There Are No Solid Gold Dancers Any More

I start to walk and think, “Who can think of love when it’s hard
getting enough out of being alive?” Nature tries to cover me like
velvet, make everything seem more romantic, but I gotta learn to
ignore that shit.

Internet cafés, homeless guy, psychic, dollar-store music, and used
condom swimming in puke: all within one block. And thank God that,
in the end, technology will save us all, make us all the same.

All I need is one late-night glass of habit and I’ll be through, in just
one year I’ll be through with sweating red wine from my armpits, all my
tense pores. Just one year, that’s all it’ll take and then I’ll be through
   with this street, this town.

Red light. No cars coming, and who cares, I’m fucking walking, I’m like
an immigrant here, anyways. What I do, what I’ve done, will make a
mighty fine epitaph: “LIVED, LAUGHED, DIED.” You’ll be able to look
   up my name in a dictionary and it’ll have a definition, a lexicon, a
   history. Hmm.

I’m counting my time down as I walk one last time north on Liberty,
   picking at my cracked lip, my hands colder than when I was born,
   in my pocket is opium for the people—thank God I always could
   make ’em laugh— oh, and a song as catchy as any Irving Berlin
   could compose:

I wanted to try, oh
how I wanted to say
to you so many things

that it’s funny, wishing on a star
how stupid I think we all are

how little it all means
in the wider scope of things

and now, how better off it seems
to just have me and my little dreams

—ADRIENNE WEISS

(Originally published summer, 2003.)