Ode
to My X-Agent on This Day
On
this day, the deceits of my agent,
whom I have fired and condemned to an eternal hell
of surrounding mirrors,
where she stands naked with her reflection multiplied
because I don't have to live with her
and maggots nesting in her nostrils,
creeping through the fat of her lies
join her gaseous burps to form perpetual excrements
of failed strategies and false accounts
as she negotiates with Beelzebub,
do not jail me in depression.
On this day, a rose breaks through the urban pavement
because the sun draws her red to bloom,
shining with expansive glory
in February winter that resembles April offspring.
On this day, I am born again
and even the street squalor,
backyard garbage of broken big wheels,
and dog shit on the pavement, creating a hazardous
trail
in which one has to navigate with stealth
because the many canine owners see these turds
as decorative elements of city life,
for their proletariat hopes of suburban grass
have faded with sentences of being working stiffs
through eternity,
all adds up to a romantic notion of new beginnings.
On this day, the wind whispers reason into my darkness
that has found a home in the cavities of memory
and will serve me as archival information for another
poem,
where my anger flies like Icarus.
February
1998 in Jersey City,
>From
Palisades in Jersey City
from
this vantage point, concrete spreads
like an endless fever of industrial revolution
as the Hudson disappears beyond geography
in an urban labyrinth
where even the sky has to ask for permission
to serve as lift for nine planes per minute landing
between JFK, La Guardia, and Newark International
while many helicopters waltz in their maneuvers
like a petite tribe of mechanical locust
with Wagnerian epic Hollywood proportions
from this vantage point, a million invisible volts
of electricity
charge the choreographed chaos
composed by heroic human spirit
pronouncing its will against nature
that remains captured for its protection within the
gates of city parks
from this vantage point, on the Palisades of Jersey
City
I feel connected to the auto graveyard in Hoboken
to the Central Avenue bodega selling raspberry Tropical
from Ecuador
to the Big Apple deli morning bagels for commuter
armies at Union Square
and to the captured dreams of millions in polluted
fog
from this vantage point, I celebrate another birthday
on the hill
smoking like a fleshy conduit for carcinogens
because of my romantic notion
that a city cowboy must go up in flames
