3540. FROM BROADWAY AND TWELFTH

FROM BROADWAY 

AND TWELFTH (1910)

I shade the city with these broken arms and eyes,

seeing small buildings, red brick, and windows and

casements tiny and light. Three-story walkups or four,

the anxious stairways bring the radicals forth - all

those pacifists and socialists and communists and

sorts - as one they are gathered together. This

unbrokered meeting, I sense will run on for hours,

into the wee of the night, for they have no jobs to go

to and their interest anyway is not in service, but fight.

They narrow the streets just by gazing down them: all

signboards and placards and marches and plight.

-

I live in a storied age, one of missions and causes.

Having never left oblivion, I remain quite familiar with

the steps of the downtrodden, the disenfranchised and

those enmeshed in fright from might. The little boy within

me still seems to want to dream, but the token hope

of an everlasting life just now seems stupid and dull.

All the real colors have vanished, with everything now

but a pallid and ghostly reminder of what it once may

have been, and all I know is that which I've seen.

-

Frost-wrapped, bundle-jacket, greatcoat keeping out the cold.

Just as new electric lights bring fewer doubts and dark'nings

so too does the open mind hold less of recess and paranoia;

fantasies of old, bereft, things of myth and magical belief,

alas, thy all now have to go. The only God here is movement.

Movement. The Movement. The Gift  -  and ideology beckons.

-

I cannot be encumbered by the heavy weave of circumstance.

I am striving for light and air, places to exude from, was of

reaching out. Driving off the demons, evil things that sing.

I shade the city with these broken arms and eyes.