ex oriente lux

across from the patricia hotel a ghostly sign glows luminous thoughts in strict chinese strokes,
the windows dark the building blank as the eastern words jack across a slow to 30 kph zone...
the drifters and the seekers spread out their accumulations in exchange for another day,
another day of rounding the block only to find themselves back in the same fabrications,
where the fabulists drown in their own spit and the somnambulists soothe the nay-slayers...

"The simple damning lust, 

float flat magic in low changing 

evenings. Shiver your hands 

in dance. Empty all of me for 

knowing, and will the danger 

of identification,

Let me sit and go blind in my dreaming 

and be that dream in purpose and device."*

[*excerpt from "The New World" by Imamu Amiri BARAKA, 1969]