Who ever thought of it as the peninsula it is. Inhabited by native Americans and called Narrioch, a ” land without shadows”, “always in the light”, its beaches facing south and ‘always in the light; a “point” or “corner of the land”. Come 1600’s and it’s Dutch bought for a gun, a blanket and a kettle. Also called Coninen Island, then Coney Hook, then maybe Conyn Eylandt, maybe even Konah, even Colman after John Coleman, slain by the natives 1609.
Wikipedia

So I write about my Coney, phony, and for me my lonely island.
Land of rides and fun’s placations,
First such park for work vacations.
Frankfurters with ***** and mustard,
Frozen custard, chocolate syrup on the top.
Brooklyniters, Jackson Heighters…New York City’s pop…ulation
Come by subway all that way.
(Who had a car?  Everything and place was far,
Every stranger from a land they landed from –
At least their dads or moms or grand or great-grand dads and moms:
Generation and the nation of the 20’s 30’s, 40’s).
Cotton candy, candied apples sweet outside, sour within.
Who thought of sugar then?  
Who thought of staying thin?
Miles and miles of sand - all gray.
Cold Atlantic blocks away.
Parachute ride, new and daring.
Arlene Nover, longing, raring.
Merry-go-round wan and childish,
She, wildishly shy, tongue-tied,
Watched by grownups there not sharing any wooden horse beside
Which could have turned the ride
To fun
No parent un-derstood.
Clear and queer these memories.
Showing up spontaneously.
Sequences squeezed out of fate
Some seventy years later – late.


Coney Island 5.1.2017
Pure Nakedness;
Arlene Corwin

ladies and gentlemen this little girl
with the good teeth and small important *******
(is it the Frolic or the Century whirl?
ones memory indignantly protests)
this little dancer with the tightened eyes
crisp ogling shoulders and the ripe quite too
large lips always clenched faintly,wishes you
with all her fragile might to not surmise
she dreamed one afternoon
                            ….or maybe read?

of time a when the beautiful most of her
(this here and This, do you get me?)
will maybe dance and maybe sing and be
absitively posolutely dead,
like Coney Island in winter

It was a cold day,
overcast with a few rain showers here and there,
I picked you up from Penn Station,
dragged you to the subway steps,
led you down the tunnel, onto the train.
You asked me where we were going,
I wouldn't let you in on the secret.
One train. Another train...
You saw the last stop and knew
right where I was taking you.
Coney Island.
You looked from the sign,
then back at me,
your eyes lit up right then,
a smile crossing your face,
you knew i'd been trying to get you there.
We took the long train ride,
Manhattan to Brooklyn,
a quiet ride,
we enjoyed each others silence,
only feelings left to feel.
Finally pulled into the station,
'Mermaid Ave.' read the sign,
our kinda place, this was our time.
The boardwalk was practically empty,
on this cold and windy day,
everyone taking shelter from the rain.
I led you to the beach,
the sand hollowed from the drops that fell,
you looked at me doubtingly,
asking with your eyes,
'how will this help?'
I pulled off my green sweater,
you looked at me in shock,
threw you a smile,
off with my boots,
you stood there,
watching me undress,
not knowing what to do,
not knowing my next move.
I was down to my bra and *******,
goosebumps covered my flesh,
you laughed at my pale skin and it's contrast to the sand.
I ran over to you,
lifted you up,
you started to scream when you realized,
every intention of mine was to get you into the water,
the salt that is so addicting,
just like your name on my lips,
you made me set you down,
and so that's just what I did.
I ran into the water,
screeching the whole way in,
you laughed at me,
stopped abruptly,
knew that I was reminding you
of who you used to be.
I watched from the water as you stripped down,
you came running after me,
tears streaming,
not a sound.
You waded right to me,
stopped face to face,
I pulled you in my arms telling you everything'd be ok.

Earth’s sixth mass extinction has begun, new study confirms


How long before the rhino joins the list? Gerry Zambonini, CC BY-SA
We are currently witnessing the start of a mass extinction event the likes of which have not been seen on Earth for at least 65 million years. This is the alarming finding of a new study published in the journal Science Advances.

The research was designed to determine how human actions over the past 500 years have affected the extinction rates of vertebrates: mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians. It found a clear signal of elevated species loss which has markedly accelerated over the past couple of hundred years, such that life on Earth is embarking on its sixth greatest extinction event in its 3.5 billion year history.

This latest research was conducted by an international team lead by Gerardo Ceballos of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Measuring extinction rates is notoriously hard. Recently I reported on some of the fiendishly clever ways such rates have been estimated. These studies are producing profoundly worrying results.

However, there is always the risk that such work overestimates modern extinction rates because they need to make a number of assumptions given the very limited data available. Ceballos and his team wanted to put a floor on these numbers, to establish extinction rates for species that were very conservative, with the understanding that whatever the rate of species lost has actually been, it could not be any lower.

This makes their findings even more significant because even with such conservative estimates they find extinction rates are much, much higher than the background rate of extinction – the rate of species loss in the absence of any human impacts.

Here again, they err on the side of caution. A number of studies have attempted to estimate the background rate of extinction. These have produced upper values of about one out of every million species being lost each year. Using recent work by co-author Anthony Barnosky, they effectively double this background rate and so assume that two out of every million species will disappear through natural causes each year. This should mean that differences between the background and human driven extinction rates will be smaller. But they find that the magnitude of more recent extinctions is so great as to effectively swamp any natural processes.


Cumulative vertebrate species recorded as extinct or extinct in the wild by the IUCN (2012). Dashed black line represents background rate. This is the ‘highly conservative estimate’.  Ceballos et al
Click to enlarge
The “very conservative estimate” of species loss uses International Union of Conservation of Nature data. This contains documented examples of species becoming extinct. They use the same data source to produce the “conservative estimate” which includes known extinct species and those species believed to be extinct or extinct in the wild.

The paper has been published in an open access journal and I would recommend reading it and the accompanying Supplementary Materials. This includes the list of vertebrate species known to have disappeared since the year 1500. The Latin names for these species would be familiar only to specialists, but even the common names are exotic and strange: the Cuban coney, red-bellied gracile, broad-faced potoroo and southern gastric brooding frog.


Farewell, broad-faced potoroo, we hardly knew ye.  John Gould
These particular outer branches of the great tree of life now stop. Some of their remains will be preserved, either as fossils in layers of rocks or glass eyed exhibits in museum cabinets. But the Earth will no longer see them scurry or soar, hear them croak or chirp.

You may wonder to what extent does this matter? Why should we worry if the natural process of extinction is amplified by humans and our expanding industrialised civilisation?

One response to this question essentially points out what the natural world does for us. Whether it’s pollinating our crops, purifying our water, providing fish to eat or fibres to weave, we are dependent on biodiveristy. Ecosystems can only continue to provide things for us if they continue to function in approximately the same way.

The relationship between species diversity and ecosystem function is very complex and not well understood. There may be gradual and reversible decreases in function with decreased biodiversity. There may be effectively no change until a tipping point occurs. The analogy here is popping out rivets from a plane’s wing. The aircraft will fly unimpaired if a few rivets are removed here or there, but to continue to remove rivets is to move the system closer to catastrophic failure.

This latest research tells us what we already knew. Humans have in the space of a few centuries swung a wrecking ball through the Earth’s biosphere. Liquidating biodiversity to produce products and services has an end point. Science is starting to sketch out what that end point could look like but it cannot tell us why to stop before we reach it.

If we regard the Earth as nothing more than a source of resources and a sink for our pollution, if we value other species only in terms of what they can provide to us, then we we will continue to unpick the fabric of life. Remove further rivets from spaceship earth. This not only increases the risk that it will cease to function in the ways that we and future generations will depend on, but can only reduce the complexity and beauty of our home in the cosmos.

I saw him on a subway train
We looked on each other
The whole ride.
Not a single word,
No secret smiles.
Just a look,
deep in the eyes.

Maybe imagining the life
We could have together
Sitting on the white sand
Of Coney Island beach,
Enjoying our cosy home,
Getting warm near a fire place
On amazingly snowing day.

And then a cruel squeaking wheels noise made him leave the train
And took all our dreams away.

We won't see each other again.
See you in another life
My love

Why did you bring me here?
The sand is white with snow,
Over the wooden domes
The winter sea-winds blow—
There is no shelter near,
Come, let us go.

With foam of icy lace
The sea creeps up the sand,
The wind is like a hand
That strikes us in the face.
Doors that June set a-swing
Are bolted long ago;
We try them uselessly—
Alas, there cannot be
For us a second spring;
Come, let us go.

Ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i'd kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter

You to jones beach
or maybe coney island
or maybe just to my house
lyric you in lilacs
dash you in the rain
blend into the beach
to complement my see


Play the lyre for you
ode you with my love song
anything to win you
wrap you in the red Black green
show you off to mama
yeah if i were a poet i'd kid
nap you

on ruby jacobs walk, a
small girl
asked us for money for ice cream.

she eyed our cones
                                yours, lemon
                                mine, strawberry
with a child’s hunger
glinting and opportunistic
as she held out her palm for coins.

i was not yet accustomed to the shapes and sizes,
to a dime being smaller than a nickel,
and in any case wanted to preserve them for souvenirs
so we shook our heads and walked away.

a year later, writing this poem,
i learned that ruby jacobs was a local restauranteur
who, as a boy,
illegally sold ice creams
for a nickel on the boardwalk.
                                                a nickel is the larger coin
                                                the size of a ten pence piece.
                                                i know that now.

the wide atlantic rose from a sloping manicured lawn
        star-spangled,
                                like everything here,
                                                           ­     the airborne flag
                                                            ­    above a wide pavilion
                                                        ­        a fanatic wedding cake topper
                                                          ­      against the blood-blue sky.

        i slipped
out of my shoes and let
the white sand burn my feet,
and jaggedly fill the spaces between my toes.

the atlantic held open its arms
though we weren’t, as we imagined,
                looking east
                looking home
but south to new jersey, across the bay.

the gnarled boardwalk was a
song of the twentieth century
        a roll-call of mass-market capitalism
        here in the city that didn’t invent the concept
        but certainly perfected it:
                                                hot dogs
                                        amusements
         ­                       ice creams (we’ve covered that)
                        fridge magnets
                baseball caps
        i bought an espresso cup with a picture of the president
and the caption:
                         ‘huuuuge!’
i stopped to take a photograph
of a space-age building from the fifties
which turned out to be
                                        a public toilet.

later
from the sunbaked d train,
brooklyn spread out beneath us
the houses garnished with flags,
then the city coughed us up on seventh avenue
and night fell five hours early.

Orange peel Thursdays and the Velcro shoes
Of children hordes
Who spider up Alice on toadstools in Central Park
Dusted psilocybin shoots my eyes through
With the clarity of ice and sliced mushroom
Steeping in stomach acid before finding blood
The kids are tripping like madmen or halloween candy
Like its time to release and give up to the nonsense
And let your young self congeal to a saccharine sludge

I don’t stroll in the park to keep my mind sharp
I’m here because it’s a riot
My head can throb to the jittery birds
And the blasts of carsong
It’s the right kind of rhythm to walk to

* *

Ketamine days and the lolling slums
To make sure the insane stay insane
And the hobos are washed with spit from the clouds
And the subway exhaust always hangs in our hair
And the old Coney Island burns again and twice more

We don’t pretend to understand what we see
In subway grates thirty feet wide
Like the earth punching out of work for a bit
Opening to you her *** belly
So you can check out the strips of metal inside
Before she slurps you down and with an esophageal squeeze
Shoots you through the turnstiles

The train squeals and grinds down our eyes
With thoughts as slow as ketamine
Makes room for schizophrenia in a conversation
We’re listening to ‘til sundown

* *

Years full of Brooklyn and the assorted pills
Makes offal fit for punks in name brand shoes
Squared off with police in the park
Being beaten for the fun of being beaten
Peacoat locals pass the days in supermarkets
And you grow up to the loony mumble
Of the woman who knows the boat
Moored at the end of the street
Mansion of the stray cat colony
You help her with her daily chore to feed them
Tabbies popping the pills of the homeless
And puking in tandem all over their house
Living off generous dying folk

Yesterday folds our vital documents
into its briefcase and steps onto a busy street.
Busses lunge on asphalt, rolling
knotted muscles and emptied pockets deeper
into roads where dogs and paper
blur the lines between news and ****.
Lovers, condos, taxis, and sidewalks
pray to scrape up rent. Tomorrow crouches, ready to spring
and ****** us back into the boxing ring.

I sit at the Earth's end,
an old, fractured, water-worn dock
cradles me and fixes the scene.
Yellow sails swimming the jetstream
hang on to the red dinghy whose wake
sets my eye upon the far shore.

     Coney isle ‘cross the murk-warped sea
     holds ancient homes like a tapestry
     holds ancient threads that you can see
     in some museum for a fee.

For the residents at Rosses Point
this is no end –
                          wit starts their children’s dreams
and holds them to life,
roots them in communal grasses
that grow and will always grow.
                                                       I didn’t know
that where the ****-stalk masses
life’s abundances overflow.

But where are their riches?

Cast in ditches by roadsides
where three hundred years of smiles,
vein-pulsing beliefs, busy thinkers,
sweet upswept streets,
all put wealth –
                           the heaping of coin
upon coin till nothing can breathe –
aside and laugh. They live,
surviving as they happen.

Inside the crumbled watchtower
I fling passion onto thought
onto nerve onto pen onto page
and then am limp,
like the carelessly treaded sage:
a child’s footprint.

     What anguish did the watchers know
     looking through the barred stone walls,
     their travelers still gone?

In the swirling, swallowing night,
that drops like the judge’s gavel,
I write images of the sundry
numb-fingered seaside –
                                          the birds call through the salt-stained air.

Fly, fly till you reach my words
that are split among a thousand minds and cities.
Fly till the grass overcomes the tread,
till the sun succumbs to lead
poisoning and dawn’s jaw drops dead.

The lighthouse, the sprinkling showers
from the clouds that shroud and mask
the would-be sky, guide
the heart that falls inside my throat –
                                                                two hundred tons of blood
beat through its bulge –
                                         I’m alive
and live on, like this unhampered ground.
The sound of ripples and the rustle
of reeds bring me back
to the time-broken dock.

I sit and remember my friends –
                                                       calmness soaks in and through my bones –
I am and will always be;
and when memory fails and fades
I will float the channel of everything,
beach upon this shore
and will be the grass and nothing more,
till history becomes the future
and the first layer becomes the core.

What Love commands the train fulfills*,

The six thirty bounds to Coney Island

Where the green Ubers awaits the passengers

Morning greetings, (Urdu) of few words, were the



Pakistan, rules Mermaid Street with the neon green

Were too mama? where too, two dollars:

A repeat routine for most of us,



Whether you’re a morning person or a night owl, we all start our day at some point. And we all seem to start it differently. (Kevan Lee)



Five forty showers, get dress out the door before six a.m.

Grab the garbage, and walk three to the subway,
where love commands the train fulfills, which lessened  

My morning depression until midday, (who control whom)



Why was I born, why am even here, what is my personal worth?

Timeless question, who would remember me, when I am gone?

The train, the cabbies, would the streets miss my dragging feet?

Self-observation, is it worth a Newyork minute of whom will miss us. (really)

Void, void, void, void, void, void, void, and more void,

Just allowed the few that might to do some adjustments

For the sake of remembering me, for the sake of losing my car fare,

For the sake of not receiving, my monthly fees, and T-Mobile

you definitely would, release me from my grandfather plans:



Today, I sit in silence, away from all sounds, only the sounds

Of a keyboard, and my heartbeat, as the mouse goes click, click

For the sake of remembering is that a poet is only good at recollecting, reflecting, and making his audience believes in his words: