That damn demon was drunk again the other night Ghosts are supposed to be invisible Graceful like air from the fourth dimension Not banging and breaking things at 3 a.m. Go haunt yourself I’m up I’m up Darkness drips contempt The best cover as that damn demon knows I’ll have to imagine that pile of books tumbling I just know they are Phase-shifts announce themselves There’s this pause in the dark Thinking You think about it Thinking doesn’t stop it It shifts You just know it Feel it These phase-shifts don’t happen on their own But they could be quieter The fourth dimension is out there somewhere In the weightless empty dark In the crevices of weightlessness Without boundary it stretches past the horizon Silent But you can hear it Think about it Think I’m up I’m up

I have just found out I was hip in 1979. Drinking Pabst’s Blue Ribbon In the Wayne Hills Mall parking lot We had no concept of irony It was just a cheap beer A quarter-century later I sit amazed as can after can of Pabst’s Is handed out by the bartenders I am glad I have stopped drinking If being hip requires drinking bad beer I am especially glad not to live in Milwaukee Where, by this logic, you’d have to drink Miller Even in high school we had limits If we continue down this road People will start eating spam And I will finally become a vegetarian We will munch on broccoli Walking down the streets of Williamsburg And hipsters will say to themselves “Why didn’t I think of that?” Throwing away their spam Although it would seem that any spam craze Would be immediately self-correcting You have to wonder why spam was invented Somewhere a scientist in a food company laboratory Had some surplus chemicals and a deadline All that was needed was a captive market And no doubt the Army paid top dollar Helping spawn the artificial food product industry Maybe that is quite enough irony And we do not need to actually eat spam Nor should we have to listen to more 1970s bands It was bad enough the first time around And there is simply something off About pretending to be nostalgic For music that was sclerotic before you were born Especially when you are listening to it on an iPod Perhaps this is inevitable when consumer detritus piles into mountains And the compulsion to use the bricks of the 20th century To build culture in the 21st century is irresistible Simply because there are so many bricks lying around I’d suggest we take some of those bricks And smash some televisions But the televisions are the biggest bricks It would be difficult to have irony without television Punk bands were already covering theme shows From the sitcoms of their childhoods by the early 1980s There just weren’t as many bricks then Now we have more bricks than channels So let us don our sleeveless plain white T-shirts And play some dinosaur rock While playing kickball in McCarren Park Before hoisting a Pabst’s Blue Ribbon And reliving our high school years Even if we have forgotten them for good reason

Reflections of the Sun slap against the building Wavering in time to waves moving past parallel rectangular islands of brick and cement Gentle ripples from a passing boat add to the Moon's tug Brushing a layer of salt on to the wall But striking below window level as low tide approaches A window on the third floor that turned out to be just right Since I can climb from my window directly into the boat That I can tie to the fire escape Making for quick trips As rowing is certainly faster than waiting for the 'G' train And helpful to your relationship Even a trip to the supermarket can mean a moonlight boat cruise Although I expected to live next to the East River Not in it Still, increased transportation options are one benefit from global warming And it is nice in a way that Brooklyn is now the Venice of the West Thanks to the city government building seawalls only around Manhattan Those gondolas floating down Flatbush Avenue make a pretty sight And Park Slope sure looks different with those palm trees on Seventh Avenue Who would have thought eco-tourism would have come to Brooklyn? There's less pressure to save the Amazon now that Prospect Park is a tropical rain forest Even Coney Island has been helped We all thought nobody would want to go to an underwater resort But snorklers come from around the world To view the coral reef that's accreted to the boardwalk Fifty blocks of spectacular coral formations Except the block containing Nathan's hot dog stand Where, oddly, nothing seems to grow Astroland is still a big draw, too What other roller coaster sends its riders underwater? Better be able to hold your breath I think it's easy to say Brooklyn is the most interesting of the four boroughs Since global warming became so dramatic I guess it's a shame what happened to Staten Island But they did get to leave New York City like they always wanted Nobody was surprised when the Fresh Kills landfill wasn't closed down back in 2002 And maybe if the climate hadn't changed The landfill continuing to stay open wouldn't have been a big deal But all the heat and humidity that built up after the warmup Accelerated the decay of the landfill When all that methane gas blew up The explosion made Mt. St. Helens look like a firecracker Garbage rained as far as New Brunswick But the weirdest part was the kick the explosion gave to the island Most of the explosion went out the back side, toward New Jersey And pushed all of Staten Island into the Atlantic It was like a nozzle on a rocket ship sitting on its side By the time the island came to a rest It was so far out to sea It not only had to succeed from New York City But become the 51st state Their cheering sure died down fast When the Staten Island government had to institute a $40 ferry fare Of course it's a little difficult for the ferry to dock in Manhattan Since Manhattan is now 30 feet below sea level Leaving the inhabitants a bit paranoid Since any breach in the seawall would bring a tidal wave The Lower East Side is especially touchy After the threat to flood the neighborhood because of its activists Tensions reached the boiling point When City Hall tried to sell corporate sponsorship rights to Tompkins Square Park One more riot and the seawall comes down in your neighborhood, City Hall said People were wondering why that line of sandbags went up on First Avenue There were plenty of other ripple effects from global warming Brooklyn may have gained in tourism, but it lost in shipping Once the Meadowlands became a giant bay Hackensack became a deep-water port And several Mob disappearances were solved When the new Meadowlands Bay was dredged Although everybody was wrong about Jimmy Hoffa It turned out he was buried in the Giants Stadium parking lot Mot in the end zone That should have been the end of it The Dead Mobsters theme restaurant was in really bad taste Even by the standards of New Jersey malls Which themselves threatened to take over the entire state Worried that shoppers wouldn't want to travel as much In the increased heat and humidity of global warming The mall owners decided to link all of the state's malls It was a proud moment when the ribbon was cut in front of the Laverne & Shirley Store Midway between Wayne and Paramus Another step toward all of New Jersey becoming one continuous mall One giant building stretching from High Point to Cape May And if it gets so hot the polar ice caps completely melt New Jersey will become New Atlantis A 180-mile-long building submerged under the sea While Manhattan is surrounded by 300-foot-high walls But Brooklyn will still be the most interesting borough Becoming an undersea city The 'G' train will be replaced by the 'G' submarine For which we'll wait endlessly in our scuba gear It'll be nice to know that in the era of global warming Some things will never change

Tennis balls skid through the high grass Followed closely by tufts of yellow fur Microdogs searching for their prey Weaving past one another in a high-speed chase A frenzy of barking automatons Until one reaches the prize And rushes it back at the head of the pack His reward a pat on the head And the thrill of anticipation As the next toss sends the pack surging again across the grass Keeping them occupied Until someone brings a cat to the park

But who will weep for the dead? The tears flow But they are not tears of relief Yes I know style is all And style there was Indifference to the lives of millions thrown away Would be enough But with a smile yet? That damned optimism painted on and frozen In place as the national Cheshire cat in the dark Far removed from the crescent moon sinking above the killing fields of Central America If he had to kill those hundreds of thousands by his own hands Instead of hiring mercenaries Instead of arming and training death squads and more official armies Could he have kept smiling? What an exhausting job He would have had to start at dawn most days Thank you for participating in America’s glorious morning, seÒor Now please turn your neck a little more to the right I wonder why his public relations agents didn’t think of this Single-handedly wiping out the Communist menace What a photo-op it would have been Then he could have injected homosexuals with AIDS at night Single-handedly wiping out the gay menace Well, mommy, do I have to kill all these people? Is the help on strike? Even if the death squads had gone on strike He wouldn’t have fired them The tsar always said the black hundreds were fine fellows There isn’t any point in going back to the past if you aren’t going to steal from it But would there be weeping if he were simply a cowboy deus ex machina? A vision of America as a giant happy theme park All shiny under ever sunny skies Built on the bones of Others Is the same as any product that can’t be sold unless it meets a need He told you it was good to be the bully Being relieved of guilt is the greatest gift He told you it was righteous to hate No one can be wrong when waving a flag He told you God wants you to have cheap oil If it’s in the Bible it must be true Shut up and go shopping It’s still a program to rally around If he had better public relations sense Genghis Khan would have said it’s morning in Mongolia But in those days there were no euphemisms and the leader had to get his hands dirty War is peace Asking for enough to feed your kids is greed Pollution can be ended by cutting down all the trees He believed Just as those who weep

High tide on the East River Rolls past crumbling piers Disintegrating before our eyes This foot-wide cement beam Barely connects to the mainland Less of the pier remains every time I come here The grass-covered earth is mostly replaced By tide-swept rotting planks holding up air This narrow river perch will soon be inaccessible Assuming it remains A little further out Speedboats glide past the Con Ed plant directly across And on this side is the shiny new waste-transfer station Reminding us that less changes than we think.

Time keeps moving faster Strange That the fourth dimension stretches When the first three don't This must be a recent phenomenon Because time moved so slow when I was a kid If time has always gotten faster The Roman Empire must have lasted forever Every hour must have been like a day back then And those movies of the chariot races Must be speeded up So we can watch without falling asleep Because everybody moved in slow motion in those days By our standards Although to the Romans themselves I'm sure they moved normally Everybody does move at the same speed They did when I was a kid That hasn't changed But months and years don't last as long As they used to Maybe we are all moving faster But don't notice because everybody else is faster too Synchronous acceleration This speeding up might have something to do With the universe expanding faster Time has more space to cover So it has to rush to get to where it is going Pushing us faster Without our noticing How much could the universe have expanded since I was a kid? A year was a year back then And you remembered all of them There hadn't been many yet And they lasted so long Especially if you had a teacher you didn't like Now there are entire years For which I don't remember anything I know things happened And I do remember some of them But I don't really remember just when The universe is expanding faster So time is going to speed up even more Until a day is like an hour Our descendants will move so fast They'll need to wear exoskeletons To keep from tearing apart The exoskeletons will have to be computerized to keep up I hope the computers won't be running Microsoft software Or the exoskeletons will keep crashing And the wearer would be frozen in place Every time there is a computer crash Life will already be so short You wouldn't want to waste any of it Frozen in place Waiting for a reboot And what if global warming has something to do With the acceleration of time? The exception to time moving so slow When you were a kid Was summer Which always flew by Molecules are more energetic the warmer the temperature is Maybe time operates the same way The quantum particles that carry time Are excited by heat And slowed by cold This could explain why the ice ages lasted so long It doesn't seem as if there is any way out of this time trap We're not going to have another ice age any time soon And there isn't enough mass To stop the universe from expanding Nor enough time To delay the end