CONEY ISLAND REDUX

I thought you should know about
The train to Coney Island in January,
And the way the days always
Sag towards twilight there.
How no one should have to
Watch the Lone Horseman
Prance from car to car
In his skirt of flying yarn—
Wading through melodeon hours
To fill his hat with gold.
But they are.
No one laughs anymore
At the absurdity of mayhem
Held up against the skyline,
The dream of a dozen generations
Left to eddy in the brown surf.
Who can tell the difference anyway,
Between the grandiose and the bizarre?
The slap of feet pacing the boardwalk
Echo past Nathan's in the off-season,
And there is no line to see the two-headed woman
Or the rest of the freaks
Who challenge the plain misery of our own lives.
Nothing like extra limbs to even the score.
You can drop a fiver onto Madam's sequined table
Or play the liquid slots on Wall Street,
It's all the same to glass-eyed
Graffiti prophets slipping their scripture
Beneath the lifted hem of our awareness.
But asked to define
The distance between the dream
And this last breath of salty air,
Is where we part company.
Parading around the junkyards of the absurd
Is like paying to see the Bullet Catch:
We only wait around because we know
Someone is going to lose.



Brooklyn/NYC
1/6/2001 - JNK

— James Norman Kerns