Waking in slumber
I drift outside to carnival
located in field between
my grandfather’s destroyed garage
and my great-uncle’s abandoned home.
Excited, I turn and run (naked)
to inform my sister.
The fairground sideshow thrill rides
represent the lake park
visited by John Calvin Culver
in his New York State childhood.
The hot sand beneath my feet
is like Fire Island beach
that would make Casey Donovan famous
before I was born…
and deny him the legitimate work he craved
before dying of AIDS
two days before my thirteenth birthday.
44 years old and I’m older now than he ever was,
having died in Florida at the age of 43,
days after flying from New York City home –
a home that, ironically, I now haunt.
42nd Street is a different shade of sleaze these days;
the tourist trap theme park crowd mills daily through
that tired old bitch under a new coat of sparkle.
The bramble still exists….
although I’ve never stumbled through it.
I seek out new places to get lost
only to learn that there are no new places…
everywhere I go there are ghosts of films,
of novels, of family living here long before me
and having left long before I arrived.
Almost 20 years ago I moved
to Longshore Drive and Wright Street,
thinking it new and odd,
only to learn that my father,
David Wright had lived in the same location,
and that the cemetery up the road
cradled the remains of his father before him.
It’s like that now, here in the city
and here in my dreams
which are filled with the dead
in a world long buried.
Written by Jason Wright
March 31, 2019
