Stranger Music

Leonard Cohen in the park
The sunlight turning to lechery
Battered pages spilling wanton
Naked women, thighs glistening
Birds no longer singing
A new symphony of moans and sobs
Throbbing in air rich with musk
As all the beautiful maladies are revealed
Treacheries, betrayals, all the blemishes
Weeping sores, raw and exposed
The poet laid bare, indecorous
Hairy and fumbling at flaccid genitals.

There’s a strange purity
Divinity in the lowly, the mean
Scriptures folded in soiled bedclothes
Love and hate in equal measure
Adorn kitchen tables
Holy litanies hidden in the whore’s
Undone lips as she staggers
Through the ancient dreaming Montreal streets
Wiping away the last drops
Of cold semen
Joining the lines of the desperate
Trailing in the shadows of cathedrals.

It all mingles, a riot
Grace sings, but it’s a dirty, low down blues
Hungry and drooling
Dignity given to the filthy act of living
Between the sparse frames
Of the poems falling
From his coat hem
Retreating to the tower further down the track,
Glorious traitor, broken voiced
Singing to the gluttons, the panders
To make them pure
Pouring over them sunlight like lechery
The rust and gold of stranger music.