in the green soup between the jersey shore and downtown manhattan I sleep, swollen with life and disintegrating. pale green weeds pierce my sticky fly-paper asphalt, painfully shouldering their way into flat sunlight, drinking in all they can, and never sated. decades of ignored potholes crack my roads, their maws large enough to swallow the unaware. near a mountain of sagging cardboard edging my empty lots, a manged cat bleats for food, but desperation alone does not make food grow from acres of cracked cement and promises. pools of prismatic oil throb through my gutters to be transmogrified into drinking water. talking sneakers splash rainbows, my children leaping from the jagged curbs to the broken streets, their toes lapping at the tepid fluids. barren shrubs huddle nervously along the sides of my roads, growing dusty, cracked hubcaps; holding their breath for the moment when child and rusting, speeding, hulk unite. it does not come. my hollow store fronts and empty bus stops nurse my displaced, their Dixie wax-paper cups upheld as though brown acidic rain may one day turn to spare change. it doesn't.
between my hills and my valleys filled with jerseys airy poison discharge lay the trees that broke my sidewalks and sheltered my curbs. memorialized the lost and cooled my cement fields. trees made strangely stately by the light of summer's red sun and that whispered love to my wild dogs and my bleeding stray children, and sang my lullaby by night in the tainted ocean breeze. leviathans. their magnifecence, their enormous anchors plunged deep into the ocean bedrock, keeping us all from drifting away. lost in the olive slurry between the jersey shore and dowtown manhattan.
