freedom...?

i made it. finally, i made it from the confines of the concrete prison of the port authority, partly due to a clerical error. i should have been in and out of the port earlier on, but i ended up with a three hour break with nothing to do, nothing expected of me and i walked towards penn station... or maybe it was madison square garden, i'm not too sure which, my nyc geography is still dizzying. it really is as though i were released after ten years imprisonment and forced onto the streets with no map. and then i blissfully walked through the shaded parts of the sixth avenue to byrant park and sat, dranks some water, read the village voice, smoked, watched the carousel and a young asian boy swat flies on the concrete handrailing separating this end of the park off from the grassy part, and then his ancient asian grandfather came along behind the boy with a pair of chopsticks, carefully picking up the flies with the chopsticks and placing the lifeless bodies in a long glass jar. no punchline here. some mysteries are best left as mysteries. but it was a time out of jail, my company phone still on, i half expected to get called back by my lo-jack on my waist.
walking back, i thought that briefly i saw the electronic times square message board zoom around the red letters that spelled 'the end of the world is near...,' but i figure that this was a product of my already overactive imagination, the same one that tells me that i am reading the words 'student driver' at the bottom of the gauges on this one particular model of bus rather than 'stewart-warner,' the manufacturer... and then, this sort of summed up of the day, without being to say why, it did. i was standing in front of the jackie gleason statue (our patron saint) with his beatific smile and hand on hip, ready to do anything sort of contraposta and a man, (i imagined him as cuban, but...) wearing a bright hawaiian shirt and white floppy fishermans cap walked by me, looked directly at me, pausing and smiled broadly 'hey, man...' he said 'how ya doin'?' i smiled back, 'good!' that was my day in the big apple.