1
“You should have disappeared years ago”—
so disappear
on Third Avenue
to share the heedless incognito
of shuffling shadow-bodies
animate with frustration
whose silence’ only potence is
respiration
preceding the eroded bronze contours
of their other aromas
through the monstrous air
of this red-lit thoroughfare.
Here and there
saturnine
neon-signs
set afire
a feature
on their hueless overcast
of down-cast countenances.
For their ornateness
Time, the contortive tailor,
on and off,
clowned with sweat-sculptured cloth
to press
upon these irreparable dummies
an eerie undress
of mummies
half unwound.
2
Such are the compensations of poverty,
to see———
Like an electric fungus
sprung from its own effulgence
of intercircled jewellery
reflected on the pavement,
like a reliquary sedan-chair,
out of a legend, dumped there,
before a ten-cent Cinema,
a sugar-coated box-office
enjail a Goddess
aglitter, in her runt of a tower,
with ritual claustrophobia.
Such are compensations of poverty,
to see———
Transient in the dust,
the brilliancy
of a trolley
loaded with luminous busts;
lovely in anonymity
they vanish
with the mirage
of their passage.