Poems
Winter Clouds in Hoboken
are different than New York City clouds
occasionally cumulus, lately ominous,
biblical in fact. New Jersey is not a place but
a state of mind according to my Brooklyn students,
the last frontier between irrelevance and extinction.
Everything you think it is, and more.
New Jersey is a whole lotta place(s). My place is Hoboken
where neighbors share home brewed coffee
the morning after Sandy flooded basements
in apocalyptic power surge, then darkness.
Where brass bands carrying statues fire cannons
in honor of obscure Italian saints though the mid-day streets.
Graffittied walls proclaim PK Kid is alive, Viva!
Not art to be sold in galleries across the river.
Where an empty parking space is a conversation starter
and a drunk girl cries next to a smashed cell phone
on my stoop two weeks before Saint Patrick’s Day,
a pool of green puddled at her feet.
Where we we pretend we invented baseball
where everyone’s grandma dated Sinatra.
Where the poets drink like poets
and are ignored like poets
Where the ends justify the ends
and happy hours last all night.
Seagulls peck french-fries
off a white Mercedes Benz
on Washington Street
The clouds are different
here. They just are.