Houdini’s Last Words

Rosabelle
Believe
From Appleton Street
In Milwaukee
To East 79th
In New York
City

I was a child flying
From a trapeze
Ehirch
The prince of air
Whirling
180
Degrees

I’m tired of fighting, Dash
I guess this thing is going to get me
You & I always knew
What we had to do to get ourselves free
And every eye could see
Whether astounded bourgeois
Or enchanted children of poverty
There are no odds that overcome mastery
Except this thing
Is going to get me

I met you
When you were sixteen
A Floral Sister
At the Sea Beach Palace
Our
Coney Island
Memories

The one & only
Theodore Hardeen
A strongman within
Broken chains
Fed my secrets to his flames
My brother introduced you
To me

Chorus.

But for the absence of magic
In the conditions of fate
This charge
I cannot evade

#20: Intimate Secrecy

It’s a casting call
For the bourgeois
My motivation’s alienation
Expressed demographically

Assigned a file
On destiny
A subject in denial
Like we’re meant to be

Well I want to find
The right leather gloves for me
I’m going to blindfold you
So I can finally see

Concrete never sleeps
Does it turn you on?
It turns me on
Our intimate secrecy

In the meeting
The boss said we’re a team
I’m a sense-maker
On a cheap salary

I’m just lucky to be here
We talk about TV
Before we burrow underground
For our next place to be

Well I’m in a bind
Too many promises to keep
Gonna gag your mouth
So I can finally speak
Does it turn you on?
It turns me on
Our intimate secrecy

The price we pay
For pleasure’s
A step too steep
Does it turn me on?
It turns me on
Our secret intimacy

#16: Rapunzel

Well it was forty-five
Past midnight
The bouncers had just
Ended a fight
You materialize
In the stage-light
Sit at the piano
And plink That’s Life

I swear you appear to be
A mirage to me
Wearing an Arabian dress
And rosary beads
With a pink guitar pick
Between your teeth
Playing like falling rain
Patient certainty

Then you spit the pick
In the palm of your hand
And stride over
To the microphone stand
Tune the house guitar
Strum This Land is Your Land
Singing your own lyrics
About Afghanistan

1.Hey Rapunzel
Come down
From your tower
Return to me
At this witching hour
Sing to me
Your song of tender power
I need you

You sing like a volcano
Erupting honey
Lyrics raw
Concerning blood money
Your closing line
Eurydice can judge me
You put me in tune
With my heartbeat

Well I approach the stage
After your set
You’re like lightening up there
What can I expect?
I’m just a thin white man
You could see as a threat
But you’re convivially curious
All you want’s a drink and a friend

Well we talk until
Its thirty past three
You, the bartender, and me
A holy trinity
I ask for a date tomorrow
Please be free
Let’s talk forever about
Religion, death, and comedy

2. Hey Rapunzel
May I have
Your address?
I didn’t get your number
And I must confess
Without your voice
I am under duress
I need you

Well her eyes turned down
And she calmly explained
She lives in a tower
And can only descend for a stage
If there’s no stage
She evaporates
It was the bargain she made
To reverse her fate

I ask Fred the bartender
If he slipped us some LSD
He said come on now
I’m a man of dignity
She left her tip
Said I knew you wouldn’t believe me
I always get your admiration
I never have your sympathy

She doesn’t say goodbye
Just departs immediately
And I’m still fumbling for an apology
Not thinking expediently
I’m trailing her silhouette
Shouting please, wait for me
And when I get to the sidewalk
I only see the indifferent city

3. Hey Rapunzel
I built a stage
In the middle of Washington Square
And now the skaters can’t skate
Nor can the folkies and junkies
Congregate
Until you re-animate
I need you

She’s such a knockout talent
And she actually talked to me
But now she’s gone and I’m just staring
At this family of gutter leaves
Dancing and swirling
Then falling in the breeze
Performing for that moment
Before retiring for eternity

All these nights I search
But haven’t found her again
Walking uptown to down
From Silvana to the Bitter End
If I could have believed
Or made myself pretend
I know she was real
The prophesized amend

All the while dreaming
About us on a fire escape
Her hair between my fingers
Upon her back a starry cape
Then we hold each other close
And simply fly away
Above the bodies and the buildings
This city of love and hate

#15: The Part of Hope

Paralyzed
And the crosswalk sign
Is telling me to move

In this Balkanized
Corporate paradise
Consciousness is a fool

On my way
To a date
With the anxious apparatus
To plead my case
And amend my mistake
Of writing that ending
Tragic

Do you have an empty feeling?
Can you play the part of hope?
Was their dream worth believing?
When you already had a coat?

Satisfied
By a momentary high
After signing their contract

Unrecognized
Walking the Highline
Alias intact

We were running late
To a play
That was about our lives
We did not know ourselves
Everybody is somebody else
And I still love the way you
Survive

Do you have an empty feeling?
Can you play the part of hope?
Was their dream worth believing?
When you already had a coat

#14: The Truth About New York

Emotionally homeless
Drifting thru Central Park

Baseball bat in your guitar-case
Your lips on the tender dark

You were supposed to be
The new wave
Not another matchstick to save
In the world rock and roll made

They never
Told you
The truth
About New York
You never
Believe
The proof
About New York
You forget
What you never knew
Could be untrue
About New York

Ears turned toneless
By the Broadway jackhammer

The ashes of your new melody
Unceremoniously scattered

And you were supposed to be
A useful device
Sanctifying our vice
Inside candy lights

They never
Told you
The truth
About New York
You never
Believe
The proof
About New York
You forget
What you never knew
Could be true
About New York

#10: 99 Cents

Borrowed my lady’s
Dodge Seneca
For a trip to the city

She doesn’t like me
Only seeing her lightly
But it pays to have her pity

Dropped my band
Killed the cafes
Scored myself an advance

Now a hotshot Columbian
Leather bearded Ruffian
In this Western Romance

99 Cents
Won’t get you in
You need the full dollar x3

Can’t make rent
While waiting on their check
I need some quick dough

She chastises me
There’s no art in poverty
We kiss and I go

Philosophize on the ride
Garden to 95
All friends need enemies

Then near the Lincoln Tunnel
Tollbooth reads:
No pennies

99 Cents
Won’t get you in
You need the full dollar x3

Oh my God
Ms. Attendant
Pennies are all I got

She said you’ve passed before
And been warned
How could you have forgot?

I negotiate her mercy
And she delicately
Pours my pennies from the coffee tin

Starts counting ‘em individually
The horn blaring cacophony
Tells me the shape I’m in

99 Cents
Won’t get you in
You need the full dollar x3

You only have ninety-nine
She says and I cry
But I counted them like an Arcadian!

She eyes me coolly
Replies sternly,
“But one of these is Canadian.”

Ever so fleet
I jump in the backseat
Searching for the bronze face of Lincoln

One hundred pennies
I scream at myself
What the fuck were you thinking?

99 Cents
Won’t get you in
You need the full dollar x3

Finally I find it
A dirty gleam
Between the seat cushion

The penny I need
For all eternity
Thank Jesus it hadn’t been pushed in

After I get that thirty-five
I continue to drive
And park by Washington Square

I gaze ‘round for the me
Who knew he was
But he’s not there

99 Cents won’t get you in
You need the full dollar x3

This is where we came
When we were young
And thought the city loved us

The Village
Where we wanted to know we knew
There were so many like us

This is where I found myself
Where I was no one else
This is where I fit

Now I dream
Of a window in the clouds
Where I can close myself in

A sax man’s playing solitary
Under the arches
And a thousand miles away

A woman holding five cats
Wearing a witches’ hat
Keeps screaming Bill I don’t know what to say

I sit down on the cool marble
And lower my eyes to
My Trax sneakers

Am I going to make it?
Who does make it?
Is it the faithless or true believers?

99 Cents
Won’t get you in
You need the full dollar x3

Tomorrow is mine
I say to the arches
And the stars hiding in the dark

I’m a Sagittarius
That means I’m an archer
And I’m still aiming for my mark

#9: Places You Took Me

Followed your silhouette
From the band shell
To the Bowery

Never turned your head
While moving your legs
You made quiet company

Always pondering
Your next experiment
Now I wonder where
Our chapters went

Places you took me
Faces who knew me
Because of you

You wanted to excavate
The bones of my
Neighborhood

Said you were different
From those girls
Who thought they understood

Well honey that used to be the home
Of Rudolph Valentino
And these midnight spray-painters
Believe Mussolini a hero

Places I took you
Phases you passed through
Cause of me

Well I guess we were too different
In that way
Similar people can be

My father was a bookie
Yours was a professor of philosophy

But god it felt so right
Strolling in Strawberry Fields
With our glasses of moonlight
Places you took me
Faces who knew me
Because of you

Places I took you
Phases you passed through
Cause of me

#8: Stem of Time

A gray afternoon
On Fifth Avenue
Where dreams and reality
Rendezvous
The homeless man
Wants to dance
With you
While you walk through
Filament truths
You thought knew

The folkies negotiate
Their record contracts
While slugging pills
For panic attacks
God forbid their truth is a lie
Like those secrets kept
Between you and I

Ten pretty lyricists
Atop Carnegie Hall
Tangled in parachutes
Thrashing for their fall
Meaning means nothing
At all

And on the stem
Of Time
You and I
Comprise a 21st Century
Lullaby
Though the roots are strong
The stem does bend
We climb and we don’t know why
For the rose
That must be our end

Another twilight
Over Riverside Drive
The fortress shines
Like it could be alive
An accident ahead
A stranger might’ve died
You are impatient
Because you need
To drive

Back to the neighborhood
You want to escape
Where they haven’t calculated love
Without their hate
And your meat is waiting
Don’t be late
For all the ways you call
Emptiness fate

And what you deem ambition
Annihilates the self
Because your happiness
Is owned by someone else
In you, I loved me
Naturally
In the age of media
Connection’s an anomaly

Now you are gone
And I drive alone
Passenger seat empty
I could call you on the phone
I want to but I can’t
And I know I won’t
And you will and you might
But you don’t

I never wanted you to be a ghost to me
We were young and we were flesh
And for a second we were free
Now I am once again
Someone like me
Rubbing static crumbs of light
Within America’s dream

#7: Don’t You Know

All that violence
Made it inconvenient
To fit into the narrative
I’m supposed to belong to

My friend carried a stickball bat
Because they wanted to kill him
A couple years later
The drugs did it for them

He hung from the windows of speeding cars
And encouraged me to write
Somewhere in time
I’m hanging out with him tonight

He’s part of history
Reluctantly
As are all we
And who tells the story

Don’t you know
Don’t you know
A pretty pop song makes the world go round
Don’t you know
Don’t you know
If you ain’t pretty
They don’t want you to make a sound

I, me, and my ugly voice
Remember every wrong choice
I could be easily gone
I received a reprieve

You, found me in the noise
You comforted me
I wanted to die
And you showed me what to need

So, I fell in love with you
And you saw my soul bared
You won’t speak to me these days
But I still think of you when I’m scared

When my mind gets dark
I think of him
I think of you
You both wanted me to write
Maybe you both understood

How do you?
Reconcile a second life?

#5: 2nd Avenue

The deep flight
Into Manhattan light
Disappeared from their sight
You knew my name

Walking on movie theater carpet
Passing the fish in the market
We tried to forget where we started
I knew your name

Lovers and not lovers
Touching and fleeing each other
Should have held you on second avenue
All the same

Playing the game
Nobody blamed
Should have held you on
Second avenue
All the same