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A Sunday Morning Fifth Avenue Walk

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  I’m on a 22-block  Fall escalator ride Moving with childhood velocity The sky is Tiffany blue Which makes everyone feel As prosperous as a happy ending My heart is that balloon Which floats over the Strand Bookstore kiosk with its novel-excavating archeologists As the Agnes de Mille of the wind   Shows it how to do the Red Maple Leaf rag As I am enveloped by the swarm of Columbuses discovering America The fanny pack of wolves The sneaker hoofed stampede The unicorn-fed girl in her multicolored finery The Mickey Mouse rat race The merry prankster dogs who prance like ponies as their wagtails keep time like metronomes The heads down flock, pray to their phones Lourdes knows why As I am passed by The Pashminas The Cashmeres The Good Wool Hunters The street-sleeping drifter Who is being transported back To his full belly past A cardboard of hand-scrawled commandments appears: A hastily written message from God Who has left explicit instructions as to how to lead a better, more purposeful
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This Can’t Possibly Be My Hand

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This Can’t Possibly Be My Hand Written by David Steven Simon  This can’t possibly be my hand. My hand is the tiny one That tried to weave the infinity of moonlight Into something tangible from the launching pad of a white wicker cradle My hand is the toddler one That was suffocated by a grown-up’s bigger one As we darted across The vast, black tar prairie of Jamaica Avenue In the middle of a car stampede. My hand is the kindergarten one that finger painted like Pollock Cranked a toy ukulele as if I only had minutes to live Gave life to puppets Clicked Bic pens like they were mini castanets Twirled the TV channel knob like a safecracker And tried to pin the tail on the donkey  who had suffered the tragic loss of his own My hand is the adolescent one That longed to touch the warm muffin breast of a willing girl Who would dance with me In the shadows of a school dance As my middle school manhood trembled and throbbed Like the front row of an Elvis concert. My hand is the young man’s one W
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The Ambrosial Fragrance of the Invisible

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Distant love can feel so close and close love can feel so distant depending on what the commute is. I could say the same thing about memories With eyes closed but open for Dreaming Season I can feel the warm skin And inhale the ambrosial fragrance of the invisible  which sways like in the hammock of my arms as the choir of my heart sings a good-night song like Tender Shepherd which began with the question “Can anything harm us mommy after the night lights are lit?” to which mother responded  “Nothing precious. They are the eyes that a mother leaves behind to guard her children.” And then the disciples of Neverland took flight to reach whatever in life felt scary unreachable  or far far away
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The Daddy Heart of the Sad--Eyed Man

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The living   experience loss but so do the recently dead  as they watch us grow smaller and smaller In the rearview mirror of their heaven-bound coffins feeling as forsaken as the sad-eyed man who,  after dropping off his baby at  the faraway college, had to pull off the road to cry in the confessional booth of a Circle K bathroom as gas pumps rang like slot machines Sinatra sang What’ll I Do in a nearby jukebox and an old soldier waltzed with an armful of air in the trenches of a VFW hall as the daddy heart Of the sad-eyed man emptied every memory that it could no longer hold onto the bone cracked mosaics of a just-mopped floor feeling no doubt like the departed who do not know any more than we do how to say goodbye.
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The Purple Poppy-Mallow

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Somewhere deep below the the grey mottled  multi-layered portrait of me whose surface has  hardened like a criminal you will find  a canvas of ghosts the lost souls of my life buried beneath six feet of paint who are suddenly as clear and luminous as the stars observed from the deck of  an oars up caravel slicing through the wake of an ancient night Their resurrection  began with my own, summoned by age which drew me like a gentleman caller to the fields of pentimento where the earliest sketches and baby step  brush strokes of those who I have  misjudged disappointed and most of all  miss  thrive like purple-poppy-mallow waiting to be repaired.
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Summer 1956, Day One

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Summer Day one  1956 Setting: a Garden apartment building in Queens surrounded by a pasture of concrete. Goldfish do their pond laps like old men at the Y. A block away trains load and deposit silent movie men with hats while  Fritz, the German shepherd on the corner yelps his marching orders like a commandant I’m four wearing beach flappy shorts bare-chested and  blonde cautiously balancing on an invisible high-wire a tiny Wallenda in socks as the Platters sing “Only You” on the Dumont    television set The parakeets Pepi and Gigi flutter and twirl like they’re on American Bandstand Sunlight sneaks in like a cheating husband striking the framed painted portraits of my  sister and I like a Hollywood Klieg light My mom marches in for the ceremonial changing of the  living room upholstery guard smelling like instant Maxwell a top note of aldehydes and bergamot and a just vanquished Viceroy with a lipstick tattoo which has taken a Johnny Weissmuller swan dive into the pool of a Bone Chin
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