Michael Bennett
If you ask the MTA
they will admit this # is
a full-blown fabrication
The idea being that
an enumeration of
instances makes us feel secure
Personally I find it
offensive that they think
so few New Yorkers see & say
something—anything—as though
we are all blind & mute except
nineteen hundred and forty-four
What are the rest of us up to?
Wandering around slack-jawed
and anesthetized by fear?
There goes our reputation as
a city full of poets if
the bulk of us are zombified
Quick, chop off the head
of all these living dead
before they have a chance to eat our brains!
Michael Bennett, Professor of English at Long Island University (Brooklyn), has published several books and articles, as well as poems in The Redneck Review of Literature, Downtown Brooklyn, and Hawk and Handsaw.