Whitman and Thoreau are usually out
the door by six,
the
first to leave their off-track cubbyholes—
leaves
of grass piled to the ceiling’s naked light—
to
observe seagulls spindrifting on high Manhattan air,
to
watch the Brooklyn ferry lumber through decades
coiled
like movie reels in their transcendental eyes.
Emerson,
stumbling through the lobby, claims the East River
is
full of transmigrations, currents of the Oversoul’s rise.
Kerouac
awakens late, dons a wife beater,
is
on the road less traveled half past the hand-rolled joint.
Hamlet
is the only holdout, sitting in his nutshell
and
calling himself a king of melancholy space.
Let
us not be too harsh to judge the rags and weeds
shuffling
down the pavement, harvesting dandelions
to
accent their six-by-ten palaces of crack and speed.
We
all live in the rundown El Centro Hotel, condemned,
a
dust mote spindrifting through the solar system.
We
are hungry hobos stirring in the Bowery dawn,
hoping
to catch a wave of luminescent biocentric soul,
a
ribbon of stars to carry us past the nine-to-five syringe
and
find our home, wherever that may be.
~William Hammett
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