Persistence of Vision

Rainy Saturday nights on the Lower East Side, I sit at the windowsill in my underwear while the radiator falls over itself in a fit of efficacy at my feet. Page after page flies off the typewriter, I forget to think but my raging hands do the work for me, beating the machine into the plaster of the sill, so recently repainted and now all scuff marks and dents. I yelled into the blank pages all the twists and turns of a life, of a winter, of the persistent black rain on the avenue, the music crescendoed as my poetry crested, a ship at the top of a wave, a curious vessel in the midst of a storm, they say the middle of a hurricane is entirely still, but I don't know if I believe in quiet anymore, I think we are all just wildfires with
the
lid
on.