Rent Paid on Pavement Strings

Far too late to consider ourselves mourned

and far too early to even call this night, but I squeaked my chalkboard smile: “We are gonna’ dress two leaps past our paycheck

and we will tour the top of our Manhattan.”

We became looters and nomads, thrift bungalows like a rhino looking at ivory. Plucked a patchwork suit, salmon thrown from some river-scene, fabric in a basket. I was a changed man, with a change of clothes.

Combed my hair with a dried fish bone, something from the toons, but all I could imagine was 74 floors above;

glass eyeball doors on the Manhattan egg-side ran over easy when the breeze behooved like a dignitary. Mausoleum for our simple tastes, hanging gardens meant for rulers accustomed to cow-gods and polytheistic wonders on the stars. Planetarium or dinner guests who asked obvious rhetorics, like “what was ever-done with the bricks that danced off Babel?”

So, we boarded the steam, elevator, John Doe and his Doe-eyed wife,

stepped onto the phoenix-nest balcony, jaws, plummeting 74 floors. Sultans, Tsars, Rich-men with monocles…they could not afford this.

The act of purchase the size of Louisiana–doubled over.

Copy/paste…a couple states lifted from their present state and presented stately–to the hand-or-wagon lot of hobos,

the poor date and I, on the upper East-side.

“Yes, we are millionaires.” I choked like Tarzan pointing at Jane. Yes we are millionaires, just a loan or two away.

Poetry 59