Discombobulated

(Reposting this piece from 2023)

Times Square, 1976 / Photo by Russell C. Smith

Discombobulated and disheveled, you wander out of a dream and into the crosswalk at Broadway and Seventy-Second. Noon turns into late afternoon in a heartbeat. Turn your brights on, a woman with a beehive hairdo wig pushing a broken shopping cart is yelling into a rolled-down car window. You think you’ve been here before. Thinking this exact same thought. Maybe so, or maybe no. A guy on the corner appears to have flipped his lid, but as we know appearances can often lie. High rises and low-down joints crumble around you. It’s a constant give and take, here in the Discombobulated States of Hey-Merica. How has Central Park turned into a flood plain? You wade past seals escaped from the Central Park Zoo frolicking with mermaids from who knows where, dogwalkers on surfboards, circus-escapee stilt-walkers making a splashy path by Bethesda Fountain. You hop on the next gondola heading down Fifth Avenue. The day finally fully emerges when night comes on. The lit-up half-drowned city dreams of itself, and you love the aquatically wandering part of this night. You run into a ghost as you’re heading downtown on an abandoned motorboat. A white-bearded sage of a fellow waves you toward a familiar pair of lions made of stone. He steps down from the top front step of the New York City Public Library, and tipping the boat from side to side, he hops into the backseat. He’s Poet-O, a bard of the streets from long-gone yesteryears. He made his home in Central Park in the mid-1980s. For coffee and bagel money, he’d recite composed in the moment poetry for you. How could he have lived this long, continuing the oral traditions this far into the future? Camping next to scenic rock formations, behind graffitied doorways – surviving in the city. Oh, Poet-O! Did you live this long on sourdough bagels, with friendly crows as companions, amused by life, miraculously living long enough to confound and astound everyone you came in contact with? Or, are you the ghost of Poet-O? A reminder of kindnesses given and withheld. A none too subtle reminder of what makes us human. Then and now.