When One Runs Out of Referents

Small red x’s on the lower right of my desktop
inform me my computer’s quips and blips won’t
synapse to the Internet – whatever cyber
waves it had depended on have waved
a brisk bye-bye. The TV’s on – I click it off –
I’ll save the radio for some more needful
silence when its hum, imbroglio might salve

a sadder or more anxious ear than I quite have
right now. I wonder what it is I feel, or if it has
the least importance. Strange when one
runs out of referents. Today I saw the most
amazing ornament upon a stalwart tarnished
yellow corner building on Fourteenth Street,
Seventh Avenue – as if a strolling band of curlicue

and swelling line had once decided in – say,
nineteen-hundred-nine – to hazard makeshift
art nouveau which croaked a bit of awkward
home-grown jazz: a sort of snazzy New York
glow type thing. It made the building sing:
sweet treat! – surreal. I’ll go out now,
retrieve an image of it. Perhaps it’s what I feel.

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