My Street, Your Street

My Street, Your Street, what do I see? I see greying buildings, facades of crumbling civilization. I see weeping sorrows rise from heat and Godless fog. I see misty, pumped-up street punks on adrenaline and ice, plastic and gold bling bling, warring urban wolves, legends of city gaols. I see druggies, drunkards, slatterns, scalawags, sailors in white caps and blue pea coats in search of blacked-eye prostitutes. I see neon signs advertising Peep Shows, All Night Pool, 2 for 1 Booze. I see migrained magicians sapped of strength pulling soulless shoes from bellies of stuffed rabbits. Ah, the power of the poet's eyes, his arching words, verses dripping on tungsten lines of yellowing foolscap. To the lumbering lunatics, disposable in careless worlds of crazy minds of unglued rumblings. What of my street? I see acid face cops. Baton twirling. Broken heads. Social Workers on sedentary couches. I see unhinged accountants, undone and overdone roaring like lions at racing ambulances, drivers in front seat cabs reefing Jamaican Joints, driving the dead and dying to bloodless doctors and wily nurses slipping bennies into dry throats and rich plastic surgeon tum tums. Close your ears and stop the lions roar, the thieves and the pushers, pimps in pompadours, porno queens, drug addled flutists selling Bach out of a burlap bag of baroque tunes to fill tuneless lives.

But what of your street?

Tucked in the suburbs. The white picket fences. The manicured lawns of green grass and stone paths that lead to the rustic New England home. Hardwood floors. Stainless steel stove and refrigerator, marble counters of carbon steel knives, shrimp sauted in churned butter dipped in sour bread loaves. What of your street? Loveless teenagers, lonely embraces on a double size mattress on parent's springs, crying in the night. Bed wetters and Bed Sitters. Mothers comatose on the three seat couches...alcohol, prescription drugs, sixties memories, absent husbands in Cairo whore houses, rich salesmen of olive oil and farmed mendacity. Oblivious to the world of a Suburban street. Oblivious to the maelstrom of Mid East madness. Gun Ships. Rocket Launchers. Apache Helicopters. Silly Putty Bombers in strapped suicide belts of vinyl and aluminum grommets. Homicide. Suicide. Self-Defense. Self-Preservation. Self-Immolation. Endless Sorrows in sequels of time immemorial. What of the streets of rapping Rabbis. Hip-Hopping Imams. Crooning Calvinist. Dancing Taoist Monks in Mary Quant mini skirts throwing garlands of peace at bespoke madness in Saville Row suits. My Street, Your Street, Mad Streets, Streets everywhere rising up and lifting the mothers off besotted couches, colliding in a giant chamber of love and despair, happiness and sadness. Look into the sun. See the moonlight of our civilization. The streets awash in tears, paved in hope for a tomorrow, any tomorrow while it lasts into the twilight.