Where Mom and Dad met.
Time. Cheaper to leave it haunted
Than to fill it with mouths.
They mothball architectural marvels
Nowadays anyways, too late
For the Richfield, the only tower
They remember, worthy of the Chrysler
They say. But I don't know.
I don't believe in that memory.
But as soon as I say that
I see myself in a seersucker suit
And pencil-thin moustache,
My nose bulbous from a bus crash
Where my typewriter smashed it.
The water is better. Tobacco is part of the air.
The women dress like dolls.
Not even an echo now
That I am in a different lifetime,
From a future that erased it
Not by forgetting this time
But by a judgement
That a memory
Was illicit.
It wove in and out, the dance
Of the void needle threading
Until it was no more
Than a boy's blueprint,
Structural, so allowed in
But nobody seems to know it is deserted,
Except the dry cleaner, who remembers
When there was business
Before the homeless,
Who today would rather hang out their sheet
On the corner of 6th and Grand than live
Inside. They are afraid of what's not real.
