UMBRELLA SELLERS

When it rains, umbrella-sellers
like mushrooms sprout
beneath the subway eves.

I'm heading to New York
Adorned today to complete
an old tattoo.

It's cold, but I do not want to pay
five dollars for one of those spindly,
many-spoked shields.
Instead I buy a blue jean-jacket,
at the Gap and huddle
close inside its denim confines.

It will come in handier, longer,
I think, with autumn coming on.

I keep walking,
dampening,
suffering plops like fists
from tiny thugs,

like the buzzing needles that will pierce my skin
soon and draw it black:

individual, ineffectual;
together a deluge.