Modrn Love Xxvi (New York City At Daybreak) Poem by Liberatore Suffoletta

By the West River where Columbus found Broadway
Young blacks were singing, exposing their waists
as their pants crotch touched the ground
giving birth to a caravan of gypsies selling trinkets
Cool females spun the wheel, with oil, leather,
and grinded their hips like a whetting stone
Eight million miners owed the rocks their silver.
Sleepy children dreamt of stairs and perspectives.
At midnight, dressage of police cars pranced into Lincoln Center
thousand fireflies of night invaded the sadness of precision
civilization gathered to watch the cinemaplex of dance
wearing fifth avenue summer finery
Women with glossy lizard lips, green tongues
carrying satiny crosses on their behinds
Men with eyes of delight, razored faces
and panama heads reciting whitman
Women breasts of edible pears calling to
men with seer sucker suits selling sunshine
Chicanos washing dishes and busing tables
Indians driving yellow chariots of borrowed fire
Gaunt junkies borrowing eyelids from snakes
Bored nightshift laborers resting on stones drinking
Talking about the mets and Yankees
All of them would sleep tonight,
some with their facelifts and eternal youth
some wanting to be the river,
some only wanting bottled water
some of them love the huge leaves
some the million fireflies of night
if they could be turned to gold
none of them remembered the
shoreline's blue tongue.
Bought by the river faun
with the rose of circumcision
over all the bridges, over all the eternal rooftops
over all the five boroughs, over the statue of liberty
The teeth of the night became
flocks of seagulls carried by the wind
born on your futon, in your arms
In your eyes, in your mind,
In your mouth, on your tongue
In your dancing thighs of mackerals
In your garden of delights of kisses
By the East River and the Queensboro
One solitary seagull flies east
Carrying night on its back
And dawn on its belly
As the hands of the universe’s beneficial energy
Wash their face
boys are battling their fecundity
girls are discovering their preciousness
men are putting on their sunday kisses
women are painting their glass faces
none of them pause,
none of them want to be a cloud,
or a yellow tambourine.
Throogneck red snake eyes blink flirting
With the Whitestones blue lights of sadness
Warning celestial travelers
Heavy industry ahead
The timid orange sun peeks above the ripped horizon
Chanting a haiku about swallowing dead fission bullets
Frightened Lancelot flees to the arms of a romance novel
Dante dreams of Beatrice, Paris captures Helen
Avengeful Achilles drags Hector around a tearful fortress
A Trojan rainbow arrow flies
into the gray mouth of the statue of liberty
which is awaiting Ponce de Leon elixir of youth
East river alligators don their blueberry suits
Carrying human skinned briefcases
Full of corn fields
The nature addicted trees smile their indifference
Long Island makes love to the cold Atlantic
After five centuries of bisons flee
The ashamed moon refuses invitations now
Morning is shedding the humility of night
Wearing epaulets of pristine clouds
A million chariots of doom dance
With fireflies in the world’s biggest parking lot
invisible pulleys spin to raise the sky;
borders of pride besiege memory
angels hidden in the solitary seagulls cheeks
are spat out as black snow blanketing static Queens
while all the birds moan
about the rough cloth of winter
Not for a moment, sweetheart, lovely woman,
have I failed to see your heart full of butterflies,
nor your gentle shoulders of stars,
nor your thighs pure as Venus’s,
nor your voice like a lighthouse,
woman, beautiful as the fog,
you smile like cherry trees greet spring.
Not for a moment, my princess,
who among mountains of noise, billboards, and airplanes,
dreamed of becoming a river and sleeping with the sea
with that lover who would place in your breast
the small ache of a remembered soul.
new york doesn't bury in coffins
those who don't work.
New York, modern,
New York, modern with death.

Sleep on my gazlle, nothing remains.
Dancing snow stir the prairies
and America drowns itself in machinery
and lament.
I want the green breeze from the darkest night
to blow away flowers and the inscriptions
from the eygptian obelisk,
and a black child to inform the gold-craving
that the kingdom of wheat has arrived.