Attention!


How funny and ironic
It is! (lighten up)
That we have tickle me
Elmos

We thought it was safe
but now I think the behavorial
message is a bit
Crude

Oooh that tickles!

Times Square was once a ****** place;
You wouldn’t go alone there.
When darkness fell, you held on or
You’d lose all that you owned there.

Today, though, it’s like Disney World,
With tourists, loud and surging.
There’s not an inch of space unfilled
Since everyone’s converging:

The families from Idaho,
The hawkers giving passes,
The Elmos and the messengers,
The bused-in high school classes…

The lunch-break workers, homeless dudes,
The theater geeks and shoppers,
The food carts, cabbies and the cops
And all the teenyboppers.

I love New York; don’t get me wrong
But oftentimes I wonder
If gentrifying Broadway
Might have been a whopping blunder.

In the end
Holding on to hope
Was worse
Than releasing her despair.
It was an ionized illusion
St. Elmos' blaze
Without the burn.
-    But still
     She held her hands out
     Towards this flame
And even as they froze
She kept her eye on the fire
Transfixed
By the etheric images
That leapt from the embers.

Had she pounded
The subfusc earth
To rail against her lot
And slapped the salty rills
From her cheeks
She might have lived.
But she stood still
Too buoyed by hope
To notice
That the flame was cold
And icing her bones.