My lights flash five ways.
My window is lined
for Christmas.
My lights are
red
   white
      green
         yellow
            pink
               orange.

Outside, there are strips of ice,
fossilized tire tracks in my driveway.
There's a phone booth
in front of my house.
The receiver is freezing
someone's ear.  He has the
voice of a boy and the
body of an old man.

He screams.  His voice,
like the wires that carry it,
is hung with strips of ice.
He screams:
"I don't want
no fifty cents!
I don't want no fifty cents!
I can't buy no dope with fifty cents!"
He wants ten dollars,
and from the sound of it
he doesn't have a chance,
but he still keeps screaming
"I gotta have ten dollars!
Just give me ten dollars!
I can't buy no dope
with fifty cents!"

I am the keeper of my piece
of the world, even if that piece
is, sometimes, as small as a window,
my window, which flashes five ways.
It flashes like code,
telling an old story,
repeating an invitation
to an old birth.

The man downstairs can see it,
I know, from the phone booth.
It is proclaiming stubborn hope
to a cold and depressed
and desperate and
endlessly
thirsty
world.

I flash my hope triumphantly.

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