Prodigal sons & daughters

At six forty five in the after-midnight hours of the day night, when the daylight is about to start invading the late night, tired eyes begin to able to see through their eyelids. It gives everything a sort of bloodish red tint like putting a flashlight against your cheek. Garbage trucks are hurrying around like they have been all night, the only difference is that for a few hours it’s quiet enough, whatever that means here, to hear them here. Here are the heroes of the nocturnal mess, which must be swept away each night otherwise we’ll all sink in a great splash between the Hudson and East rivers. Manhattan’s garbage is soon a problem for Queens or New Jersey. Even North Carolina is receiving some share of New York’s waste, delivered on barges each morning. But Manhattan is flattered by this. Like a celebrity, Manhattan is outraged on the outside that some low life like North Carolina is going through her garbage, but deep on the inside, down where it counts, Manhattan is blushing. How honoring, a show of true fame. Soon, Manhattan will be leaving little secrets, not big career-wrecking secrets, but innocent juicy little secrets in her garbage just so the North Carolinas will find them and score up a little black and white for herself in the newsprints. Look at what the neighbors are throwing out on the curb and you’ll understand. No other city in the world goes through so many mattresses. Manhattan needs to give North Carolina her mattresses. The mattress is where all the sexy page six innocent secrets occur. If only those springs could talk, and they sometimes do. Stained with piss, blood or fun, these mattresses are loaded onto the battleships that march like an army to and from the sandy shores of Carolina. At this moment, there is a mattress, many mattresses, somewhere along the journey to the Near South of the Union. If mattresses floated, and they absolutely do not, then the city of New York would float them down stream like the loggers of Lake Superior send around the new timber. If mattresses could float and if pigs could fly and if pigs could fly on magic mattresses, then maybe pigs would be a new kind of kosher. Rabbis would debate how they sleep in their own filth but they fly on used mattresses. When in doubt, it’s magic or more recently religion or more more recently something too scientific to understand. If we cared about planet earth we wouldn’t keep our garbage here. We’d shoot it into space and watch it float away toward Neptune or Orion’s Belt like logs down the river. For now though, how much garbage is not garbage quite yet? How many new mattresses are shipped onto the island of Manhattan each day? But, Manhattan has garbage trucks, and the trucks go to garbage barges, and those have North Carolina, and North Carolina has itself, and the cheese stands alone.