12gauge.com 2002

Words in Quotes
(a parenthetical dialectic)

from the open vistas of the Lower East Side
(where Starbucks® juxtapose habichuela, tzidaka, and "honey bear vibrators")
you locomote amongst allies to Jay Street/Borough Hall
(rodent allies-downtown Brooklyn, where "dichotomy" don't mean dick),
and wait seventy-two trainless minutes, diversity for a bench
(look!-the blacks head left, the whites go right!),
admitting to yourself on the seventy-third minute:
there's no train that will go where I want.

so napping thus on that Guggenheim incline, remember this supposed "you"
(never the tuxedoed string quartet, allowing affected smirks to lonely applause),
confess at last that "you" is just "I" during the bleak hours of the day
(when Brain derails those damned eulogies you spout, so unseasonably warm),
and shower! shave! rise from the parabola of that makeshift "bed"-
solipsize at the laundromat, for example,
or commit without shame to no institution in particular
(and my service to this auto-catalytic conversion?)
discharged! just get on with summertime, that's all I am asking-

[thinking; a languid over-the-shoulder glance]

(yes dear, and it's "us" whom those black-jacketed guards are approaching so brusquely.)

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