across latenight plots of seaweed,
hours later, still numb,
still shaking all over
after ducking thrown bottles,
the sidewalk below trembles
digesting distant jets from Kennedy
and at midnight young men make off with stolen bicycles
laughing in strange languages,
dodging glass shattered streets
and devastated buildings
that will soon feed the unfriendly rain swept sea
I am here on Beach 28th St without witness,
hearing old Motown songs from these battered boardwalks
reaching out to their long-ago innocent hearts,
and I shun these broken-down bath houses
instead embracing the cherry ice summers
the melted away laughter eons ago
this Rockaway is a faraway keyless portal
leading back to a worn-out and wilted bungalow,
where my dead father’s watch was stolen,
where my lion was off grazing somewhere
inside its immense A Train drug crazed stomach,
where my toxic eyes vomited up acid rain,
where any reason or sense
may have seeped from my mind
and it is then I must untangle and push ahead
to a place where antediluvian Rockaway's redressed resolute spirit may step up,
to where 52st jazz once more pulsates along your boardwalk waves,
to where dizzy locomotives hop back along your buzzing railroad tracks,
to where hopeless romantics once again wade our way out into your crisp resilient Atlantic
then stumble back to anywhere America,
where your children are treasured
and your beaches once more are their sandcastle playgrounds
7/6/77
Far Rockaway, NY