Broadway Windows

The Broadway windows gleamed and glinted at me, some clean and shining and others boarded with wet plywood and plastered with rain-washed posters of comedians and porno films, staring down like knick-knacks and clutter on shelves which reached hundreds of feet into the sky. The porcelain cats with their crystal eyes; the cracked paper-weights; the whisky bottles with peeling, yellow labels; the portraits of dead relatives; the urns full of dog's ashes; the nicotine-stained ticket-stub keepsake from a midnight showing of 'Casablanca' from a first, and last, date that was kept just for the sake of keeping; the matchstick models of famous landmarks;  the children's permission slips for the field-trip to a little town some place I'd call Upstate, but the locals call 'Central New York'; the bowl of loose-change given to and by cashiers, delivery boys, buskers and cab-drivers only to be swapped around all over the place and end up back in the ceramic bowl which was painted by the fourth kid from a third marriage in orange and green hues; the fake crystal-vase which hasn't housed flowers since the week after last St. Valentine's day; the postcards from Vermont; the box of instant-photographs of people you haven't spoken to in years; the paperback books about Al Capone and Julius Caesar; the cigarette soft-packs; the takeout cartons; the stains; the grime; the damp; the long-since deceased moths and roaches still imprinted in the dust; the stacks of unopened letters; the bills; the final notices to which you said, "if I don't open it, it's like they never sent it"; the drawer in which you said you'd keep all of your important documents but now you realize that you have none other than your birth certificate and will never have any more other than your death certificate - with nothing worth documentation in between; the owner's manual to a '76 AMC Gremlin in which you got your first handjob; the Christmas card you wrote months ago and then realized you didn't know your sister's last name anymore; the 'Happy 5th Birthday' card you wrote months ago and then realized you didn't know if your daughter was turning five or six; the 'Get Well Soon' card you wrote months ago and then you realized that the address your mother gave you was a hospice, not a hospital; the overflowing ashtray; the empty address book; the dead batteries inside broken remotes; the radio with a faulty speaker; the scratched CDs; the ultrasound image of the sixth kid from a fifth marriage; the incomplete tax form; the incomplete insurance form; the incomplete divorce papers from this fifth marriage; your grandfather's medals from World War One that have rusted now; the pyramid-scheme business book; the spare keys to a house that was repossessed; the fob to a car that was stolen; the half-written suicide note that was abandoned when your pen ran out of ink.