PRAY FOR ME MY LADIES

11. PRAY FOR ME MY LADIES:

I wasn’t going to be here or do this but I’m here nonetheless as some accident of place and time and fate together and thick trees brim now with green leaves running wild and blue-air-breezes touch the land and as I look out I see three Spanish guys sitting on a curb-side seating area and they’ve got some form of televised portable baseball game going – a free shot at the All-Star Game – and the baseball they watch is the same as any other being watched anywhere else just then and they laugh and chatter and they’re drinking their beers and seemingly enjoying themselves as across from them the big steps of the two apartment houses jut out and ten or more other people sit about over there making noise too and having their own share of fun while around them as a background the wide harbor is seen in reflected lights and passing traffic and little kids here and there scamper about running with blankets or in pajamas and everything seems like a festival on high Kearney Cottage Proprietary House and all the rest ANOTHER PLACE FROM ANOTHER TIME and lest they kid you it was NEVER not like this always was and history is bunk (as has been said) they fabricate their stories to fit the line they wish you to have SO ‘better accept it all little people for it’s being foisted on you’ and I’ve grown tired too tired to see and watch and care anymore and anything I hear is just trash and anything I watch is wrong and whatever’s said has FIRST a reason behind it a real-solid propaganda value that must come first and everyone’s lost everyone’s wasted but somehow I’m the only one tired the only one living a different time the only one beat and rashed and worn and communicating nothing to people who won’t listen anyway so PRAY FOR ME my ladies before I go away and remember me to anything else you wish for miserable to an ending I remain yours and as forever more forgotten lame-limbed simple and GONE (I enter another realm I visit anew the Gypsy graveyard and manage somehow happily to get lost among the crazy faces and distant lands and places the strange ideas of eighty years back the glimmering glitterati of the fortune-telling leaves and the ever-burning incense fires on temporary bounties and artificial mantles with pictures of the dead hung fresh from every corner and the gypsy woman swabbing herself with the damp rag looks over and FINALLY says : “welcome to my home it’s nice to have you here” and I know then and only then that I have entered the land of the living dead the one with the hearses and Cadillacs the open-bodied cars and the garish yellow trucks).