Cables to Rage or I’ve Been Talking on This Street Corner a Hell of a Long Time

This is how I came to be loved

by loving myself loveless.

One day I slipped in the snowy gutter of Brighton Beach

and the booted feet passing

me by on the curb squished my laundry ticket

into the slush and I thought oh fuck it now

I’ll never get my clean sheet and I cried bitter tears

into the snow under my cheek in that gutter in Brighton Beach

Brooklyn where I was living because it was cheap

In a furnished room with cooking privileges

and there was an old thrown-away mama who lived down the hall

a yente who sat all day long in our common kitchen

weeping because her children made her live with a schwartze

and while she wept she drank up all my Cream Soda

every day before I came home.

Then she sat and watched me watching my chicken feet stewing

on the Fridays when I got paid

and she taught me to boil old corn in the husk

to make it taste green and fresh.

There were not many pleasures in that winter

and I loved Cream Soda

there were not many people in that winter

and I came to hate that old woman.

The winter I got fat on stale corn on the cob

and chicken foot stew and the day before Christmas

having no presents to wrap

I poured two ounces of Nux Vomica into a bottle of Cream Soda

and listened to the old lady puke all night long.

When spring came I crossed the river again

moving up in the world six and half stories

and one day on the corner of eighth street across from Wanamakers

which had burned down while I was away in Brooklyn—

where I caught the bus for work every day

a bus driver slowed down at the bus stop one morning—

I was late it was raining and my jacket was soaked—

and then speeded past without stopping when he saw my face.

I have been given other doses of truth—

that particular form of annihilation—

shot through by the cold eye of the way things are baby

and left for dead on a hundred streets of this city

but oh that captain marvel glance

brushing up against my skull like a steel bar

in passing

and my heart withered sheets in the gutter

passing passing

booted feet and bus drivers

and old yentes in Brighton Beach kitchens

SHIT! said the king and the whole court strained

passing

me out as an ill-tempered wind

lashing around the corner

of 125th Street and Lenox.