You don't know Jack, and you don't want to...he'll get you in the end, the East End. And did he know of a supposedly twenty year dead Yank poet? Doesn't matter, I had fun with this word riff.
Like Haiku?
leather apron sees
sculpture in a po'r whore's belly
he trims away excess
The One Word Bird
© Mike M. West, August 2000
, CA
persist if you must
to strike up conversation
with the bird above the bust
you'll only learn frustration
in unanswered conversation
with the one word bird.
take it from me
it’s a foreboding thing t’see
a bird of shiny diamond black come winging back.
No doubt with memories of your haunted Lenore’s last wisp of breath
her years of contest lost to thrashing pain and strapped down death
Jacky, as your crazed mind is hollowing
I tell you you're close on following
There ne’er was a Lenore in your life mate
Ne’er existed a soul such as she, only a yank poetic memory
was then, and still it is, only a word--not a message from the lost
and you hoping to make that passage paying any cost.
ah, we hadn’t seen you'd soon enough come to think
that in such passion as yours alone abides an open ferry-bridge link
over death's chasm cross’d
to regain she who ne’er was, but in your mind became unfair lost...
Jacky, you're now at the ending place
from where you can't faithfully recall Lenore’s touch or face
you are dying in the gutted gore of your own whore-
ghosts strop-razored deeply to blood and bone
a thousand details
as the grasping mind fails
one taken away
to nevermore hear you pray,
to apologize,
nevermore to eulogize
only your true Lenore
and all her pale shadows in imagined Lenores before
My Jack, how strange are grief and loss that can be so firmly held
in just the single word
you relayed to me as uttered by that bird
with you so terminally sentenced to re-inflicting torture and pain
that you’ve brought it upon yourself, Jacky, dying, belly-shanked by a waiting whore in the ‘chapel’s misty fog and rain
so you’ve crawled yourself back here
on will to live so severe.
entrails hanging where she cut
and now you shout of Lenore and tell me of the bird again, but
killer, who bears no murderous guilt, no shame,
wasn’t that the catalyst of your red campaign?
Wasn’t it the bird
Wasn’t it the finality of the word
Made you seek--
Sent you on your streak--
Murd’rin’ yet another shadow Lenore
To cross that threshold and follow another departing soul-balloon to your lost one’s door?
Oh it’s the madness in you, aye,
To seek it here again as you die
As if you ‘adn’t ‘eard it right the first time
As if you ‘adn’t ‘eard it right the first time
with one shrill squeak
that black wing and pointed beak
that one shrill squeak
of the universe's single magical word
that can forever send your beseeching soul
to the bottom of that strangling sea
to the very fuckin’ bottom of that strangling sea
own up, Master Jack, ‘tis the fear
it wasn’t ever real ‘as brought you here?
The fear to chase an un-catchable shadow soul
In your frantic, murd’rin’ role
Down five blind alleys of carnal lust, alleys not of souls but of life-endowed dust, only dust, and nothing more!
--Certainly no opiated penny-novel dream-Lenore!
persist, if you must--
but know only that the relevance of
the one word bird
lies solely in the undisturbed dust
above that placid, pallid bust
close your eyes, master Jack,
put away your leather,
it ain’t coming back
you ‘eard it right the first time
you ‘eard it right the first time
George Yard
Buildings off Whitechapel High Street, London 1888
from the RedBlue Victorian Detectives Crime Club page by Mark Drooling
click the pic to pick up interesting Jack "bits" in the Walking Tour thread, then "alt +left arrow" back here - Mikey
© Mike M. West, 1999
http://ripper.wildnet.co.uk/visit.htm
