Alexander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Prie Pour Nous | A poem by Leonard Cohen, 1964
Alexander Trocchi in his apartment in London, c. 1964
Who is purer
more simple than you?
Priests play poker with the burghers,
police in underwear
leave crime at the office,
our poets work bankers’ hours
retire to wives and fame-reports.
The spike flashes in your blood
permanent as a silver lighthouse.
I’m apt to loaf
in a coma of newspapers,
avoid the second-hand bodies
which cry to be catalogued..
I dream I’m
a divine right Prime Minister,
I abandon plans for bloodshed in Canada,
I accept an O.B.E.
Under hard lights
with doctor’s instruments
you are at work
in the bathrooms of the City,
changing the Law.
I tend to get distracted
by hydrogen bombs,
by Uncle’s disapproval
of my treachery
to the men’s clothing industry.
I find myself
believing public clocks,
taking advice
from the Dachau generation.
The spike hunts
constant as a compass
You smile like a Navajo
discovering American oil
on his official slum wilderness,
a surprise every half hour.
I’m afraid I sometimes forget
my lady’s pretty little blonde package
is an amateur time-bomb
set to fizzle in my middl-age.
I forget the Ice Cap, the pea-minds,
the heaps of expensive teeth.
You don a false nose
line up twice for the Demerol dole;
you set yourself on the steps of the White House
you try to shoot the big arms
of the Lincoln Memorial;
you spy on scientists,
stumble on a cure for scabies;
you drop pamphlets from a stolen jet:
“The Truth about Junk”;
you pirate a national tv commercial
shove your face against
the window of the living- room
insist that healthy skin is grey.
A little bood in the sink
Red cog-wheels
shaken from your arm
punctured inflamed
like a road map showing cities
over 10,000 pop.
Your arms tell me
you have been reaching into the coke machine
for strawberries,
you have been humping the thorny crucifix
you have been piloting Mickey Mouse balloons
through the briar patch,
you have been digging for grins in the tooth-pile.
Bonnie Queen Alex Eludes Montreal Hounds
Famous Local Love Scribe Implicated
You purity drives me to work.
I must get back to lust and microscopes,
experiments in embalming,
resume the census of my address book.
You leave behind you a fanatic
to answer R.C.M.P. questions.
Leonard Cohen, 1964
.
burgher – a citizen of a town or city, typically a member of the wealthy bourgeoisie.
R.C.M.P. – Royal Canadian Mounted Police
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