Max Blagg’s
‘70’s [Slight return]
‘70’s [Slight return]
My daughter offered me a hundred dollars
to eat a dead moth a habit picked up
from her mom who was always insisting
I eat live things on a dare
caterpillars and flies served up on leaves
wasps and worms shaken and stirred
but I just couldn’t crunch that spider meat
like I would have in the bent frame
of youth when I understood nothing
and drank everything,
waiting in the wings for something
to begin to kick in to be real
real gone again waiting
on the starving actors who
cluttered the booths at Phebe’s
on the Bowery all of them
destined for misfortune
unless they got a real job.
They dream on subways now
that last curtain call the applause
as rich as velvet fading into
the latticework of morning
as the train pulls into the underworld
of Grand Central Station.
There was no art in life just raw bodies
colliding in the chemical night
soft explosions of lust and battery
eclipsing the civilized as
the years poured down the drain.
Echoes of that loveless tune still resound
through the hallways of the Hotel Chelsea
epidural center of a numb youth
the hum of true Bohemia
coursing through the building
pulled me right off the bank and
ducked me in the river,
Underground USA, washed me
down in the blood of a wig
I knew what I would find there
as I swam through oily corridors
beguiled by pale submariners
abandoned in this morbid institution
who plied their cunty trade
with a feral resolution.
Their trapdoors opened like
the Jaws of Life I tumbled
down their mohair stairs to land
on piles of drugs and threadbare floors
of factories retooled for heels
of whores with hearts of gold and
daughters who would later work at Scores.
They were bigger than Life magazine
veterans of a thousand mimeo parties
fingers black with printer’s ink they drank
and stripped in rooms with a view
basements in the crawling dark
re-enacting for the squares
nocturnal clashes in the Park with
Minotaurs in studded gloves
who prowled the spikestrewn lawns
and lay in wait beyond the railings
to relieve the harried citizens
of whatever cash they carried
translating it to third rate dope.
A dollar for your life in hallways
enameled with the texture of nightmare
and when this innocent new arrival asks
what was New York really like back then?
I can reply without exaggeration
“Utter heaven.”
Max Blagg was born in England and has lived in New York City since 1971. He is the author of four collections of poetry, and several other books. His most recent publication The Little Dress Book [Shallow Books, NYC 2010] was listed in About Poetry’s Top 20 small press publications of 2010. He has collaborated with various artists, including Alex Katz, Jack Pierson, Richard Prince and Keith Sonnier. With Glenn O’Brien Blagg co-edited the legendary art/lit/tit magazine, Bald Ego. He is a contributing editor to Oyster, BG and 10 Magazine, a Visiting Professor at the New School and a member of the faculty at the School of Visual Arts. A book of stories, Ticket Out, and new collection of poems, Slow Dazzle, are forthcoming.
