The Smith

I still smith
Archaic tools
And hold them
To humanity’s flame
Like a fool
Returning home
With diseased meat
To feed a family,
Or the dehydrated idiot
Lapping feverishly
From the salted sea

The novel is dead,
Replaced and ignored
By the philistines
Who race towards the line,
Mouths agape
And drooling
Their bovine eyes
Drying in the breeze,
Their sclerotic brains
Knocking around their skulls
Like almonds
In a guitar

I have found the source
Of that
Cosmological
Sucking sound.
It is my fellow man,
Slurping oysters,
Hoarding shells,
And keeping the spoils
From the bowery boys,
From the urchins
And gamins,
The remnants
Of the fourteenth ward

They killed Coney Island,
They killed City Lights,
They killed Greenwich Village,
With the robotic
Torpor
Of their pathetic
America.