SO YOU WANNA BE IN PICTURES?

I had my ass parked
on a black, wrought-iron rail
which bordered my garbage cans,
smoking a cigarette & waiting
on a steady thing: a job, a woman,
immortality or my clothes
to dry and settled on
finishing the smoke & hanging
for my underwear
& bedsheets for the week next
& smelling the snow
which was promised
for later on that evening
when I heard tears ten feet
to my right.
I took a drag
& swiveled my head
& saw a pretty college co-ed,
her face scrunched-up
balling into her cell phone.
I tried my best
to eavesdrop
but my hearing is going
the way the rest of my body is:
south. I tried again,
failed again & waited.
I suppose you really get the impression
these days, that no one is around when
you're on these devices; self-consciousness
doesn't enter into it. I'm of the age
where I think people are spying on me
when alone in my pad, but that's me.
But when she passed
I could hear her say,
"What am I going to tell my dad?"
Ten or twenty years ago, I thought,
I could tell her; I could give her
the benefit of all my knowledge &
hard earned experience &
a healthy dose of bullshit
with the idea, or plan,
of fucking her
then & there or
the not too distant future.
Don't get angry--
it's an all too human ploy.
I watched her & her jelly-limbed legs
wobble & teeter down my block
& didn't notice a young man
who approached me from the other side:
"Excuse me, sir," he began.
My head swiveled back east.
He'd disturbed a poem
that was taking shape.
"What?" I asked.
"The director of this film we're shooting
would like you to be in it."
"What are you talking about?"
"We're on a shoot...all these trucks...
we're filming a scene and he'd like you
to be in it, smoking a cigarette the way
you just did. Just smoke another cigarette
and we'll film it."
I looked around and sure enough
there were film trucks up & down my block.
Nothing strange; someone films something often
in my part of Greenwich Village.
"How much?"
"Eh, how much what?" he inquired.
"How much bread would I get? Money? You know, coins?"
"Money? Nothing. No money, but you'd be in the movie...maybe."
"Who gives a fuck?"
He moved off
& so did I. A mistake
I know. Another part
misread.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016