Roderick Lane

Roderick Lane
will smell the dust and death
of the great, great West.

Off the bus,
he lights his mother's stale cigarette.

Looks fantastic in those boots,
in that Aztec Jacket.
(It is a prismatic, hallucinatory,
idolatrous thing. It is the fabric of his dreams).

But the city has thirty years
to play a merciless game.

The metropolis shrieks,
lurid lights invade him
while he sleeps;
the dirty Atlantic
spreads its breath across his back.

In thirty years
his each and every aspect
has become an artifact.

Now, still in his Occidental boots,
he seems a curious shell.
His jacket is a listless cloth,
of dust and death it smells.

(It was a prismatic, hallucinatory,
idolatrous thing. It was the fabric of his dreams).