Booze, Cthulhu, and the Weeds

Moving down - this street - again,

sidewalks buckled under the weight of invisible pedestrian feet
that must have walked by a decade ago, before the weeds
began to surface like so many wolves
stalking ankles with mouths full of thistle-sharp teeth

The dull blast of a foghorn is their hunting cry, these
feelers testing for prey and the brain must be floating
in the harbor because it's just me and the weeds along
an unmarked street in the herniated bowels of this dyspeptic
old man of a city

The buildings float by, I can see through the amber
spyglass that is my forty ounce malt liquor bottle
(One of the last things anybody ever made in
the U.S. of A.) - it convinces me that I am warm,
My life a thick, soggy yakisoba noodle in the beefy
broth of time and I'm sucking it up unsure of just how
long it's gonna be-

I've been waiting-and footstep after footstep it feels
like there's a rotted molar stuck in my heel so I stop,
Take the boot off, and can't-not while the weeds are out
swaying all spider-like in the breeze and there'd be no one
to find the body, not if it was dragged back into the harbor,
and certainly not here and now

I'm surprised it doesn't leave more half-eaten cadavers
in the streets because fear sells and it could be a star,
and everybody loves stars, but this thing stays so quiet
it takes a lot of close looking to even guess at its form

It's gotta be the same as a Polaroid of an old, ugly five-year-old boy
just chipped his tooth on the handlebar of his tricycle in a
mess of blood and chrome and sweat-matted brown hair taken
just three seconds after the kid had started pedaling

Five-year-olds grow up wiser, though, and that means
wise enough to know there's no resolution and kicking
(and kicking and screaming doesn't save cattle from the abbatoir's floor)

It was only a matter of time before the unctuous old snakeoil
salesman slipped in his product and impaled himself on a white
picket fence-damn you, Joneses, I've got a bigger house, a faster
car, and a newer tv, and now you've got me in collections you filthy
silver-tongued weeds-crowding out revolution with the empty
promises of money and the stability of money-symbol lies

All the automatic tellers with their cameras acting as eyes,
they ingest, digest, and regurgitate paper... and watch for the
database-maybe those lines lead back to Ohio, maybe they run
back down to the murky floor of the harbor where words like
"Novus Ordo Seclorum" are coined

Why do the gods of the ancients outlive even the memory of
the ancients in an age which spawns infinite machine generations
and exponentially increasing people for these sooty black, neon
illuminated, cold stink of decay-mixed-with-gasoline cities,
- this one, as I swagger down a vericose alleyway somewhere
in its teeming terminal anatomy?

Don't ask me, friend. I can't tell you why - I can't even tell you
How I know. I can't...

It's got me, it's got my soul (it's got my soul) - it's wrapped up
In this throbbing mess of razor-wire, semiconductors,
Plastic debris-I can feel its pulse
Behind broken plate glass windows-and I can hear it ringing me,
From that solitary payphone on the corner.

"Hello, this is [STATIC] Ka- [STATIC] -thul -hu [STATIC] from American Credit Hotline. May I interest you in a..."