On the River Looking at the Moon

Somedays, today maybe,  unable to get the first paragraph off, stuck in traffic or on the three yard line. 

Drinking at a Chinese juke joint on the river:

Black  and Chinese girls everywhere, busy, Henry hot for the vest pocket girl with a green wig on her head. It was about scoring good cocaine and eating, life wrapped around bowls of it on long tables. Tequila to wash down fried Mollies, sticky rice and okra.   

It was always summer at dusk, driving the back-back roads on the side of the river, the empty-roads slow and leisurely, the convertible-car  suspended on nothing much. Henry color-blind,  the alley-ways folding into sepias wind-tunnels, leaking rainbows, majestic.

Henry didn’t want to leave town. There were too many people on the road, when you travel you are just another buffalo he thought. Traveling an effort, why get out of bed unless you have to? 

Henry on the computer writing, drinking coffee and smoking ganja first thing in the morning. That is what a real-man-writer did. It was ritual and celebration, there was work to be done, editing and re-editing. 

Later that morning reading Dylan Thomas, “The Clown in the Moon,” it was awesome and beautiful stuff, the greatest poetry of any century, the best anywhere. 

Thomas the last ballsy poet, 

 ’My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.

I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.’ 

Dylan Thomas writing about the planet he occupied, awesome as any moon. 

Was good poetry taken to heart enough to bankrupt the space industry Henry thought? 

'Why the moon-bound-projects could dry up,' 

belching , the out-going-wind just enough to propel a little more,

Oh fuck the economy anyways he thought, banks gave him a head-ache, he didn't worship money, money the controller of the world, people were slaves to it.  

And so on and so forth today and most days.