Inventory—To 100th Street
By Frank Lima
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.
Copyright Credit: Frank Lima, "Inventory--To 100th Street" from Incidents of Travel in Poetry. Copyright © 2015 by The Estate of Frank Lima. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.
Source: Incidents of Travel in Poetry (City Lights Books, 2015)