Sunday, February 15, 2009

While Driving on Berry Avenue

Hipsters, you have taught me an irrevocable, indelible truth!
On Berry Avenue--your very own avenue--
I realized that all you want, in your deepest want of wants,
is to live in a community of your own!
Your own hip restaurants.
Your own hip second-hand clothing shops.
Your own hip coffee joints with hip organic munchies.

This is the same want of the Orthodox Jews,
who lives just ten blocks south of you,
Their own hip wig shops.
Their own hip stroller stores.
Their own hip bus stops.

Eureka! I shout, to the sidewalk.
Hallelujah! I shout to the headlights of the car crawling too closely behind me,
Beurk! (which is French,) I shout to the flapping Tyvek of the building-in-limbo.
Did you know this about yourselves?
That you are separated by something as simple as a choice of fabrics?

--The way the shredded toilet paper in the pissy water of the Coffee Shop commode makes it look like a delicious egg drop soup.
--The snore of your boyfriend, which starts out horrible, like a diesel engine dying, and ends the same way his exhausted sigh does when he holds you.

Look how close everything is.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

How Whitmanesque! (That's a compliment -- I'm a big fan of WW.)