Monday, March 25, 2013

New York Street Scene

I was thinking about you when I stepped out from the curb into the path of a Yellow Cab. The jagged patch of crisp blue sky, edged with the black filigree of East Side fire escapes, waved around like a flag and continued to sway gently as I lay tangled on the ground. 

Absurdly, my mind continued to hold on to the thought of you, while layers of human concern gathered over me. First the random mix of colors, smells and voices-- concern in Babel. The silhouettes of heads now replacing the jagged tops of facades around my patch of sky.

Then there were the sirens and lights, flashing translucently in the bright morning sun. A new layer of navy blue and black; the smell of gasoline and hot, dry rubber tires. They reverently lift up my body like a broken chalice, unaware that absurdly, it is still filled only with the thought of you.

It is all I have become, my whole existence precariously held together by the very thought that placed me in the path of the monster city like a sacrificial lamb. This thought, now full of the captured sky rolls around like a marble in the bottom of the broken chalice;  barely missing the fresh, jagged edges between my life and my death as the ambulance sways through the busy streets.

I slide out of the ambulance horizontally and in under yet another layer of human concern. The swish of scrubs and medical smells; the sounds of electric instruments are like so many sirens, distant like the streets outside; miniature, Liliputian to my broken body, now tied to the bed and the metal boxes by wires and tubes.

A gentle fog descends and obscures the universe. There is only a small, blue glow; a fuzzy light at the center of my existence-- it is my existence.

The thought of you will not keep me alive, I know, but will not let it go. I am too mesmerized by the blue and frozen momentum, not to flirt with a further fall from grace. The thump of my confused physiology tells me I am alive, but my life still leaks out through cracks and jagged holes left by the missing shards; runs down the stem of the chalice into a tarmac-gray oblivion.


Killer McQueen by AmiBly

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From:
King Guezo of Dahomey 1850-52: The Abolition of the Slave Trade on the West Coast of Africa

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