six blocks of trash on the sidewalk

empty I walk under an unseasonably bright winter sky, not thinking of sudden climate change, not thinking of love, not thinking of anything at all except the six blocks of trash on the sidewalk along bailey avenue; and how they would never permit that in manhattan (not thinking of definitions for they, manhattan, trash [foodstuffs vs. inorganic material, e.g.], me, you). nonetheless the sun is clear and its light falls on each of us alike. it wants to know us, the meaning-minded might suggest, but today I am not thinking of meaning, or being known. I save that for another day, when all the nights of drink and questions, all the weeks that sent me reeling as if by particle accelator into other people's bodies and waking with other people's dreams burning on my lips, when conversations reached to the moon like a house of cards and I walked for hours between midnight and dawn and spoke to the walls and decoded the hundred-and-one secrets of human hands... all that belongs to another lifetime right now. here the high afternoon sun gives color and shape to the trash, the sidewalk, kids coming home from school -- the part of new york called the bronx. empty I walk six blocks down bailey avenue. I don't watch my back. I don't talk about love. I let my hands hang where they fall.

-amr-