(inspired by a month of socializing with Manhattan paupers)

First Act:
Who hears the paupers of Manhattan contriving manifestos, self-righteous narcissism, electing themselves the chichi harbingers of the Philistine;

Who cuddles a cappuccino from the mug of an urban hermit or a buddhist monk only to claim it was karma or Katmandu or a Kuten's prophesy to their prodigiousness;

Who toreadors with streams of moving metal that growl in the absence of mutts from rural America only to arrive at perspicacity: the music recording studio of their dreams;

Who pardons polite upscale crime wearing golden corpus christi and a cocktail dress without the dress, or the tail, or other false idols that coddle cocaine holsters cupped with concupiscent grins;

Who schemes visions of infinite inlets, geometric irrationality, plastic rivers of beautiful claptrap and cardboard, or unorganized Hundertwassers all within reach of their lush lofts: tiny rooms inside drain pipes the size of Broadway or hysteria;

Who paints portraiture with slow Kretek and exhales sophisticated eagle nebulas drooping flamboyant Koyaanisquatsi into hashish filled candle holders while flashing obtuse images like a psychiatrist born da Vinci;

Who sleeps in scaffolding above underground banks or other golden brothels where beggars pawn candy bars to bakers who roll joints with pigeon dung rapped in cashmere while being romanced by spelt;

Who traverses two avenues of one item wardrobes hanging from organic street malls, feeling genuine about their pleather or polyester denim or thrift store cotton that bears hidden truncated labels on the way to an interview with a rishi vegan in the meat packing district;

Who builds shrines or burns incense to honor Ganesha - or to seduce him - or to sell her silk garments of dead Italian minx perched like Tulkas, Tibetan hats from the Himalayas of voodoo immortality;

Who fastens unclapped clash, strips naked and bathes in a film shoot with haze, nostrils perfumed with wrath from the gutters of industrial guts that sin like the pride of a tribe of tigers, and yet remains innocent and flaccid;

Who removes a Bossendorfer piano from their bottomless handbag, or a Fendercaster guitar, or a halls for their halitosis, while conversing near the elm tree about moogs and mints or Mary Poppins and Wendy Carlos having a child;

Who idolizes Cuba or Cohiba cigars or codifies Columbian cartels, or just perambulates Columbus Street searching for the New World or New Amsterdam or aromatic strawberry lotion to unstick their partner's husband's wedding ring;

Who drinks green tea stained coffee beans from Indonesia, intellectualizing locals from doodles on napkins or post cards of Ben Eldon's map, depressed about poverty while carrying a pristine panasonic?

Who steps on grandma's limping foot or splashes her with muddy puddles of solipsism and auspiciously says "sell yourself, don't ask for love, kindness is a robber baron and truth is a billionaire in Manhattan!"

Intermission:
Look! There's a sea of demigods disguised as Siamese pussy cats who sleep all day and sip eggnog from champagne flutes in the springtime. They absorb nepeta leaf fragrance from a city block away and orgasm locally through a purring mannerism or a spazz attack or an androhermophrogenous entheogen;

Look! There's a gaunt Manhattan pauper guru dressed in tweed or smoking weed, or cutting it down to plant bird seed or a bonsai tree, or a pleasant deed like teaching greed or buying Fendi;

Look! There's a renowned rock star dressed as Mithra inside the serapion or the Mercury Lounge signing cherry gum balls or singing inside terrestrial Starcrafts with a flogging pink belt, or catatonia;

Look! There's a domesticated squirrel climbing Wall Street and gnawing a marijuana leaf or his hairy hemlock harness while waiting for his elegant English owner to return with an almond scented acorn from the Scottish Bakery on Dublin St.;

Look! The sun's been trumped by Trump Plaza or a million Shiva lingam or a bongo drum-set in the sky or the motherboard of a global computer that herds gentle ferocity into civil cyber wilderness: liberated, hot, schizophrenic, insane normality;

Look! There's a Versailles miniature at St. Patrick's Cathedral, or St. Patrick's Cathedral or St. John paving pews with promises from dead poets or Native Americans who denounce the sepulchers with the same retrospective redundancy: homeless at the church! flies on shit! fans on celebrities! all fawning the famed: Manhattan! Manhattan! Manhattan!

Second Act:
It's Ginsberg tautologies,
Duplicitous ideologies,
Instaurations from Francis Bacon's philosophies on better explanations,
Knowing that...
Basquiat is acrylic and hobo,
Mendietta is half Soho suicidal,
Warhol is the Sphinx,
Kalil Gibran also died in Manhattan,
But not from the Dakota - Imagine that John Lennon,
And we're still wondering...
If Eleanor Roosevelt did too, but not as sweet as Thomas Paine's un,
Or in martini hallucinations like Eleanor Wasson's who's almost 100 now.
While comrade Che uses a gun,
And Moorison uses heroin -
Van and Jim.
But Ralph Waldo Emerson is gay,
Speak only of Mi(ni)ster Moore...
Your bittersweet ranting is proselytized chocolate for fanatical diabetics,
Motley sensibility behind Masonic heresy of perennial grandiloquence.
"Brave words", Jean Michele?
Where's the Wuwu, Jay?
The Factory?
Polly Magoo?
Williamsburg's the corpus callosum,
The Day of Purification, Godfrey?
Or is it Christo-Jeanne Claude?
The Gates?
Milly La Fortet?
Tribal Marx, you need privacy too!
Eccentric proletarians are Manhattan paupers!

Grand Finale:
Scour the streets, Manhattan paupers;
Swarm the parks with art and idea!
Resources abound, Manhattan paupers;
Color the screen with depth and cheer!
Meet the masters, Manhattan paupers;
And wealth will abound, wise and clear!
Manhattan is alive, and the pauper sings!