across twilight plots of seaweed fields,
hours later, still numb,
shaking all over
after ducking thrown bottles,
this sidewalk below trembles
digesting distant jets from Kennedy
at midnight young men make off with stolen bicycles,
laughing in strange languages
past worthless glass shattered streets
and devastated buildings
that soon will feed the chilly rain swept sea
and I lurk here on Beach 28th St without witness,
humming old Motown songs from these battered boardwalks,
to reach out to their long-ago sugar-pie honey-bunch hearts,
to fathom their broken-down bath houses,
to reach out and embrace their cherry ice laughter
melted away summers ago
this Rockaway is a faraway keyless portal
leading back to a tattered wilted bungalows,
where my father’s watch was stolen,
where my lion was off grazing somewhere
inside this immense A Train drug crazed stomach,
where my demented toxic eyes vomited up acid rain,
where any reason or sense
may have forever seeped from my mind
so hear this antediluvian Rockaway:
untangle and push ahead
to where a redressed resolute spirit steps up,
to where that 52st jazz once more pulsates along your crisp boardwalk waves,
to where dizzy locomotives again hop back along your buzzing railroad tracks,
to where hopeless romantics wade their way out into your crashing resilient Atlantic
then straggle back to anywhere America,
and to where at last all your children are treasured,
this beach once more their sandcastle playground
7/6/77, Far Rockaway, NY