Lower East Side   In dream after dream you're always the same: so old that you're melting, crumbling, eroding into thin air, all this psychic code for -- what? Long before, before I came to know your seductive squalor and stink I roamed your streets by night, glimpsed furtive strangers vanishing into your fissures, changed wonder to dread, lost my way, watched friends sink into oblivion.                         But then came Street Fun -- now I possessed your carnival eruptions, bannered bricks, raucous color -- from top to bottom the music of laughter and everyone, everyone in on this conspiracy, this beckoning to breathe, to wake, to see.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont June, 2009   top of page  other sonnets  shorter poems  longer poems               e-mail to Mike  Fox Paws home page