Baked August Goods

High atop my tenement,
a tar beach steams
over the floors below
while jets approach JFK
like homing pigeons.

Neighbors finish their day;
some cooking dinner, singing out an oldie
while others take a fresh shower,
washing away the city sweat of August.

Maybe a painting forms
on amateur easels
as horns honk
like motorized geese down Broadway,
or a poem is born between
the sounds of sirens that drift in and out,
wrestling with the sunset’s humid calm

We live stacked,
a loaf of bread on end,
slices of white, rye
blending together,
in a packaged community.

Is the boiler ready
for winters onslaught
as the vagabond picks
his subterranean bed;
mice readying
a garbage feast.

Dinner smells emanate
from elevator shafts
as another flight, roaring by,
leaves a contrail, maybe a flight from
exotic tenements abroad.

Maybe from Swiss Chalets;
those visitors unaware
of the cities vertical dwelling.

The sun goes hiding behind brick
and I’ll make my way
back to my box and I’ll stand
on the heads below
and they’ll stand on the heads below
and we’ll pretend a cool pasture
looms outside.

Jim Senetto about Jim Senetto

My father was quiet; loving, provider but quiet…I never knew a grandfather, his side, or his brother lost at 28 and I was told not to ask. So quiet I was…me, the quiet one, second echelon in a group of friends…quiet in the confessional booth I was brought to…why tell a stranger, in a dark booth sitting behind mesh, my woes, thinking it just might be his woes were worse than mine (I’ve later learned, some in collars should have sat on the other side of that mesh window, confessing). I was drafted in ’66, taught how to kill strangers and my mouth began to question why and with some friends now dead from bullets of insanity, I became alive, vowing never to be as quiet as my father. He had his reasons, I’m sure, old school and all of that, but I had to break the chain. Art, photography, music, poetry is my voice and it’s all fair game…say it loud, some will listen and that is good enough for me.