Messages

Are not the words of the prophet written on the subway walls?

A well-dressed middle-aged man at the 86th St IRT station was writing in ball-point on a poster: “Let he give us money.” Cathy and I stared at this after he moved on. Then she, being an editor, careted in an “s” between the “e” and the “t” to make “lest”. The man meanwhile was down to the next poster, then the next. We followed once the useless-to-us-Brooklynites-after rush-hour 5 train took most of the good-sized crowd away, including our scribbler.

“Charge us more for nothing,” he wrote on a transit map.

The next poster down: “Pay in pennies.”

Later, we found the comple poetry and prose of Wm. Blake in a bar (yes, we were back in Brooklyn) and thought, ah, the man’s “the mind forg’d manacles” have been broken, but in the wrong direction.

Later still, freegans were dumpster diving at Trader Vic’s Joe’s. One woman pulled out a potted conifer and chortled “Merry Christmas!’

And to all a good night.