Hollywood

We are the Feeders
Smiling wryly at you with polluted smiles in daylight smog
Watching always. Exiled residents, outcasts
Disaffected runaways thousands of miles from redemption
Flanking sidewalks stained with the residues
Of dreams untimely expired by disillusionment
The teeming boulevards and congested avenues
Crawl in peristaltic electric neon
Writhing with grazing herds of human cattle
The hordes of midwestern tourists are intoxicated
Upon naïve enchantment
Wearing commercialized souls upon their sleeves
Capitalism drips from the furtive eyes of restless shop owners
And swindlers alike
As they feed from the fat below pliable flesh
The youthful splendor of delicately divine ethereal girls
Elicits nubile impulses
That beguile pimps with rapt wishful longings
Of only dreamt about business opportunities
Here we all gather in unique ceremony
Of cultural integration
They have everything here, man
The cheapest booze
Designer drugs
Hookers with an unrivaled work ethic
All you have to do is name your price
It's okay
What do you want?
Sometimes the key to unlocking your freedom
Is by allowing yourself decadence
It can be seen
In the blank stare of your eyes
That you are not different
From the rest of us
We are deadened and soulless
Our bodies not temples
But run-down motels
With vacancies in our hearts
Our smiles are red-light districts
Where people come to feel good
Guests check in
Guests check out
They find refuge in the safe dark
Anonymity we insure
It is somewhere they can abandon
The person they are otherwise pressured to become
Where they can remove their old cracking masks
Where they can lay down arms
Where they can dispose all their illegitimate fears
Here people are unburdened by the constraints
Of a social conscience
Of a stale moral code
They never wanted to abide
Streamlined in death carriages of silver machinery
The guests are shuttled from hamlets and villages
They descend from insular silent privacy
Of deep forested hills
And arrive here in continuous influx
At this insect kingdom of hive chambers
Connected by gray crawling streets
Adorned with puked upon spit upon plaques
To memorialize dead stars
They come looking for Eden
They come looking to be tempted by Original Sin
The ambrosial fruits are everywhere abound
Dripping tantalizingly their succulent fructose juices
That glisten as droplets of sweat sheen
Upon the bare breast of a woman
In these desperate hours
Of desperate need
For desperate escape
We begin
We end
And at this threshold
Where the sacred crosses into the profane
Innocence finds its damp
Soft rotting burial ground
In the muddied souls of human depravity
Because of us
The Feeders
Lurking upon these frenzied Hollywood streets
Our guests have now taken the night
And administered fear
To where once wonder was endless
They have dressed the night in
Tabloid articles
Of violent association
Even revelry is condemned
Bacchus hangs dead from his own vine
As the murderers conspire
With the beasts in their own soiled hearts
Who extinguished the stars?
Who has blackened out the moon?
Nothing any longer shines beyond this world
Or in this world
Hollywood is as cold as that of space
The dark of the heavens
Is related to the human soul in this hour
Though we are all different
We are all the same
We are the ruiners
We who are these sins of the Father
Forgive us all, Mother
Forgive us our rape
Our murders
Our theft of the night