(It was a real place, 100th Street & Broadway in New York.)
ROSENBLUM'S DELICATESSEN, 1962
(through Alan Dugan)
I was never young, so even by 18
everything was amnesia, learning
not taken but given away, a short life
of identities renounced as Wagner's dwarf
renounced Love in the name of Power.
But I? Not even Power, certainly not Love,
only a pastrami on club delivered with
the contemptuous waiter's sneer
because I'd asked for milk with coffee,
because by age 18 my traditions
had drifted so far that they
were a message scrawled,
stuffed into a bottle and cast adrift,
my names I could not read
written in gallnut ink
the letters chipped and peeling.
KTW/2-6-05
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Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com
"This is the best of all possible worlds only because it is the only one
that showed up."-- Russell Edson
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