I write holy verse postcards, translate dreams into hobgoblin doublespeak turpentine fantasies, see mothers burning shuddering blinking ashcan angels in fuck-flick fallout.
I see cigarette-filled crossbone soulless jailhouse methheads whose mission to butcher passes for poverty racketing through armies of muscatel America with cigarette holes burned in their dungaree hope.
I research hungry mothers and burning fathers jumping to see someone somewhere sometime stop suffering, leaving the sweat in my veins waiting for roaming herds of bedsheets soaked in the public eternity.
I dream of desolation-barroom mercy, stolen horror, heroes of the mouldering consciousness, innocent sleight of mouth, and the highway of hollow caresses.
I purify myself shivering in echoes of things left undone, dragged off like junky reciprocating memories fresh from rose garden evenings firetrucking to the fascist void, blowing lava on the johns of the cross.
I commit no crime in the gilded auditoriums or ill-illuminated hovels or naked alleyways, running in the rickety rows of the future disgorged, making the insane pilgrimage to my expectations.
I share my vision and my incomprehensible desire, burning victory like endlessly hungry whispering facts.
I scribble of synagogues and wonder and mustard gas and nightmare blues shuddering in the bedsheets of the corporate American cathedral, praying for the mother of all ecstasy, the love and delight of the day, the shaman of symbols, the stone old men waiting to return to the dead imitation family.
I hear boxcar romance tumbling into the abyss.
I scatter accusations of collapsing invisible narcotic extremes, would give up my place in the madhouse, and hand my 15 minutes to the sleepwalking zombie generation for a pass from the vanishing barrel-ass terror before the end.
I trudge out loud and look suspiciously like tenement visions plotting one dreadful murder at the window of daisychain injustice.
I wage my subway war against nothing but the tomb and I hear you when you’re silent and I cannot help the empty someones out there somewhere while screams for mercy echo down the bloody toilet.
I feel the technicolor hunger in flannel-suit cities, suburban commuters looking at the purgatoried solitude where madness leaves a moment’s humanity lit in the neon fire and nightmare light of supernatural dawn.
I want nothing but to joyfully be myself.
I ignore the dream, the static concrete, the allegations of cosmic tatters, the illusions of victory, the continuous tv hitchhiking, the romance of once-upon-a-time, the blindness of the superhuman slaughter, the symphonies of midnight, the rattle of the hipster soul, the mind-shrew yogi entrepreneurs, the staggering facts of the cocksucker heart, the empty dawn, the mending of the dead poetry of harpy asses, the false god of the ill-spoken word, the fast-forward dynamo jailbait hallucinations from the tangents of lost light skulls, the transformation of poverty, the crazy souls of the weak who sell their shadows for a scrap of nostalgia, the hijacked who seek more of theirs, and—still—there is more.

Charles Newman was born in Newark, NJ. 4 books. 1 chapbook. Various publications and collections. Hosts 2 venues. Has read in NYC, Chicago, London, Louisville, etc. with David Amram, the Viking Hillbilly Apocalypse Review, Mouth and Hands, and ZOOTSUITBEATNICK!