The Last Payphone in Manhattan

The last payphone in Manhattan

has seen a thousand pretty girls

in a thousand little black dresses

and can tell you what their mothers cooked for dinner, or the fantasies of their 1947 Harry-Truman voting-boyfriends.

Those were the days of pastel and glass chandeliers hanging in the pinstriped streets that Joe DiMaggio forever owned.

Forever owned.

The city is still busy, but the last payphone doesn't host a line anymore.

A line that used to wrap around the block, quarters slipping and dropping and slipping and dropping just for the privilege of a few minutes.

Every "I love you" from the customary to the heart pounding firsts used to fly through that receiver in a single day

and it never got old.

Those were the days when the yellow pages were worn like a hat

and mid-pubescent boys giggled as they drew obscene geometry over the area codes.

Their giggles sounded like springtime in the winter.

Once, a twenty-something subway regular who used to draw those shapes on the way to school

shouted Italian curse words right through the mic,

hung up hard enough to make it hurt,

then turned around in shame to wait another twenty minutes in line and say I'm sorry.

The "I love you" at the end of that call, was among the most sacred ones.

That Italian kid grew up, dropping his quarters in a few times each week.

The payphone tried to add up how much he spent over a lifetime, just for fun

but every time someone dialed a number it threw off the count, so math became a dead language

and don't you know that's why memories are all the last payphone in Manhattan can speak in now?

A payphone without numbers is a payphone of memories.

If you try to make a call now, all that comes out the other end are wonderful memories, and we call them static.

Which means that soon, the last payphone will be gone as the rest.

As soon as someone bothers to report the trouble

to whoever these sorts of troubles are supposed to be reported to.

It could be a while.

So if you get the chance, make a call sometime.

Two quarters to spread the stories of Italian boys

West Coast wanderers

hopeful youth and every stage of the light in their eyes

short skirt princesses

burnout bureaucrats

sober dancers

and all the rest.

Manhattan's last payphone watched every one of them from the back of a subway station

and their I love you's

belong in every ear.

Even Though Daddy Offered

He was a midnight hitchhiker stowing away on trains even though Daddy offered gas money.
Because Daddy's money was found
and all he wanted was to be lost.

He wouldn't admit it,
but all he wanted was to be lost.

Because tears are the stuff that oceans are made of
and the North Star
was always the most boring one.

So he hopped the C train east expecting the underbelly society hiding in that empty caboose.
That empty caboose.
Daddy held out his wallet the whole time, but hitchhiking train hopping hilarity was always free.

He traveled a continent without letting sentimentality sink in
Daddy held out his wallet the whole time
his arm withered and groaned holding it there so long.

All he really wanted was his son
but they never communicated well
and the world always ran more on schedules than sunsets according to him.

Freedom and Fathers
Schedules and Sons

They never did seem to fit.
Not for them.

Sunsets

I was trying to write a poem
about how lost our generation is

when I went outside
and saw the most beautiful sunset
since yesterday.

The kind with purples so deep they could be oceans,
reds so raw roses must be wilting on Mars.

And every generation has these sunsets.
I don't care what wars we've fought,
or meaning we've failed to find.

We can only be so lost,
as long as we have these sunsets.

Conclusions on Nothing

I just woke from a dream

in which I lost a friend

who meant a great deal to me.

And now I'm trying to figure out what it meant.

I'm no sage,

I'm no monk,

but I have to conclude nothing.

It means only that I had a dream.

It is in and of itself,

and nothing ever seems to have meaning 

in and of itself.

But now, look,

the damn thing has inserted itself

into a poem

and into my thoughts.

So once again

I have to conclude

that nothing I know of

is ever in and of itself.

Art & Armistice

The most useless things in the world

are poems promoting peace,
And books that believe in humanity
even when it's inconvenient.

They're the most head-hanging

idealistic

simple examples of defeat.

And yet here, I pray,

that these useless things

never stop redeeming us.

Probable Future

If the earth were to give us the last of what it had

and we threw it in an internal combustion engine to wither and die

then we could all finally be happy.

Because the earth would know it gave us everything it had

and we

would have nothing left to fight for.

The Pawn Massacre

War was a backyard game for presidents and kings

who knew that in the end, they would still be friends financially.

And they would have a few more heroic war stories,

movies

and songs
that would somehow be enough to make their people cheer.

So they played

and played.

And their people

grew up

to be corpses.