Sunday in the Park
For a short time in 1991, a
small park in Switzerland's capital
constituted the only true IV DMZ in
the western lands.
We are walking toward Zurich.
We are walking on bridges across the Rhone
past statues of generals encrusted with pigeons
thru the back alleys of Copenhagen
or under sooty Polish skies, the color
of the tracks spattered along my arm.
The first reports were incomplete --
speculations over the spoon,
whispers while injecting, a chance phrase
from the woman in the corner
bleaching & rebleaching her rig.
We skitter like roaches, rats.
We nod in curtained rooms,
construct our habitats
with shot glasses and bent spoons.
We are walking toward Zurich, toward
a shooting gallery roofed with sky.
We've been lost a dozen times
this first afternoon, lurching
along well-scrubbed boulevards,
random smears of carbon
obscuring the cross streets
on our overfolded map,
and we see it:
a carnival of use, hundreds
of junkies, pallid, jaundiced,
sprawl like exhausted statues.
Flames flicker under bottlecaps
random as fireflies, syringes
bloom like plastic thistles
all across the grass.
Warmly dressed Swiss matrons
(children clustered about them
like ferns about flowers)
detour around this park.
The swings rust.
We who were once
someone's clean children
now crouch on our own land.
The paramedics cannot
last much longer --
45 respiratory arrests today! --
we are a state of emergency
abscessing on command, breathing
only when forced.
I have readied my fix
and hold it firmly. The shadow
of my rig falls directly
over my favorite vein, thin compass
pointing true north. I inject.
I hold my breath
and find it no burden, far lighter
than an overused cotton.
My skin is gray as lead
in the late afternoon sun.
They pound my chest. No use. We
are not willing to come back.
We are warriors, lemmings, gods.
We dart toward Heaven
as our cyanosed skin
cools below.
© Claud Reich, 1996
Poems by Claud Reich
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