Inventory—To 100th Street

To John Bernard Myers In the corner lot where they parked green banana trucks fruits palmed in paper straw I smell bedbug & kitchen-cockroach summer afternoons Somewhere tailless one-eyed cats doting in fat garbage cans screaming with the stench of rice & beans strawberry tampax piled high as the smell (I was small & slick) the covers tilted like the hat of a rock-look wino in a deep knee-bend nod on a beer can-street Sunday morning There were always time-thick empty nights of nothing to do but listen to the ethereal (she lived on the top floor) I-go-for-more screams of Charlie's pimp's woman when he beat her for his good business principles joy-pop the block with morning-talk I hear the dim iron dawn yawning (I lived on Third Ave.) rattle nights into Saturday morning flag-bloomer eclipses just before the hunt— they were as big— the cats like jungle bunnies fierce with fleas & sores I see window-people hanging out of gooey-stick slips sweating strange below-the-button drawers crouched junkies in hallways with monkey backs eating cellophane bananas on a g-string waiting for that last bust Spies with cock-comb hair fronts ear-gulping mambo music eye-lapping pepperican flower crotches I can hear the streets whispering in the ears of yelping kids in the fun-gushing that rippled my blood in the pump but the kids are dying in the lot like the tarry-blown feet of the rain jingling on the rusty-green of yesterday's fire-escapes.