I’ve have never seen darkness as a mask that reveals what
people really are.
It was The Night Of Breaking Glass.
I’ve never seen looting before.
The first store to go was The Good Year owned by a Jewish
American.
Steel radial tires wobbled out like a stampede of Mad Cow
Disease.
I saw flames from a garbage can that was dragged to the
street by an actor who wanted to direct traffic. I saw someone who lived in my
building become one of The One Thousand Points of Light. I looked up at the heavens in awe. I’ve never
seen so many stars over the city bear witness to another attack of what was
left of Camelot.
I tried to take pictures of the 1970s Summer Black Out to
develop in my homemade darkroom but a bearded Hispanic glared at me with the
eyes of the devil that escaped from an old gray episode of The Twilight Zone.
I ran for the life of my camera and into a wall. My eyes
became camera that saw shelves fall like lines of dominoes in a store that sold
dominoes.
At my feet was a game for children called Stay Alive as
adults behaved like locusts decimating golden fields of wheat (and all that was
needed were tigers and lions and bears breaking out of The Bronx Zoo to devour
the nature of the beast in humans)
It was like the devil came to New York and made it a
playground, Walt Whitman wrote when he saw the Irish set fire to a city of wood
in 1863. Europeans calling themselves
Americans are reptilian, wrote one Founding Father who is buried near my
Ponderosa, Saint Mary’s Park. And then he went on to write the sacred words
“…We, The People,” Captain Kirk read to an illiterate people in an episode
called Omega Glory where life nearly ended by a war to end all wars. It was 911 before 911 in The South Bronx of
America where Irish cops brought The Troubles. I saw and felt abuse in the time
of shadows of burnt out buildings and bullies falling over Anne Frank in my
arms
In spite of head
injuries inflicted by a Neo Nazi at NYU, I have a Ken Burns on the brain
mentality. Get the story right, said Uncle Walter, anchorman of CBS News, home
of the all-seeing eye based on René Magritte’s surreal painting The False
Mirror.
I write this tired of Waiting For Super Man at my childhood
Fortress of Solitude where I found a Winkle In Time much to the delight of the
boy I was.
Here’s to our public library in The South Bronx
Where The Wild Things Are.
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