Iceberg lettuce in the sky,
Puppy meat, a roomless suitcase,
An excuse rattling about like a wind-smacked newspaper,
Subways and saxophones, sinuous sinuses
Groan and rasp, then engines
Scream out of mouths,
Humanity carried on the tip of a tongue
Through holes of grunge and decay
To hollows where each can stay.
Puppy meat, a roomless suitcase,
Those icy scrapers sway
And trash is inspected by non-residents
Endlessly commuting from hand to mouth
From pan to bench to bedsheet
Keeping the parks clean.
Dogs leashed to statues bark at ladies with mink coats
And overhead the silence of the icebergs rumbling,
Suffering an alpine view of the city to an alpine wind.
You must move fast when you are small
And you must eat.
A man sells fruit and news in an underground shed
Packed to the dust with pulp and leaves,
Warm ink newspapers hung out to dry on clothespins
Tossing under ventilation fans in the diesel breeze.
Venders smoke cigars and snort, pastel sidewalks
Lose chalk dust to the sirocco in the tunnels,
The black through which we go,
The rattle we know in our bones,
The route we all take to our homes,
Saxophones,
Homeless suitcases in well-lit boxes
In unknown, familiar territory,
Puppy meat in three piece suits
Seeing other faces in black flashing mirrors,
For those without seats there are nooses.
The newspapers here have a social disease,
Somebody wants more to breathe.
"Spare me a dime for the subway,
It's all I need to get home,"
A derelict collects his duty
From people who know and hate him and the subway so.
Money bags spill like seeds in the park that way,
But nothing grows in the park that day
And that's the way everyone wants it — barren,
To write off, reinvest, sell,
To keep florescent cells filled.
Gloomy florescent trains
Gliding like match sticks over grinding steel
Becoming perpetual, like the sun and the sea
But on schedule, as we want it to be.
Change tumbles smoothly in the intersecting vaults.
The transients have found a haven by Park Station.
A man pedals a fake swan around a fake lake
Reflected in a monolith
Whose mirrors fall down on passerby,
Tiles peeling off like pieces of the sky
Exposing plywood underneath.
Connections under the streets
Always racing, always beating the above-ground machines,
Sending its troops into buildings first
To pillage the coffee and Xerox machines,
To fill and weaken the building,
To master elevators,
To observe the icebergs floating on by.
Wrappers are freed and fly idle.
Pigeons feed on the pavement.
People feed around troughs around the vaults,
Avoiding the park, opting for safety, if not strength,
In numbers, in files of people kept track of somewhere
Programmed from somewhere to run these circuits,
These glass pores and this cement skin,
People dying in bowls of lettuce as icebergs pass the sky.
