ON ELVIS PRESLEY'S BIRTHDAY

I can't say that I love this place where I live
This particular geographic location
But I've grown use to it and now I miss it when I'm away
Of course, when I was a child my father would take me with him
Down to the bowery where the bums were
And in the restaurant supply stores
He would buy shiny steel refrigerators and deadly looking stoves
While I begged him to take me to the army navy surplus stores on canal street
To buy some big dead bullets

He wore a short corduroy jacket, an informal hat with a puff of feather
And he talked with his hands in his pants pockets jangling change

Driving in his Cadillac it was Elvis Presley's birthday
They said it on the radio and my father liked Elvis
And it was wonderful - it was wonderful
We drove through the black neighborhoods on Long Island's north shore When
Elvis was alive

My father was from Brooklyn and the depression left its mark
From picking up coal on the railroad tracks
He didn't have a good word to say about Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Later, I liked elegant hotel bars
Where I could drink under F. Scott Fitzgerald skies
The coolest of the cool
Never a child on Elvis Presley's birthday
My dead father jangling change

This is an unreal city
You can be anybody you want to be
When you're alone