Ignition

Garbage trucks

sirens

occasional ignored screams

nocturnal New York

‘60s Vintage

or ‘70s

or ‘80’s

or…

Such echoes the calliope of early morning’s darkness

behind weathered pull-down shades

their sepia guised reality made blue-gray

aglow with Emerson’s 12 inch flicker-fantasia

my Late Late Movie conjugal ghosts

merging ever so smoothly into early dawn slumber

Time

like a typical Avenue C icebox

gathering frost ever so stealthily

maintaining just enough credence

to preserve Sunday’s awaited feast

peas and carrots beside Grandma’s care package

Spam ala chutney spice

with graham cracker Alaskan something to close

Along Avenue C

there are many shrouds of nightly anonymity

orchestrated by the unearthly sounds of horror flicks

of faraway beach romance groans

far too cheesy to even warrant respectable exploitation reviews

Beneath the lids of closed eyes

such sounds screech across the pristine sparkle of my imagined stars

riding the flatulent winds of White Castle burgers and bad coffee

the remnants of another day spent in the vacuous unemployment struggle

desperate to leave behind the vortex of noxious fifty-cent images

42^nd Street cinema escapes from sunburns of reality

awaiting yet another disappearance of light

a subway token’s round-the-world trip to home

retreat from whirlpools of city blight

the perpetual red-on-white-lettered exits to urban hell

Once upon a time

mother soothed my ears with Jules Verne’s adventures

Jack London’s wilds

Aesop’s comforting fables

hundreds of childhood nights

gladdened by Life’s almanac of wonders

Now

Eyes flutter

open to the ever faithful scratch

of sink-roaches

thinking they can steal what’s left

thinking like the conspiring greed out there

it’s theirs to take

uh uh

Dignity

Even an Avenue C survivalist

knows the sound of netless hoops

self-worth’s inner roar of silent tears

cascading over the heart on hearing Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety

or the sight of Henry Moore’s sublimated rages in bronze

Yes

Tomorrow is here

beyond the square-tube field of static sign-off

anthem’s furled stars and stripes

making ready the daytime cooling of vacuum tube transmission

Awaiting more copper coiled control

Today is anew with winter’s fresh breath of immaculate fallout

white upon the litter of yesterday’s attempts

vanquishing the test-pattern hiss of another sleepless night

a silence made greater only

by the vow to give voice to the quietness

Another chance to change

today’s version of inner fire

understood by the light of its own burning

Yes

As I penned another sentence…

We have ignition