bigger (12/17/82)
Local Dies In Auto Mishap, page 7b I live on a street where no one cries. Last week there was a paper wreck of metal and bone here, that brought out crowds of sirens. The news they inked read like mud footed lines of obituaries in the local daily. And maybe one old woman gasped. Paramedics proofread vitals for ways to correct the syntax of heart and breath but it was style that made them miss deadline. The crowd, as a man just laid there dying, posed for photographs, punctuating the phrase he lived on a page of old cliches. Long shadows move across this grey urban page, but it's the street I've got to live on.