SOHO

SOHO is coming soon 🥀🔥 …

SOHO was originally written in collaboration with The Verse Verse and the estate of Allen Ginsberg ~ inspired by my trips to New York, the people I’ve met and adventures I’ve been on. Red bricks and terraces contrast a New York street from any other. The rain is always present, wether falling or in potential. But there is a soul to this city as if it were a poet to all the world. When Ana Maria Caballero, Sasha Stiles and Elisabeth Sweet contacted me to contribute a poem to After Ginsberg I was at the time roaming the streets of Soho writing poetry. I swiftly acquired a copy of “Gates Of Wrath from a booksellers on the streets of Brooklyn.

Ginsberg saw in his poetics, as in his collection “Gates Of Wrath” which takes its name from the poem by William Blake;

“To find the Western path,

Right thro' the Gates of Wrath

I urge my way;”

Comparing those gates to the gates of Manhattan, walking through its sun drenched streets ~ in the Spring which May at any point turn to grey. At times Ginsberg spoke of a writhing hell in Manhattan as much as cascading angels. It was for him the devil’s parlor. 

I saw that parlor too and sat on its couch, it’s smoke filled rooms of a culture on the tides of change.

Ginsberg was at a vital part of that tide in his time. Where structures of tradition, perhaps the best of tradition was overhauled by the radicalization of the changing times. 

Poetry was protest, love was protest, humanity was protest. 

Soho came at a time when for me I felt lost wandering New York without direction,

But for where the street guided me and the promise of digital art I thought if romance fell from the sky, it must  land on the streets of Soho and those pavements where Ginsberg tred, outside the theatre down Broadway. Below were the pigeons perched on bronze sculptures that changed in the sunlight throughout the day. 

I wondered into bars throughout Manhattan with my poetry book in hand and visits to the Chelsea Hotel ~ accompanied at times by the curator Haiver as we discussed the state of digital art, whiskeys in hand. 

At the time I was releasing the Fable exhibition with SuperRare ~

I felt as if a transformation was occurring, and once it did the world world around had changed. I had changed, things would never be the same, and poetics of my life. I saw the city and its people in a chorus of poetry unlike any other. The buildings touched the skyline and Ginsberg’s ghost whispered to me of a letter I had not sent.

Below is that letter.

SOHO

Poems by Laurence Fuller

Burlesque where I went that day,
Through the smoke and pink,
Red and black lingerie,
It’s left and ran away,
To the dance floor, to dance all day,
I write the ending on each page,
Write in hopeless decay,
She arrived and went away,
It’s unlike everything on display,
Staring at the flower of the faded stained and hopeless hour,
Redress the red dress,
Garters stretched across soft skin,
A potent pink flesh,
A single sweet intoxicating voice trembles in the seductive silence,
Like a hummingbird’s tweet in a volcanoe’s chaos,
Bizarre disturbance like a flaming cross,
Into the wretched gardens where we lost,

Umbrella’s shade hides the despair,
hides the raincoat of violence,

Secret rooms where they exist,
Find you in the parlor of the rubrics cube boudoir,
Pipes and libraries,
Serpents and time burning
Spurned to the last this club’s hurting my eyes,
Dusted the cupboards well enough surely
Desire, lined up by a house of lies,

It seems so sweet,
Though tinged with the devil’s hashish
I will pull you under
Where the merchants peddle their feet
Above the devil’s conceit

Stuck in the halls,
The blank pages,
Rusted frames on the walls,
My own note could be the mark of the sages

Enough of the pigs trough through the pages

I know what I’ve done
Capital down the sink,
Capital on the run,

Circles on the pages,
Ashes in my drink,
Cigarettes in the sink,
Painters friends and myrtle,
Worried so they think,

I climbed the walls of the museum,
And visit the visions,

Pure splash of paint,
Pure chains of fate,
Paint the relish of subconscious tastes,

Odalisque why was there dark patches
Wondering alone with a notepad and pen
Carrying these lonesome bags
Where is happiness in the bricks and stains

I’m never scared
Never hoping
Doesn’t care
Silence is broken
As I walk down Mayfair

Paintings stacked from the floor,
Much of the time, I’m at their door knocking for hours,
Lost in limbo,
Cello struck a chord,
It’s bow damp in the twilight,
It’s player dripping from rain,
Suits soaked and puddles in the floor boards,

Have I become such an arbiter of degradation,
Sectioned off by the yellow lines at the train station,
Never met her shadows in the park,
Because it was too dark already,
Madeline maiden, of the darkest arts,
Stumbled at the start.

Burnt perfume thick with lavender oil,
The pastiche black, colors of a geisha’s umbrella
I loved her, in my own sick way
I wanted her, still perhaps to this day
It’s easy to take shots at a man in love, for we love in secret
The mirrors always in front of our eyes
Guilty by suspicion and always suspect in disguise,
But still I smile
Maybe it’ll be good enough this time,
I feel like I’ve done my best,
I left my stool at the burlesque,
An aging ticket fell from my pocket,
We can put it all to rest,
Holy and entropic,
Close to my chest.

ADDITIONAL POEMS…

Strawberry ICE CREAM

The sun in Soho melts the ice creams of all that pass by,

It melts the smiles on all their faces and melts the ice in their coffee,

It melts the sound from all the instruments of a street choir roaring melodies of this city,

The sun’s dust gathers in piles,

All the clouds in the sky floated like puffs of ice at sea,

And the ice bergs at sea like mirrors reflected,

As you and I saw in eachother the earth like shattered glass that floats on the surface of this life,

Lillies in a pond of consciousness we float too as the sun shares its presence with us,

For what eclipses, what shines off the ice that’s glinting,

Some hope of a portal into paradise,

The garden where we reside,

Is that through the iris perceive,

The true flowers from the weeds,

Strawberries on the vine, give all your beauty unto me,

As we lay basking in the sun beneath,

Our fingers dripping wet with ice cream.

CHOOSE BEAUTY

Life itself is an oath,

It is the beauty we chose,

Turning hands clenched by the coast.

Falling curtains are what we love the most,

Ideas hang in the balance of what we are and what we know,

Within a persistent echo,

Digging in our past we find heroes,

With rings around their bones.

I acknowledge we’re only here for a moment.

Other’s wish for me to steer my mast in their direction,

Hoping to see in my eyes; their own reflection.

I know how you felt, when you found a voice to use language as a vessel,

To create the world around you in your image.

How many others wish to swim in your river and move your pen to their wishes?

To see their own ideas more beautifully expressed and enacted?

With all their failings redacted.

Where art hangs on the pillars of invention,

Where the wall, the floor, the earth,

To the void in our chests that see ourselves in unrest,

Glory waits for tomorrow, where fate is frozen.

Today kiss my face and tell my broken ears of a choice;

Choose love,

Choose rich,

Choose bliss,

Choose to dream,

Choose to kiss,

Choose beauty.