Lower East Side   In dream after dream you’re always the same: so old that you’re melting, crumbling, eroding into thin air, all this psychic code for — what? Long before, before I came to know your seductive squalor and stink I roamed your streets by night, glimpsed furtive strangers vanishing into your fissures, changed wonder to dread, lost my way, watched friends sink into oblivion.                         But then came Street Fun — now I possessed your carnival eruptions, bannered bricks, raucous colors — from top to bottom the music of laughter and everyone, everyone in on this conspiracy, this beckoning to breathe, to wake, to see.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont June 2009