bury us alive.
*
He sleeps curled up blond, like a pale infant, in a room five
floors above a desperate street corner. The windows are open,
of course, and he sleeps, pale and dreamless, curled up and
calm. The stairs outside his windows, rusty and fragile, go
from our tenement heaven down to the grimmest cement. The
sirens passing that corner blast the brick building, so that we
might be in a war zone, each siren blast meaning we must get
up and run to a shelter to hide. But there is no shelter. There is
the occasional bomb by terrorist groups. Arson. Prostitutes.
Pimps. Junkies. Old men, vagabonded, drunk with running
sores, abscesses running obscene with green pus, curled up like
my love, but blocking our doorway, on the front step, on the
sidewalk under the step, behind the garbage cans, curled up
just in the middle of the cement anywhere, just wherever they
stopped. The blasts of the sirens go all day and all night and in
between them huge buses make the building shake and wild
taxis careen with screeching brakes. Cars rocket by, men with
guns and clubs sounding their sirens, flashing lights that spread
a fierce red glare into our little home: red flashing lights that
climb five flights in the space of a second and illuminate us
whatever we are doing, wherever we stand, in one second a
whorish red, turn us and everything we see and touch into a
grotesque special effect. Sirens that blare and blast and make
the brick shake, announcing fire or murder or rape or a simple
beating. Screams sometimes that come from over there, or
behind that building, or in the courtyard, or some other apartment, or the nice man with the nice dog ranting at his mother over eighty and her screaming for help. Across the street there
is a disco: parties for hire and music that makes the light
fixtures quake between the siren blasts. Sometimes a flight
above us, right near the roof, the filthy vagabonds sneak
in and hide, piss and shit, urine runs down the hall stairs
from the roof and a stench befouls even the awful air, and so
106
cautiously the police are called, because the drunken, ruthless
men might be armed, might hit, might rape: might kill.
The sirens blast the air, wind runs wild like plague through
the rooms: and outside on the street men are curled up in fetal
position, all hair and scabs and running sores, feet bandaged
in newspaper and dirty torn cloth, eyes running pus, a bottle,
sometimes broken to be used as a weapon, held close to the
chest. The women on the great spiked heels, almost as cold as
we are, can barely stand. They wobble from the fix, their
shoulders hang down, their eyes hang down, their skin gets
yellow or ochre, their faces are broken out in blotches, their
hair is dry and dead and dirty, their knees buckle: they are too
undressed for the cold: they can barely walk from the fix: they
