for those brothers & sisters whose eyes burn still in heaven Poem Found In The Ruins Of The Old Cafe Rafio Greenwich Village, Circa 1962-64
I See Hunger’s Children I. I see them in the skeletal mockery of a city’s 16th generation opening dawn dragging their brazen feet thru the ribaldry of an early morning sun on midnight’s pale street corner whistling Dixie weeping ankle deep in winter’s savage wetness wane & screaming a hand leering message to cruel scoffers in polished shining fuck limousines amidst starvation’s immortal war crying/laughing in the sovereign ecstasy of an all night diner’s tearless last booth or asleep alas on a Freudian fourth floor landing wrapped as dead fish in dejected puke newspapers I see them dying in some Foundling-like hospital poor-boy motherless nameless & as yet not reaching their first birthday because the food soured stale in their stomachs for lack of love and then to rise like a reincarnated Christ to walk in threes & fours hands in pockets in the stupid hush of phantom daybreak waiting, contemplating Chinese aphorisms in the dried senile grass of a tawdry park, aping the sage, waiting for the sun to kick its holy way thru the faceless cameo clouds --- a belated midday sun that never does show its virgin face these angry ragamuffins humoring their raw squalor with a guffawed-moan jerk of the head & standing like cigar store indians in distant rooms until rabid silence comes
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