter how you shape it, it is still

 

going to be full of bullet holes. Broken hearts bleed.

No need to turn back or down the silk sheets

 

of an unmade bed. Love is the only thing that can die

and not be dead. Allyson is reading, slowly the palm trees

 

of my hand. My fingers are pointing at her breasts

of reasons for pointing out the inconsistencies of

 

tracking the projected movement of weather patterns

that come calling out the names, scribbled, put away

 

and forgotten only to be,  years later, re-forgotten again.

In rain and wind driven, stormy times like these,

the scenario does not want the movie makers to know

 

black and white photography is way more beautiful

than any coded color coded colorful situational drama.

 

Cornfield life is real. Cornfield music is jazz.

 

And Allyson and me, as we make our unsteady way

to the exit of this song, she is reading, breathing softly

 

the spaces between my words and I’m listening to lips,

painted red rush hour red. Broken hearts bleed.

 

Where are my keys, what day is today? Where does

 

forever come from and where does forever go when

it disappears? I do not know is always incomplete,

 

the answer to standard sized questions of impending

weather patterns defined  by the wet noise of wet wind

 

and rain, that would explain if it could, pelts from above.

Love is the only thing that can die and not be dead.

 

 

 

 

No, time was not Neal’s father, Neal had no father.

Time was his mother and this time he promised

 

to stop, but time-clocks never stop counting, ticking

time away in Greyhound bus stations, so time

 

tellers and ticket takers punch holes through

destinations. Restless youths, going anywhere.

Time does not care about time.

 

Any clock on any wall of any young life

is a clock on the wall of being forever young

just like Bob Dylan said. So when time

 

marched into the bus station this time, it

marched out just as suddenly

as the highest flight of any bird like Neal,

weaving, zooming in and out of predicaments of

 

time honored circumstance, a black bird

boy living in the neighborhoods of black

hooded life. There is a reason times flies

 

from Eastern Standard to Central Standard

and beyond the time zones of Neal’s life

have forgotten to say grace too many times

 

before sitting  upon the hard bench seats of

bus station jazz, eating vending machine

soda crackers while time forces a can of coke

 

to keep the change every time. Neal is broke

again this time, at the same time

a pocket full of nothing but hard bad luck

 

and time on his hands. Busted blue bus station

grey is time travel moments of madness turning

into gladness over time if waiting rooms decide

 

to really wait. Neal knows time can not be

put into a frame on a bookshelf, a picture,

his mother, crying because she doesn’t believe

in Neal Thomas’ God.

 

She doesn’t believe time has whatever it takes

to make wrong things right. In Jersey City,

there is no such thing as daylight saving time

in a bottle of vodka.

 

Time doesn’t have the time to forget

and she doesn’t forgive her son, Neal

for the train wailing holler of a distant midnight

freight, coming around the mountain when she

 

comes, one headlight, shimmering in the absence

of thin, fractured, everyday love. Nothing

and nobody ever loved Neal

 

except a needle in a haystack, city stacked

on top of  other crying cities

like yellow gypsy cabs and casinos. Showtime

 

always cast showy shadows in Jersey City and

bedtime is a box for  packing things lost, not things found.

 

Time of day never cared much for this time

of night in a city like this.  Neal’s mother

has always mailed her letters with U.S. food stamps.

 

“As long as they got to where they suppose to went,”

she always says.

Over due bill collectors, time tables and time keeper

are just that, collectors,

tables and keepers, keeping the true sad jazz

of water

from choosing the perfect choice.

Neal never loved nobody either.

 

Time and space are enemies,

no synchronicity in the state of New Jersey

according to a jury of thirteen

count room judges, judging the distance

light travels

 

in a place where there are no

straight lines and city streets

so easily forget to pave the wicked sidewalks

of poor boy poverty. Time

 

and time again, the dull deep cut

of butter knife life has forced Neil

to realize it takes a lot more than time

to actually kill time.