Seventy second street East, NYC, Carlos Vasquez mutes the somber song of financial defeat and hoists a sign that appeals to the streets.
His militia is his business, a platoon enlisted to keep the peace, simply, he promises to wash your suit, if you can land an interview to get yourself off the street.
A mother empties her pockets at a butcher shop, on the Lower East Side, her last stop, before she can take the pink slip from her pocket and tell her kids why she’s still not gonna cry.
Mr. Reporter I implore you, return to these better truths, find us evidence that there are people who tend to each other while they die from their own wounds.
Lest we forget that in the garden of greed and evil, a good goddess struts her stuff too. Plucking poems from pockets of botanical prose she shifts her fists, her palms make love, and she whispers to it, come forth and multiply.
And thus, by a vehicle like this, an extended open fist, the goddess thrusts into the forest people made of poetry, looking outward to identify with the marks of the goddess that treads under trees, marks that betray their common benevolence and a rejection of common greed.
For when she whispers, and blows gently her sweet breath into the crook of her folded hands, a majestic chemistry commences to conjure the very best of imperfect man.
She’s an artisan, an alchemist, a farmer who insists to her lively crop, that they can be better than this, choose the lonely green of the government’s failing bills, or put your neighbor on your back and climb to refuge which waits beyond this, over top this, ominous hill.
The people are in fellowship under the punishment of the sun, a blazing selfishness that sits aloft and scoffs at the meek, a heat that seeks to destroy our communion by leaving our trust undone and our empathies in defeat.
But bulls on parade are met by the patriots of the same day, who stumble upon their brethren, pick them up and brush them off, remove the distrust that fell as dust from the sun’s scamming with Mr. Madoff.
From the garden an exodus declares the precedent. Human beings are blooming and putting greed to their backs, snuffing the instincts of the desperate and in need for the nobility of a people that holds each other from the cracks.
This crisis is not just business, its come to be about people. And we’re going to choose to believe that an American resilience can again be unbelievable.
The mayor of tent city is a man named Dale, a jobless contractor outfitted with PVC pipes and an arm full of pickle pales.
In his city he’s known as Poseidon, the god of the water’s will, who doesn’t sleep at night but swoons the Good Goddess in her garden sky, and tells her stories of his people’s ill.
And as the tingle comes behind her nose, her cheeks begin to streak and she fights to speak through tears she hears the cheer of Tent City.
Awake in the rain. For a moment alive, drinking of the goddess’ gift from filling pickle pales, a moment to forget, and smile at the good lady sky.
