for Adam C.

<>

somewhere near the U.N. headquarters,
the phrase penetrates, a mysterious bubble
of double toil and trouble, registering in a
soapy glistering & glittering pop,
its sensual quiet comfort concept consorts
within, a cell surrounded by an onrush of comprehensive intuition,
the need and the necessity for the gentling
of so many souls, disturbed and desperate…

hard by the East River, the secret and suspect
currents that once seduced me with their pleas
of rushing secretive eddies,
pleading me,
“join us,” we’ll sweep you away to places unknown
where any troubled past will passage far away,
cleansed, gentled, you may be refreshed unto a
new future, with hopes ever present, gift wrapped
in ornaments of unknown possibilities…

but horns honking, the silenced buses yet growling,
scratch out shoutings of “not so fast buddy boy,”
and the tumult of people’s clashing, crashing and
clambering to be loudest, irritates the thin hopes
(or the hope that is flawed & pre~thinned)
of the colored different skins
that separate us
and the phrase ”gentle this soul” are
yet, nyet,
whiskered away by surgical currents, and deep tides
to a watery sentencing of super~imposing silencing

and we continual walk on into our next unending mouthful of fantasia