I Am-Sterdam

I AM-STERDAM / 'The Ins & Outs'

meteorite-slash over herengracht ‘gentlemens’ canal
where mad colours run psychedelic ripples
on the wrong side of my reflection
born beneath the sign of fire

bright lights bright cafés shimmer shimmer,
tram-lines quiver, the sound of sea in the trees
born beneath the sign of water

once hazardously wasted on a Thai stick
sat on a kerb for 45-mins straight, without moving
animation suspended, on pause, slow obliteration
struck dumb, then snap back, with no time elapsed
I must have come from someplace
just can’t remember where,
rap on the radio, lyrics connect in burning code
scattergun schmatterglum shatter-gloom encrypted
messed-up raddled, listen, saying the lines loud
soothes their quick-theft backwards into poems
born beneath the sign of the minotaur,
I Am-Sterdam

Rembrandt gazes down in ghostly stone in doublet, cap
& wistful regret, at needles, spent condoms &cold pizza,
he steps down as dark turns & the moon grows vast
freezing the city to stone, melting stone to flesh,
& we tiptoe together through Rembrandtplein
my mind made of gravel, where digital dogs howl &
sound resounds around in inpactful impactwise narrative
painting genes and bones, stonewashed jeans and stoned
through the square that puts the dam in Amsterdam
where even the bag-lady rides a bag-bicycle, &
fast-food burger-bar mothers feed kind to be cruel, where
cigarettes have health-warnings and brown energy cafés
don’t, ganja minds breathe god particles in magic potion 309
gauntlets of fat women are chewing iphones,
& there are chicks with dicks on the corner,
tres strange, born beneath the sign of aphrodite

light-years later, scanning every face on the Rokin, but
he’s returned to stone & I’m in the crummy Thorbecke
hotel skyping you home-thoughts & facebook phone-pics,
before we met my life was lived within these snippets
yet the light has dimmed, even as she shies away,
at one time you do stuff, smoke stuff, drink stuff
then do other stuff, rather than not doing stuff
a coming down, coming of age, or just coming?
there’s no time for ‘you should have known me when’,
time tells lies, there’s no time to be retrospective,
these memories you burn, & too late for new stories
so what other way to tell all these storms in golden cups,
trade away days, forget regrets, forsake mistakes
born beneath the sign of forgetting…