the secret life of things

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There's a secret life to things,
like Ricky said,
that covert slant of light
that falls upon the page
and burns Apollo's lines out of
Atlas' lesser verbiage:
the language of shadows,
of Pablo's sax notes and fleeting glances,
that electricity that cracks the air
and beckons the landscape listen...
that crackles through
the hapless city night of Bottoms' dreams
to in the morning
from 101 dew drops glisten...

It's Midas' fabled curse,
the silver-screened lining of madness,
that Janus-hidden city "through the window"
where sunshine-maddened men
read sinister-tinted dream news
from papers that float by themselves
in Baker street-light lit pipe-smoke
just outside the mighty walls
of cloud-enshrouded Xanadu:
that truth-entranced, rainbow-lit
Macbethian knock-shattered palace
of lovers, poets and idealists,
of sickened pretty visions:
"illegal in every town,"
taking their stolid form in the shadows...
as real invisible
as if plainly seen