Flowers bloom next to rusting Pepsi cans,
Watered by the spit of cocaine dealers,
And the semen and vaginal fluid,
Of hot lovers groping under blankets,
Under stars dimly blinking through thick smog.
Nightly haven for muggers, rapists, fiends,
Whose every breath profanes the species they,
So poorly represent, turning Plato’s,
Featherless bipeds, to dead plucked chickens,
Soul-less, pointless wastes of protoplasm.
Abomination-- not in itself but,
For the use it’s put to: a bone for dogs,
Who’ve never tasted steak, and are gleeful,
To feast upon the scraps of fetid meat,
Clinging to well-gnawed bones that they are fed.
Central Park, the bone we are to chew while,
Smiling complacently at skyscrapers,
Daily rising where wild flowers might have grown,
Our humanity proportionally,
Shrinking inversely to their daily rise.
If I seem narrow minded and unkind,
Or blind to the beauty of Central Park,
It is because I’ve stood on virgin ground,
In summer, fall, winter and early spring,
And cannot bring myself to love a whore.
From Of Pain and Ecstasy: Collected Poems (C) 1978, 2011
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