Harry Siegel

New York is dead like yesterday’s head-
Lines, today’s fish-wrap. Dead like Battle-Axe 
Bill, the “oversized Irish terrier
With a proper fighting spirit and
A hatred for the island’s invaders” who
Was dispatched to Rikers’ 400
Acres made mostly of the city’s trash 
Barged in, heaped up and then set 
Ablaze, the island shining like “a forest 
of Christmas trees” at night, a “whole hillside” 
of trash “lit up with little fires.”The dog “kept 
the rats in their place” until they “cornered, 
killed and devoured” the beast. RIKERS ISLAND 
RATS HUNT AND KILL A DOG blared
the New York Times, adding, obviously,
PEST IS NOW A PROBLEM. Stop 
The presses! 

New York is as dead as who you were
Twenty years ago. Dead as you will be,
In perpetuity, in another twenty or twenty
After that, dead as the corpses lining the Belt
Parkway. The days are long but the years
Are short, said someone who’s 
Dead now and people who are not dead 
Yet keep repeating it, carrying the flame. 
Dead as the New Yorkers whose trash 
Got dumped into the Atlantic until 
Jersey squealed. 

Waste not, want not but life
Is waste and want and barges 
Took the trash once washed away 
Or washed up to line the Jersey shore to 
Rikers, where Tarzans stripped
to the waist shoveled it to make way
For the trash to come, “each day enough ashes, 
Paper, discarded furniture and sweepings 
To cover ten city blocks twelve feet deep.”   .

When the jail was young, the convicts tended 
A vegetable garden and cared for pigs 
There under guard (the convicts, not the pigs) 
Until “the long summer evenings” when Battle-
Axe Bill’s successors who the city’s trash boss
Praised as “the most gentle friendly animals 
in the world who went about their business  
Of killing a couple of hundred rats 
A day” and who “perform their duty 
Efficiently” but who “in the long summer 
Evenings they hear the call 
Of the wild and go forth in packs
To prey on innocent pigs.”

Without those dogs, the trash
boss said, “the rats would overrun 
The island and perhaps swim
To the mainland and destroy the city.” If not 
For the trash that fed the rats that made the city 
Bring the dogs that preyed on innocent 
Pigs, most of Rikers wouldn’t be there.  

New York City is dead like a forest of Christmas 
Trees at night, a vamping affront to God, 
Nature, nothing, same as it ever was, and is
Everywhere so long as people keep saying 
So long, and it is so long until it’s done. Long 
days and short years, gradually until it’s 
Suddenly and, until it’s suddenly, life feeding on life 
And each pig, prisoner, boss in the race 
Until we ain’t or it ain’t and what
Difference does it make then, did it ever
Make? We are prisoners tending a futile
Garden, food for rats, electric lights 
Flickering in an uncanny valley
Of ash that one day, if some Moses
Wills it, may be remade as a park too late 
For us, as dead as the city, to give a good God
Damn about it, or some punchline coda 
About what happens after 
Someone cries out to stop
The presses!