Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

110. WITH CANDY STILL ON THEIR HANDS:

'To the sound of your wrecking voice / I am drinking milk on a patio / outdoors somewhere overlooking a great blue harbor / and one without doubt or passage.'
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There was lots of lost time for me everywhere : walking down along the Henry Street Settlement looking for anything that could give me incentive to go on I looked at the endless array of synagogues and old churches amidst the 'ancient-for-New York' buildings and the now crumbling walkups and storefronts decorated with Hebrew lettering and I saw all the places selling scrolls and dreidels and anything else which the great Jewish masses needed and they stood around too - many of them lame and elderly and sorrowful and mute - short and stocky bent with cane and overcoat and hat and they all seemed meant for something else and someplace else but saddled somehow too with responsibility here for one thing or another and there was a certain gloom and sadness which permeated the area and the tasks each person undertook were heavy and dreary - a thousand seamstresses and ironers and cutters and counters five hundred bakers and cooks and hundreds of others there for prayer and humming and worship and prayer again - prayer for sunrise and prayer for sunset prayer for birth and prayer for death for hunger and for food for good fortune and for massacres crime and well-being EVERYTHING seemed mixed together and I sat down on a stoop across from the settlement building just to watch things come down as workers were tearing apart tenements and ripping up streets to build whatever - one form or another of government building all with government architecture made and selected by stern government agents with very loose government money (once again NOTHING of this was good or right or honest or even needed) and no one looked up no one moved no one even seemed to care as I watched transfixed : old red brick doorways and buildings and fronts with Hebrew inscriptions and synagogue names and symbols the long blue sky behind the star-symbol atop steeples unique to the Jewish way - none of that tall thin boastful Christian style here but rather a stolid mean and chunky brickwork topped by the Jewish star with a circle and it stood stark and lonely against the broad and deepening sky colored as it seemed by every pogram slaughter and death these Jews had ever undergone - but still there was the massive silence and that is what I noticed the most and actually it is that which talked most loudly to me and I remembered someone had said 'if life is so short why then is memory so long?' and judging by what I'd just been seeing I knew I couldn't answer this OR that and it all started to seem like tuberculin fields of dread with people stalking streets like fire or wise men with swords seeking children to kill - with candy still in their hands.