after Driving Over the Brooklyn Bridge, by Robert Wooden Lynn
I dissolved into unemployment and I cherished
the worst of it. Greenback Pizza’s nails in my abdomen
and the lengthy mountains of Pennsylvania’s
rain in my midnight’s future: New York was over.
Or a minimum of invisible to my want, which was not, it seems,
a dependable technique for survival. Even once I turned my physique into an
envy others might inhabit lengthy sufficient for the town to really feel small,
I used to be simply ready for the silence to renew.
One evening the odor of fresh-poured asphalt cooling in
the acid drizzle meant that I used to be newly in love; one other evening
it meant I’d overstayed my welcome. Entire months I’d stroll
the size of boroughs, thoughts melted off my landlord’s medical,
clutching two-thirds of hire in my account prefer it might get me
wherever farther than New Jersey, clutching a half pack of contraband
Virginia Marlboros and a deal with I hadn’t earned from a bodega I hadn’t discovered
the identify of effectively sufficient to stroll into with out headphones on.
It turned extra obvious each day that the soul of what it was
I used to be shopping for had been torched a long time earlier, the soul of
what I used to be promoting quickly to observe. I remembered these males
haunting my block rising up, as if just lately dropped
off by a probing crew on a UFO,
dwelling within the illusions they’d purchased. And now I used to be on one other’s
block within the phantasm, in a metropolis that felt like its personal universe,
strolling into the bus station with my funeral swimsuit already on,
understanding the opposite aspect of Pennsylvania’s mountains
of rain held the useless and that the useless there can be
the few left who might inform the distinction between the phantasm
and the block itself.
