LOTHAR'S EVIL KINGDOM

305. LOTHAR'S EVIL KINGDOM (nov. 1967, nyc):

At the readymades where really there was nothing : car tires and truck tires piled together and the countless juices of whatever slips through as rainwater and grease and seepage and toil - all of that stuff below filthy windows through which one could hardly see and I knew that as I knew the forcefield that kept it all going - up above the elevated highway falling apart and crack-crumbling where the vehicles flowed like emanations from Lothar's Evil Kingdom or somesuch drivel by a rabble-rousing fate but within myself I felt nonetheless settled and in one place where I wanted to be and the river-wide smokes of a few fires and factories - the sort of stuff that fouls a river drips its poison into the water uses the water as a runoff stream of filth and vile - they curled over the mad Hoboken horizon far across from me and even though now maybe it's all gone back then back here where I'm speaking off the Vietnam-killer-force incremental dread and all its matter ran on through morning light and afternoon brilliance and the slow shading of dusk like death towards evening - nothing left but loud voices and the enchantments of anger : girls in crystal berets parading from Canal with fatigue-wearing guys as fatigued as their clothing : weaponry on display and all that mad revolution in the air going nowhere and the shouts and slogans of idiots countered by the shouts and slogans of idiots from the other side I paraded Broadway I got dragged to Whitehall I was tortured and taken in and then thrown right back out incendiary 1967 nighttime daytime unreason kill-a-cop torture-a-prisoner wipe the slate clean reasoning the kind the Government would use to make a point but without involvement I walked away from everything unattached and I cared nothing for the makers nor what they made : train tracks lying in wait the daily commuters hoarding their briefcase time struggling lowly over stairways and doorways and stepping over whatever in the way could hinder them and the fine sheeted girls who passed by looked for all the world like young mirrors of lovely time while the men dragged through their muck carrying both their time and the maggot-infested regrets they kept : slime-ridden memories military-cap-wearing soldiers on leave playing something anything along 42nd street bowling lanes and ski-ball outlets walking sideways through the hookers and fags and whores on display while cops twirled their sticks and the maddened black-Muslims hawked their papers and scorched their pavements and in that dark December night it always seemed that - no matter where I was in whatever part of town - what came to the fore was the Lie that all existence was NOTHING more than a Lie shading and wrongly filtering everything we think and do and assume to be and all that's left when the final dawn does finally break is the strange confusing red sky of another morning just waking to be.