Free Write Week 9 Compression

A Ghost in Central Park West

Liberty, please surf Fifth Avenue on my Chernobyl Computer
again. please, watch my great smog television explode
and turn on to my cotton gin. 


Why can’t I ride the great earthquake to your lobby of lobbies, in lobbies?

Where are the strangers with glass onion pages searching for cold peace?

             Liberty, I saw the smoldering memorials of the triangle machines

             become windows again, and first shadows of frost bitten bodies

     lying naked in the road. I smelled the pungency of weed microwaved

     and I know the other side of pungency, which radio operators at kulmhof

     politely ignored.

Liberty, I looked around my mailbox, to unravel the penny paperback

                to remind me of a day in which I shot frames of our boxcar, 

when the old Hindenburg Camera, safe in my hand, helped me laugh a cab down, 

                I wasn’t afraid.

Liberty, now when we go downtown, bad morning sunshine

ebbs in the wake of our missing twins and the brownstone smells

of dead apples and ash. If we go way past down now, we leave old

age stocks and find you, Liberty, outside a rumbling window

I still hear electric shots in the subway.

Liberty, I think I know the song playing in India. 

Liberty, I float past the strawberries of my warm, 

Dakota hallow, rising up to bed in, and Liberty,

this century already seems tired.