avenue c
white clouds on the lower east side,
our latest winter storm.
highness,
why here?
at 2 am
the wolves are cold,
your wallet burns
like a campfIre
it's either sex or drugs.
it's drugs. no surprise.
that language highborn-
"snow
"
,
"crystal,"
"angel dust"
wordfalls on avenue c,
no two the same,
eight inches tonight
so
by inches the streets go under,
winter's
frozen throat
a
fractured semiology
we
mush over--
half -hearted burp of siren,
sudden
drums from squatters' tenement,
naked, whirling figure at window
set
off by flaking window-frames,
old
men sucked into knitted caps--
soon, the city's placard announces, all this
will be scrapped--
eventually out of mind
what
the symbols flatten on--
a
whitewash
sure, let's get high.
nothing in god's dead greenhouse
to free the animal crouched
in all of my cells.
always
something just out ofview
grinds its teeth.
what I am, what I think I am,
tears in the night
a
word drops on each thing. then this blizzard of perceptions--
the really deep stuff
snowed in