Armenian Man

My thing fell off at Forty-seventh Street,
Out of my pants and to the ground to shatter
Like a cylinder of glass amid the rushing passersby.
A man with a matrimonial eye
Came from the jeweler’s
With his beloved well in tow

To make a spectacle of my broken bits.
You may know Forty-seventh Street
And the part of Manhattan in which it lives,
Lying to the east and to the west
Within the bounds of the rings it markets
And bearing the embedded silence

Of the diamonds in its tongue.
A thing falls off when it can. Not all are made of glass.
But Forty-seventh Street is where you want
To keep that thing secure inside your pants.
My father came to this same street.
He was old and he was scared and crazy

From the fumes in some theater ruins
In his head. I told him of my loss,
And from his history he spoke his own,
Of desert burns and melon breasts blood red,
Of men who wore axes in their skulls and
Needles in the eyes of shrunken children.

Blankness dominated the sign he held,
And a typewriter displayed itself,
Promising secrets it would reveal.
As it laughed and taunted and showed
Its different sides in a wanton dance
Inches from my grasp.

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