4:35 AM Thursday, October 06, 2011
BROADWAY IN ASTORIA
The trance jungle is
wilting in cubicles made of honey,
domains of dismay where
hills of stranded grass cram
lifetimes into cans of daylight.
Sardines and salmon,
stacked as pillers of dismay,
remind you that
greatness is a fabrication,
a pasty fantasy.
Wilderness zaps past your bedroom window,
vrooming and zooming into the brittle, nubile night.
You do not know
where you are in that
rented hole
over which you shall
float for decades.
You see a stranger in the mirror.
The stranger sees you.
Both of you step away.
In separate quarters you shower and shit,
welcoming the next 35 years of
forgettable life into the
cold air of theater cursing itself as
failed opportunity.
You think of the venom on this street,
the poison and aggravation of romance and the
ugly violence of failed love.
You throw your coolness into the
tombs of passing strangers.
Is there a calm?
Is there serenity?
You do not ask.
You do not know.
No one knows,
not the unread Bible or the
unelected politicians who
glower like sleepless morons in the
tepid Astoria nights where
freedom reigns in the
bedrooms of the uninspected.
The surface of the East River breathes with the
bellies of the unknown, tipping its fat hand with the
moneyed wink of forgotten mayors.
How has Broadway changed since you first met it?
Voices from the past rise from the sewers,
freed from where the grasses and brooklets,
running to the rivers, were
flattened by the rage of tar and concrete.
Hairless and jaundiced you
lie naked on the floor,
masturbating, showering at 3am,
imagining other people’s lives and
occupations as if they
fill a continuum of love,
a muddy graph where
races and creeds are
mushed together in the
style of an Astoria street fair,
or as you call it,
the lava lamp of America.
We live like rotted cordwood,
poor and affluent,
workers and the lazy,
our drunken stumblings and
self-induced orgasms
broadcast through
walls and windows wide and weak.
The flesh of the dead will drip through your ceiling.
O, Astoria.
O, Astoria.
Astorio.
Astorio.
