FIRST DAY

1.
Who wanted me
to go to Chicago
on January 6th?
I did!

The night before,
20 below zero
Fahrenheit
with the wind chill;
as the blizzard of 99
lay in mountains
of blackening snow.

I packed two coats,
two suits,
three sweaters,
multiple sets of long johns
and heavy white socks
for a two-day stay.

I left from Newark.
**** the denseness,
it confounds!

The 2nd City to whom?
2nd ain’t bad.
It’s pretty good.
If you consider
Peking and Prague,
Tokyo and Togo,
Manchester and Moscow,
Port Au Prince and Paris,
Athens and Amsterdam,
Buenos Aries and Johannesburg;
that’s pretty good.

What’s going on here today?
It’s friggin frozen.
To the bone!

But Chi Town is still cool.
Buddy Guy’s is open.
Bartenders mixing drinks,
cabbies jamming on their breaks,
honey dew waitresses serving sugar,
buildings swerving,
fire tongued preachers are preaching
and the farmers are measuring the moon.

The lake,
unlike Ontario
is in the midst of freezing.
Bones of ice
threaten to gel
into a solid mass
over the expanse
of the Michigan Lake.
If this keeps up,
you can walk
clear to Toronto
on a silver carpet.

Along the shore
the ice is permanent.
It’s the first big frost
of winter
after a long
Indian Summer.

Thank God
I caught a cab.
Outside I hear
The Hawk
nippin hard.
It’ll get your ear,
finger or toe.
Bite you on the nose too
if you ain’t careful.

Thank God,
I’m not walking
the Wabash tonight;
but if you do cover up,
wear layers.

Chicago,
could this be
Sandburg’s City?

I’m overwhelmed
and this is my tenth time here.

It’s almost better,
sometimes it is better,
a lot of times it is better
and denser then New York.

Ask any Bull’s fan.
I’m a Knickerbocker.
Yes Nueva York,
a city that has placed last
in the standings
for many years.
Except the last two.
Yanks are # 1!

But Chicago
is a dynasty,
as big as
Sammy Sosa’s heart,
rich and wide
as Michael Jordan’s grin.

Middle of a country,
center of a continent,
smack dab in the mean
of a hemisphere,
vortex to a world,
Chicago!

Kansas City,
Nashville,
St. Louis,
Detroit,
Cleveland,
Pittsburgh,
Denver,
New Orleans,
Dallas,
Cairo,
Singapore,
Auckland,
Baghdad,
Mexico City
and Montreal
salute her.



2.
Cities,
A collection of vanities?
Engineered complex utilitarianism?
The need for community a social necessity?
Ego one with the mass?
Civilization’s latest *******?
Chicago is more then that.

Jefferson’s yeoman farmer
is long gone
but this capitol
of the Great Plains
is still democratic.

The citizen’s of this city
would vote daily,
if they could.

Chicago,
Sandburg’s Chicago,
Could it be?

The namesake river
segments the city,
canals of commerce,
all perpendicular,
is rife throughout,
still guiding barges
to the Mississippi
and St. Laurence.

Now also
tourist attractions
for a cafe society.

Chicago is really jazzy,
swanky clubs,
big steaks,
juices and drinks.

You get the best
coffee from Seattle
and the finest teas
from China.

Great restaurants
serve liquid jazz
al la carte.

Jazz Jazz Jazz
All they serve is Jazz
Rock me steady
Keep the beat
Keep it flowin
Feel the heat!

Jazz Jazz Jazz
All they is, is Jazz
Fast cars will take ya
To the show
Round bout midnight
Where’d the time go?

Flows into the Mississippi,
the mother of America’s rivers,
an empires aorta.

Great Lakes wonder of water.
Niagara Falls
still her heart gushes forth.

Buffalo connected to this holy heart.
Finger Lakes and Adirondacks
are part of this watershed,
all the way down to the
Delaware and Chesapeake.

Sandburg’s Chicago?
Oh my my,
the wonder of him.
Who captured the imagination
of the wonders of rivers.

Down stream other holy cities
from the Mississippi delta
all mapped by him.

Its mouth our Dixie Trumpet
guarded by righteous Cajun brethren.

Midwest?
Midwest from where?
It’s north of Caracas and Los Angeles,
east of Fairbanks,
west of Dublin
and south of not much.

Him,
who spoke of honest men
and loving women.
Working men and mothers
bearing citizens to build a nation.
The New World’s
precocious adolescent
caught in a stream
of endless and exciting change,
much pain and sacrifice,
dedication and loss,
pride and tribulations.

From him we know
all the people’s faces.
All their stories are told.
Never defeating the
idea of Chicago.

Sandburg had the courage to say
what was in the heart of the people, who:

Defeated the Indians,
Mapped the terrain,
Aided slavers,
Fought a terrible civil war,
Hoisted the barges,
Grew the food,
Whacked the wheat,
Sang the songs,
Fought many wars of conquest,
Cleared the land,
Erected the bridges,
Trapped the game,
Netted the fish,
Mined the coal,
Forged the steel,
Laid the tracks,
Fired the tenders,
Cut the stone,
Mixed the mortar,
Plumbed the line,
And laid the bricks
Of this nation of cities!

Pardon the Marlboro Man shtick.
It’s a poor expostulation of
crass commercial symbolism.

Like I said, I’m a
Devil Fan from Jersey
and Madison Avenue
has done its work on me.

It’s a strange alchemy
that changes
a proud Nation of Blackhawks
into a merchandising bonanza
of hometown hockey shirts,
making the native seem alien,
and the interloper at home chillin out,
warming his feet atop a block of ice,
guzzling Old Style
with clicker in hand.

Give him his beer
and other diversions.
If he bowls with his buddy’s
on Tuesday night
I hope he bowls
a perfect game.

He’s earned it.
He works hard.
Hard work and faith
built this city.

And it’s not just the faith
that fills the cities
thousand churches,
temples and
mosques on the Sabbath.

3.
There is faith in everything in Chicago!

An alcoholic broker named Bill
lives the Twelve Steps
to banish fear and loathing
for one more day.
Bill believes in sobriety.

A tug captain named Moe
waits for the spring thaw
so he can get the barges up to Duluth.
Moe believes in the seasons.

A farmer named Tom
hopes he has reaped the last
of many bitter harvests.
Tom believes in a new start.

A homeless man named Earl
wills himself a cot and a hot
at the local shelter.
Earl believes in deliverance.

A Pullman porter
named George
works overtime
to get his first born
through medical school.
George believes in opportunity.

A folk singer named Woody
sings about his
countrymen inheritance
and implores them to take it.
Woody believes in people.

A Wobbly named Joe
organizes fellow steelworkers
to fight for a workers paradise
here on earth.
Joe believes in ideals.

A bookkeeper named Edith
is certain she’ll see the Cubs
win the World Series
in her lifetime.
Edith believes in miracles.

An electrician named ****
saves money
to bring his family over from Gdansk.
**** believes in America.

A banker named Leah
knows Ditka will return
and lead the Bears
to another Super Bowl.
Leah believes in nostalgia.

A cantor named Samuel
prays for another 20 years
so he can properly train
his Temple’s replacement.

Samuel believes in tradition.
A high school girl named Sally
refuses to get an abortion.
She knows she carries
something special within her.
Sally believes in life.

A city worker named Mazie
ceaselessly prays
for her incarcerated son
doing 10 years at Cook.
Mazie believes in redemption.

A jazzer named Bix
helps to invent a new art form
out of the mist.
Bix believes in creativity.

An architect named Frank
restores the Rookery.
Frank believes in space.

A soldier named Ike
fights wars for democracy.
Ike believes in peace.

A Rabbi named Jesse
sermonizes on Moses.
Jesse believes in liberation.

Somewhere in Chicago
a kid still believes in Shoeless Joe.
The kid believes in
the integrity of the game.

An Imam named Louis
is busy building a nation
within a nation.
Louis believes in
self-determination.

A teacher named Heidi
gives all she has to her students.
She has great expectations for them all.
Heidi believes in the future.

4.
Does Chicago have a future?

This city,
full of cowboys
and wildcatters
is predicated
on a future!

Bang, bang
Shoot em up
Stake the claim
It’s your terrain
Drill the hole
Strike it rich
Top it off
You’re the boss
Take a chance
Watch it wane
Try again
Heavenly gains

Chicago
city of futures
is a Holy Mecca
to all day traders.

Their skin is gray,
hair disheveled,
loud ties and
funny coats,
thumb through
slips of paper
held by nail
chewed hands.
Selling promises
with no derivative value
for out of the money calls
and in the money puts.
Strike is not a labor action
in this city of unionists,
but a speculators mark,
a capitalist wish,
a hedgers bet,
a public debt
and a farmers
fair return.

Indexes for everything.
Quantitative models
that could burst a kazoo.

You know the measure
of everything in Chicago.
But is it truly objective?
Have mathematics banished
subjective intentions,
routing it in fair practice
of market efficiencies,
a kind of scientific absolution?

I heard that there
is a dispute brewing
over the amount of snowfall
that fell on the 1st.

The mayor’s office,
using the official city ruler
measured 22”
of snow on the ground.

The National Weather Service
says it cannot detect more
then 17” of snow.

The mayor thinks
he’ll catch less heat
for the trains that don’t run
the buses that don’t arrive
and the schools that stand empty
with the addition of 5”.

The analysts say
it’s all about capturing liquidity.

Liquidity,
can you place a great lake
into an eyedropper?

Its 20 below
and all liquid things
are solid masses
or a gooey viscosity at best.

Water is frozen everywhere.
But Chi town is still liquid,
flowing faster
then the digital blips
flashing on the walls
of the CBOT.

Dreams
are never frozen in Chicago.
The exchanges trade
without missing a beat.

Trading wet dreams,
the crystallized vapor
of an IPO
pledging a billion points
of Internet access
or raiding the public treasuries
of a central bank’s
huge stores of gold
with currency swaps.

Using the tools
of butterfly spreads
and candlesticks
to achieve the goal.

Short the Russell
or buy the Dow,
go long the
CAC and DAX.
Are you trading in euro’s?
You better be
or soon will.
I know
you’re Chicago,
you’ll trade anything.
WEBS,
Spiders,
and Leaps
are traded here,
along with sweet crude,
North Sea Brent,
plywood and T-Bill futures;
and most importantly
the commodities,
the loam
that formed this city
of broad shoulders.

What about our wheat?
Still whacking and
breadbasket to the world.

Oil,
an important fossil fuel
denominated in
good ole greenbacks.

Porkbellies,
not just hogwash
on the Wabash,
but bacon, eggs
and flapjacks
are on the menu
of every diner in Jersey
as the “All American.”

Cotton,
our contribution
to the Golden Triangle,
once the global currency
used to enrich a
gentlemen class
of cultured
southern slavers,
now Tommy Hilfiger’s
preferred fabric.

I think he sends it
to Bangkok where
child slaves
spin it into
gold lame'.

Sorghum,
I think its hardy.

Soybeans,
the new age substitute
for hamburger
goes great with tofu lasagna.

Corn,
ADM creates ethanol,
they want us to drive cleaner cars.

Cattle,
once driven into this city’s
bloodhouses for slaughter,
now ground into
a billion Big Macs
every year.

When does a seed
become a commodity?
When does a commodity
become a future?
When does a future expire?

You can find the answers
to these questions in Chicago
and find a fortune in a hole in the floor.

Look down into the pits.
Hear the screams of anguish
and profitable delights.

Frenzied men
swarming like a mass
of epileptic ants
atop the worlds largest sugar cube
auger the worlds free markets.

The scene is
more chaotic then
100 Haymarket Square Riots
multiplied by 100
1968 Democratic Conventions.

Amidst inverted anthills,
they scurry forth and to
in distinguished
black and red coats.

Fighting each other
as counterparties
to a life and death transaction.

This is an efficient market
that crosses the globe.

Oil from the Sultan of Brunei,
Yen from the land of Hitachi,
Long Bonds from the Fed,
nickel from Quebec,
platinum and palladium
from Siberia,
FTSE’s from London
and crewel cane from Havana
circle these pits.

Tijuana,
Shanghai
and Istanbul's
best traders
are only half as good
as the average trader in Chicago.

Chicago,
this hog butcher to the world,
specializes in packaging and distribution.

Men in blood soaked smocks,
still count the heads
entering the gates of the city.

Their handiwork
is sent out on barges
and rail lines as frozen packages
of futures
waiting for delivery
to an anonymous counterparty
half a world away.

This nation’s hub
has grown into the
premier purveyor
to the world;
along all the rivers,
highways,
railways
and estuaries
it’s tentacles reach.

5.
Sandburg’s Chicago,
is a city of the world’s people.

Many striver rows compose
its many neighborhoods.

Nordic stoicism,
Eastern European orthodoxy
and Afro-American
calypso vibrations
are three of many cords
strumming the strings
of Chicago.

Sandburg’s Chicago,
if you wrote forever
you would only scratch its surface.

People wait for trains
to enter the city from O’Hare.
Frozen tears
lock their eyes
onto distant skyscrapers,
solid chunks
of snot blocks their nose
and green icicles of slime
crust mustaches.
They fight to breathe.

Sandburg’s Chicago
is The Land of Lincoln,
Savior of the Union,
protector of the Republic.
Sent armies
of sons and daughters,
barges, boxcars,
gunboats, foodstuffs,
cannon and shot
to raze the south
and stamp out succession.

Old Abe’s biography
are still unknown volumes to me.
I must see and read the great words.
You can never learn enough;
but I’ve been to Washington
and seen the man’s memorial.
The Free World’s 8th wonder,
guarded by General Grant,
who still keeps an eye on Richmond
and a hand on his sword.

Through this American winter
Abe ponders.
The vista he surveys is dire and tragic.

Our sitting President
impeached
for lying about a *******.

Party partisans
in the senate are sworn and seated.
Our Chief Justice,
adorned with golden bars
will adjudicate the proceedings.
It is the perfect counterpoint
to an ageless Abe thinking
with malice toward none
and charity towards all,
will heal the wounds
of the nation.

Abe our granite angel,
Chicago goes on,
The Union is strong!


SECOND DAY

1.
Out my window
the sun has risen.

According to
the local forecast
its minus 9
going up to
6 today.

The lake,
a golden pillow of clouds
is frozen in time.

I marvel
at the ancients ones
resourcefulness
and how
they mastered
these extreme elements.

Past, present and future
has no meaning
in the Citadel
of the Prairie today.

I set my watch
to Central Standard Time.

Stepping into
the hotel lobby
the concierge
with oil smooth hair,
perfect tie
and English lilt
impeccably asks,
“Do you know where you are going Sir?
Can I give you a map?”

He hands me one of Chicago.
I see he recently had his nails done.
He paints a green line
along Whacker Drive and says,
“turn on Jackson, LaSalle, Wabash or Madison
and you’ll get to where you want to go.”
A walk of 14 or 15 blocks from Streeterville-
(I start at The Chicago White House.
They call it that because Hillary Rodham
stays here when she’s in town.
Its’ also alleged that Stedman
eats his breakfast here
but Opra
has never been seen
on the premises.
I wonder how I gained entry
into this place of elite’s?)
-down into the center of The Loop.

Stepping out of the hotel,
The Doorman
sporting the epaulets of a colonel
on his corporate winter coat
and furry Cossack hat
swaddling his round black face
accosts me.

The skin of his face
is flaking from
the subzero windburn.

He asks me
with a gapped toothy grin,
“Can I get you a cab?”
“No I think I’ll walk,” I answer.
“Good woolen hat,
thick gloves you should be alright.”
He winks and lets me pass.

I step outside.
The Windy City
flings stabbing cold spears
flying on wings of 30-mph gusts.
My outside hardens.
I can feel the freeze
deepen
into my internalness.
I can’t be sure
but inside
my heart still feels warm.
For how long
I cannot say.

I commence
my walk
among the spires
of this great city,
the vertical leaps
that anchor the great lake,
holding its place
against the historic
frigid assault.

The buildings’ sway,
modulating to the blows
of natures wicked blasts.

It’s a hard imposition
on a city and its people.

The gloves,
skullcap,
long underwear,
sweater,
jacket
and overcoat
not enough
to keep the cold
from penetrating
the person.

Like discerning
the layers of this city,
even many layers,
still not enough
to understand
the depth of meaning
of the heart
of this heartland city.

Sandburg knew the city well.
Set amidst groves of suburbs
that extend outward in every direction.
Concentric circles
surround the city.
After the burbs come farms,
Great Plains, and mountains.
Appalachians and Rockies
are but mere molehills
in the city’s back yard.
It’s terra firma
stops only at the sea.
Pt. Barrow to the Horn,
many capes extended.

On the periphery
its appendages,
its extremities,
its outward extremes.
All connected by the idea,
blown by the incessant wind
of this great nation.
The Windy City’s message
is sent to the world’s four corners.
It is a message of power.
English the worlds
common language
is spoken here,
along with Ebonics,
Espanol,
Mandarin,
Czech,
Russian,
Korean,
Arabic,
Hindi­,
German,
French,
electronics,
steel,
cars,
cartoons,
rap,
sports­,
movies,
capital,
wheat
and more.

Always more.
Much much more
in Chicago.

2.
Sandburg
spoke all the dialects.

He heard them all,
he understood
with great precision
to the finest tolerances
of a lathe workers micrometer.

Sandburg understood
what it meant to laugh
and be happy.

He understood
the working mans day,
the learned treatises
of university chairs,
the endless tomes
of the city’s
great libraries,
the lost languages
of the ancient ones,
the secret codes
of abstract art,
the impact of architecture,
the street dialects and idioms
of everymans expression of life.

All fighting for life,
trying to build a life,
a new life
in this modern world.

Walking across
the Michigan Avenue Bridge
I see the Wrigley Building
is neatly carved,
catty cornered on the plaza.

I wonder if Old Man Wrigley
watched his barges
loaded with spearmint
and double-mint
move out onto the lake
from one of those Gothic windows
perched high above the street.

Would he open a window
and shout to the men below
to quit slaking and work harder
or would he
between the snapping sound
he made with his mouth
full of his chewing gum
offer them tickets
to a ballgame at Wrigley Field
that afternoon?

Would the men below
be able to understand
the man communing
from such a great height?

I listen to a man
and woman conversing.
They are one step behind me
as we meander along Wacker Drive.

"You are in Chicago now.”
The man states with profundity.
“If I let you go
you will soon find your level
in this city.
Do you know what I mean?”

No I don’t.
I think to myself.
What level are you I wonder?
Are you perched atop
the transmission spire
of the Hancock Tower?

I wouldn’t think so
or your ears would melt
from the windburn.

I’m thinking.
Is she a kept woman?
She is majestically clothed
in fur hat and coat.
In animal pelts
not trapped like her,
but slaughtered
from farms
I’m sure.

What level
is he speaking of?

Many levels
are evident in this city;
many layers of cobbled stone,
Pennsylvania iron,
Hoosier Granite
and vertical drops.

I wonder
if I detect
condensation
in his voice?

What is
his intention?
Is it a warning
of a broken affair?
A pending pink slip?
Advise to an addict
refusing to adhere
to a recovery regimen?

What is his level anyway?
Is he so high and mighty,
Higher and mightier
then this great city
which we are all a part of,
which we all helped to build,
which we all need
in order to keep this nation
the thriving democratic
empire it is?

This seditious talk!

3.
The Loop’s El
still courses through
the main thoroughfares of the city.

People are transported
above the din of the street,
looking down
on the common pedestrians
like me.

Super CEO’s
populating the upper floors
of Romanesque,
Greek Revivalist,
New Bauhaus,
Art Deco
and Post Nouveau
Neo-Modern
Avant-Garde towers
are too far up
to see me
shivering on the street.

The cars, busses,
trains and trucks
are all covered
with the film
of rock salt.

Salt covers
my bootless feet
and smudges
my cloths as well.

The salt,
the primal element
of the earth
covers everything
in Chicago.

It is the true level
of this city.

The layer
beneath
all layers,
on which
everything
rests,
is built,
grows,
thrives
then dies.
To be
returned again
to the lower
layers
where it can
take root
again
and grow
out onto
the great plains.

Splashing
the nation,
anointing
its people
with its
blessing.

A blessing,
Chicago?

All rivers
come here.

All things
found its way here
through the canals
and back bays
of the world’s
greatest lakes.

All roads,
rails and
air routes
begin and
end here.

Mrs. O’Leary’s cow
got a *** rap.
It did not start the fire,
we did.

We lit the torch
that flamed
the city to cinders.
From a pile of ash
Chicago rose again.

Forever Chicago!
Forever the lamp
that burns bright
on a Great Lake’s
western shore!

Chicago
the beacon
sends the
message to the world
with its windy blasts,
on chugging barges,
clapping trains,
flying tandems,
T1 circuits
and roaring jets.

Sandburg knew
a Chicago
I will never know.

He knew
the rhythm of life
the people walked to.
The tools they used,
the dreams they dreamed
the songs they sang,
the things they built,
the things they loved,
the pains that hurt,
the motives that grew,
the actions that destroyed
the prayers they prayed,
the food they ate
their moments of death.

Sandburg knew
the layers of the city
to the depths
and windy heights
I cannot fathom.

The Blues
came to this city,
on the wing
of a chirping bird,
on the taps
of a rickety train,
on the blast
of an angry sax
rushing on the wind,
on the Westend blitz
of Pop's brash coronet,
on the tink of
a twinkling piano
on a paddle-wheel boat
and on the strings
of a lonely man’s guitar.

Walk into the clubs,
tenements,
row houses,
speakeasies
and you’ll hear the Blues
whispered like
a quiet prayer.

Tidewater Blues
from Virginia,
Delta Blues
from the lower
Mississippi,
Boogie Woogie
from Appalachia,
Texas Blues
from some Lone Star,
Big Band Blues
from Kansas City,
Blues from
Beal Street,
Jelly Roll’s Blues
from the Latin Quarter.

Hell even Chicago
got its own brand
of Blues.

Its all here.
It ended up here
and was sent away
on the winds of westerly blows
to the ear of an eager world
on strong jet streams
of simple melodies
and hard truths.

A broad
shouldered woman,
a single mother stands
on the street
with three crying babes.
Their cloths
are covered
in salt.
She pleads
for a break,
praying
for a new start.
Poor and
under-clothed
against the torrent
of frigid weather
she begs for help.
Her blond hair
and ****** features
suggests her
Scandinavian heritage.
I wonder if
she is related to Sandburg
as I walk past
her on the street.
Her feet
are bleeding
through her
canvass sneakers.
Her babes mouths
are zipped shut
with frozen drivel
and mucous.

The Blues live
on in Chicago.

The Blues
will forever live in her.
As I turn the corner
to walk the Miracle Mile
I see her engulfed
in a funnel cloud of salt,
snow and bits
of white paper,
swirling around her
and her children
in an angry
unforgiving
maelstrom.

The family
begins to
dissolve
like a snail
sprinkled with salt;
and a mother
and her children
just disappear
into the pavement
at the corner
of Dearborn,
in Chicago.

Music:

Robert Johnson
Sweet Home Chicago


jbm
Chicago
1/7/99

I imagine myself
A few gentle decades older.
Finally grasping the cusp
Of success.
Living in my own apartment
In New York City, nonetheless.
Wearing an Armani coat
(Whatever those look like.)
Walking idly yet prestigiously
Through winter in the city.
Taking care not to laugh too loud,
Talk to myself, smile too much.
A small, attractive female
Has to be serious to get ahead.
Customers will buy from a happy girl
Only if she is early 20's, at most.
That is Marketing 101.
I am a small fish in a large sea;
The principles of Darwinism
Still apply to me.
I've learned long ago to succeed,
I must stifle the welcoming smile.
So along the familiar concrete
I stride,
Carefully manicured hands
In pockets.
The Filipinos know better
Than to rush on the hands
Of a businesswoman caressing
A successful career.
She tips well and lives well.
I walk along with cool calm
And feminine grace.
I have regained the safety
To be feminine once again.
The criminals know better
Than to infiltrate
The Business district
And cause trouble
To working professionals
In Armani coats.
I imagine myself a few decades older.
Kissing snowflakes unenthusiastically.
Yes, I marvel in poetry, in Nature,
But I have matured
Much like the snowflakes themselves.
At the end of a cycle,
No matter how beautiful.
My actions flow gracefully and delicately.
I melt into New York City
Like a cell in a body.
Pumping fuel into the *****
To sustain the mass.
A tumor.
I smile subtly as I slosh along.
I recall, once upon a time,
On my lower-class youth.
***** jokes, crude dancing,
And cluttered apartments.
I approach the high-rise building
I call home and greet the doorman
With the obligatory disregard
For his innermost being.
Poetry truly is in the strangest of places.
Even in an enigma like me.
I enter the marble floors,
Wiping my feet,
My rent as sky-high as
The building itself.
Elevator. Comforting motion sickness.
This is success.
The pit of my stomach sinks.
I tell myself it's the motion sickness.
I return to my apartment,
With its symmetrical details.
My thoughts return to you.
You've never stepped foot in my home,
But you've always been here with me.
I get dinner started.
I set out the extra glass, like always.
Rituals like these serve
As my Sunday mass.
I drink your glass with my evening medication.
Dare I say like always?

A man sits at the edge and stares at the wall
A door closed here, a doorman too tall.
You can’t pass, No reason to be told
But do stay here, the door may open before you grow old.

Restless is this man,
Let me cross this wall, I may already be late
The water is flowing on other side while deserts lay here
Shade of Green trees on other side, the sun burning men here
Storms stay silent here while the breeze sings on other side
Oh. Please let me pass.

Frustrated with silence, Man decides to force his way through
Probably the hammer will break this wall, maybe the keys will open this door
Maybe the tunnels will find their way and the ropes their hold
May the lies convince the doorman, May the ladders make me rise.

He brings his powerful hammer, all his keys and his ropes
Prepares his ladders and tunnels, with lies full of hopes.

The doorman laughs at the man, what makes you so hopeful
You know nothing of other side.
The water flows on other side but maybe drinks are not for you
The trees are indeed green but perhaps shades are not for you
Breeze does sing there but the songs are not for you

Oh mighty doorman, but my heart is set
How can I go back now, the lies have been told
May be there is no hope and no more truths to unfold
May be this wall is the end and its grandness my fold
But I still open my cards, for this beauty mesmerizing my mind
Waiting for me, singing in the trees, drinking my wine….

Back at Donnie's place
this chick had shown me her ****.
Her brother was some guy we ran with.
She had just gotten her ******* pierced
and wanted to know what I thought.
She was a thick girl
with blonde hair
and big chubby ****.
Later
we were at a bar
one of our friends was the DJ
and another was the doorman
so all of us 18 year-old scumbags
were able to drink without too much hassle.
The night started the same way it always did
the first song of the night was always the same
'Symphony of Destruction' by Megadeth
our whole crew sitting in the corner booths
out of the light & in the dark.
We were the dimmer of lights
The party crashers
The woman stealers
The Black Circle.
We downed shot after shot
of this green **** they had
called 'Zombie'.
Drunk off my ***
feeling warm & fuzzy
I went outside for a smoke.
Matt W. ***** lay next to me on the concrete patio
in the back alley of the bar.
I had barely lit the cigarette
when the thick girl with
the big pierced ******* came out back.
We made ******* conversation
for about a minute
before I asked to see her **** again.
She carefully pulled them out
wincing at how sore they still were.
We started making out
and she asked me if I wanted to go somewhere.
I motioned towards the darkened alley behind us.
Matt lay on the ground
Laughing to himself and staring at the night sky
Taking long drags from his cigarette.
In the dark behind some cardboard boxes
And empty liquor crates
She kissed me hard and messy
Both of us reeking of ***** and cigarettes
That stinky combination.
“Why don’t you let those get some air?”
I asked, pointing at her massive mammaries.
“Okay, but…be gentle okay? They’re still really sore.”
“You got it darlin’.”
And out they came, hanging like gods in the sky
I was down on my knees
With my head under her skirt
Just going to town on this thick chick
Like I hadn’t eaten for weeks.
Her hands gripping my greasy hair
And pulling hard
As I got faster and faster
Licking and ******* like my life depended on it
Reaching up and squeezing those *******
As gently as I possibly could.
And then she tensed up
Her knees shaking, trembling, and finally
Buckling as she came
Still holding me by the hair
She pulled me back and out from under that little red skirt.
“Oh my god. Just give me a second.”
She asked, trying to catch her breath
And stop her legs from shaking.
I stood up and gave her a ***** flavored kiss.
“Well?” I asked.
“I’ll go down on you…..if that’s what you want…”
“Of course.”
And she got down on her knees
In that dark alley.
“Ouch.” She squeeled.
“What is it?”
“The ground’s got a bunch of rocks or some ****. ****.”
“Here…” I grabbed one of the cardboard boxes
broke it down in a matter of seconds
and laid it on the ground
at my feet.
“There ya go.”
Before she put it in her mouth
She laughed.
“You’re such a gentleman.”
“I have my moments.”
Afterwards
I walked back over to Matt on the patio
Buckling up my pants.
The lady thanked me
Said it was nice meeting me
And walked back inside to her brother and friends.
Donnie was now sitting with Matt on the curb.
“Where the **** did you go?”
I just started laughing.
It took him a second, but Donnie figured it out.
“Did you just **** that fat chick?”
“No man. I just got a *******. That’s all.”
“What the **** Danny? What are you a male ******* or something?”
I just kept laughing
“Hey ******* man. Nobody gives a ******* like a fat chick.”
Matt rolled over and spoke up,
“The man has a point Donnie.”

1
The jack tree, framing the museum gate
was an eyeful, with fruits from top branch to roots,
reminding  a lush woman, pregnant and languid,
expectant, beaming a smile, what else could be
a better fertility symbol, gladdening one's heart!
2
He sees her, Lila,waiting under the jack tree
Lila, a fixture, highlighting jack tree's abundant fertility,
on a juncture of present and past, symbolizing
what is left inside the walls of the museum
only the bits we came to know sporadically,
stashed away for curious eyes, a puzzle for us always.
Everything flows in to one, yet remains in fragments!
3
He knows Lila will turn the corner,
now or later and go in to the museum,
standing in a lovely garden
full of past waiting for her
he guesses someone else too, accompanies her,
A lover? Perhaps not, his heart consoles,
only a dim figure, he could see
in his repeated dreams of her.
4
He ingeniously attempts, different ways to see her,
in points of time and different points of view.
Lila, he feels is a girl, he may fall in love with,
but the fact is that she is in mystery's wrap,
the play of Maya -illusion- in matter
that realization wakes him up to awareness,
of himself, many things that count.
On the lonely roads of university campus,
she walks looking in to a past,
she wants to leave behind or retrieve?
Following her far behind, from a clearing
in the forest of a time past, he thinks about,
the time they were together,
now, she becomes a symbol,
to explore the secrets of the past, himself, life.
5
A name with dimensions, Lila is,
the Sanskrit word for play, the cosmos is engaged in,
the dance he would do life long,
but there would be walls erected, like the time they were together.
He thinks being together has significance, if only you count so,
Lila is in the scheme of things that moves universe too,
he learns to detach Lila from her physical form.
6
Lila in the universe is the dancing atoms,
the stars dying and being born in other universes.
While reciting poetry on stars and* 'multiverse'  
he feels the flow of life. Lila is the flow of energy unlimited,
Lila, takes over body, mind and consciousness.
7
Lila smiles at him as he walks to her,says she:
"Waiting for you here, took me to the unknown, waiting for ages,
I am curious, is it you looking at me or a past fragmented?
I feel your eyes playing with my body mind and beyond"
She didn't say she is imagining things. Now, all that matters is this.
They gravitate towards each other.He is pleased at the light emitted
They both are fascinated by the jack tree full of fruits,
life forms of nature and nebulous energies that navigate,
going back and forth has become a habit for all of us.

A big bang in every nucleus, inviting big crunch, that creeps in,
Lila and he walked in, the doorman in the museum smiled

During my second trimester I felt like getting some fresh air.
I went out cycling through town in the warm sunny day.
Observing the comings and goings of people all around.
The flower cart on the corner, lent a lovely lilac scent to the air.
The street preacher was shouting out his testimonials,
trying to recruit believers to his cause.
Further on as my pedaling took me, I saw a group of boys.
They were pantomiming their favorite rockstars.
Strumming the air for all they were worth and
Jamming to the silent music in their heads.
Down the block past the Bakery, smelling of cinnamon buns,
was the museum.  My favorite place to stroll on a quiet day.
The gregarious doorman always wished me "A fine  day, Madam!",
as he ushered me into the foyer. He always wore that silly hat that makes me smile.  
And, of course, he kept an eye on my red bicycle by the door.
Making my way through the corridors, observing the sculptures, paintings and artifacts.
Wondering at the archaeologists dinosaur finds, mounted above and behind the glass.
Finally, on to see Pandora and her ill-fated decision to open the box.  
Letting forth into the world all manner of toxicity.  And then, again, opening the box
she set Hope free so we could cope in this danger-laden world.  
Ending my museum tour, I contemplated my coming child
and what he would find to make him cry or hope or love
in this world, as I slowly pedaled through the spring infused day.

Caged organs never sounded so beat
Bone marrow around the brass meat
I'm a toxic lover with love around my waist
And afraid of poisoning, as you taste waste
Cleaning toxins out of my sheets with chemicals.

(commercial break)

Ay-yeah-ya-yeah-yeah
Ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-wa

Breathe me all the ways to stay away
Blood on bathroom tiles that run for miles like crimson Niles
Just stay

Ay-yeah-ya-yeah-yeah
Ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-wa

(Okay, we're back.)

Coals in your cold coat holes
I know you're happy now
I hope you're warm with fingers intertwined
within the future in your ribcage
feel your organs to know you're alive
your heartbeats beat because of a stolen car.
I feel-

(change the station)

Drive me, my baby. I'll turn you out in time. Don't you recognize
you're the only thing I want in sight. I could change your-

(change the station)

You're the one for me. You are my-

(change the station)

I hope you like it like you love it when you should like it because you love it without liking it with loving it within loving and without loving with love and without like because liking is love and love is liking what is liked to be loved within and without. Here's God with the weather.

(change the station)

Green and cotton, that's a lovely chair, I could make love from over there
without a percocet. Un-un-un-un.
Touch the eyes that boil within; you find me nice but I'm not applicable
because I'm a lonely boy without a dog.
And I,
am
God.
And I,
am
God. Nod.

Sugar sweet, silver sweep,
I could touch you in familiar places in unfamiliar ways
I get lost in the boulevard of a sweatshirt
And I,
am
without.
And I,
am
without. Route.

Mhm, that's not a smile,
that's a thirty-foot crocodile
waiting to take a chunk outta my heart.
Art-Art-Art-Art-Art?
******* in separate dreams with the same meaning,
blood boiling in coffee pots and soldiers
without a cover.
Tame me like a child in uniform, from the universe.
Cake drugs like it's an icecream cone. Jesus loves you.
**** in another room
to feel the same.
**** in another mindset
to feel sane. Train.

I'm not a river of veins suffocated by milk skin,
to be without a busted lip is to be kissing without pain.
And to be your God
is to be ******* insane. ******* in a bathub.

Mhm,
you're a painting within a crooked house
inside a straight housewife's flamboyant blouse.
You're sippin' on God and Orange Julius
without a straw.

Ripping out red ribbon rays from rayon replays of a river in ruin
really what did you expect to do with that sort of information
I could cancer caulk chalk with every other walk
to seal your home without home inflammation.

Jesus on a candle clock, with a nail in each hand of the hour
I feel nothing but sugar shame when I sail past his shower.
And I,
am
without remorse.
And I,
am
without remorse. Force.

Candy-coated ***** candidly corroding colored coats into capes
callously creating cowardice,
can you be more?

I have a way to remove myself from great events
and a way to sell lies wrapped up in honest packages.
To be without and which way would you run with me
if I were not a twenty-three
in your eyes,
meteorological decline.

And the winds
carry
me home.
And your eyes
carry
me home.
And your lips
carry
me home.
And your hands
carry
me home.
Home again.

(change the station)

Bone marrow
in my back
touch me, I wanna feel
Give it up
Give it up
I want to make love in love
I want to die and donate
a part of myself
my backbone, lack thereof

(change the station)

Tie a noose around a highschool grad
attach to a college rule to rule how to think the same
because a couple of IDs and free games
help you understand how you understand how you understand
how you understand how you understand how you understand

Dreams.

Whoops.

****.

Two twenty-three inside a church for me because God doesn't have
a responsible doorman, just an abused son and a plot-hole plan.

(change station)

Save the opera for the quiet drinks
I wanna think, I wanna think

(change station)

Sonic tendencies
suicidal sound
My heart is left in a bone,
bone marrow
I'm a broken calcium stick
surrounded by health
I waste away
Waste away for you
Oooh,
I love.

I tried to stay my overstay.

(change the station)

Bronze your lips, I want to kiss you green.
Wait. I could be the best.
Don't walk too far because it feels like walking away.

(change the station)

Super fast
in the past

Once I saw a monkey man,
driving down my street in his monkey van,
kids tried to run away,
but monkey ran,
he brought the children to his monkey land.
If they got out of line,
with monkey man,
they'd get a slap,
from the back of his hand.
The favorite nut of monkey man,
was the pecan,
he loved pecans,
the monkey man,
he eats as manys as he cans.
Unlimited lifespan,
has the monkey man,
currently lives in Iran.
Likes to read comics,
batman,
superman,
while getting,
a monkey tan.
Been around,
since the caveman,
had the monkey man.
Used to be a doorman,
had monkey man.
Wanted to be an anchorman,
but there was a monkey ban.
Not a woman.
Not a man.
M o n k e y    M a n .

My art
is the way
I re-establish
the bonds that unite me
to the universe. -A.M.

Before she fell
They were
Hated
She, for her sudden rise
And he
in turn
for his shaggy, loping omnipotence
The sure-footed authority
marked by silver squares heading nowhere.

She was the little Visionary
and he, the Blue Chip
So very messy
The Tall and The Small

If you were sitting at the bar
Somewhere around Mercer Street
And those two came in
“Ugh”
Went off inside all the heads
in their line of sight
A palpable mental groan
As they hung up their coats
And waved at various tables
Making their way like penguins through
recalcitrant faces
eyes focused on a glass of beer.

Again, it will all end badly, we thought
Nursing our drinks.
Tonight

Piling out of the last bar
brawling on slick cobblestones
under the yellowish streetlights
of Prince or West Broadway
Arguing about nothing and everything
“I will out run you Old Man!”
You could hear it bouncing off the sidewalk like reverb
Whispering around corners
“You will be surpassed!”

Birdgirl, I too look to eternity,
he states full of drink and exasperation.
I step and step again. I am walking there.
I am not a bird and you will see that I need no wings.

“You will be surpassed!”

Blood and more blood
A face planted with busted lips
Flattened
Your body crushed into the earth
Over and over
Having fallen
Waiting for burial, entombed in flora
Welcomed
Reclaimed
To be disappeared
But not just yet.

What had you unleashed Mija?
What did you already know?

I’ve got a devil inside of me! SHE GOT LOVE!
I’ve got a devil inside of me! SHE GOT LOVE!

In editorial spreads
we saw flared American jeans in Rome
You said that they understood you there
And in Cuba too
We understood you very well right here,
you know.
It’s not so hard.

The doorman said he heard someone cry out
And then a soft thud a moment later
From the deli’s rooftop next door
Crusted guano
Broken, forlorn and misguided leaves
Cigarette stubs with pinkish ends
A stray tabloid cover page and that
peppery NYC grit in your eye and nose and under your fingernails all reclaim you to a concrete womb
Welcome back!

“ICARUS DOWN” read The Post

How easily we lost our envy
after those 34 floors
Earthbound
Strait shot

It was all foretold in the telling
Now folded into a history of sorts
That of an earthy primordial Fertility cut short by a ruddy man
rather than a thousand  compulsive chalklines drawn around a singular and knowing corpse
There are ramifications for deals
made in feathers, b lood
puddles and mudlood
A recipe for the
reunion of force fields
Folding you back within its arms
Where you belong
What an excellent day for an exorcism.

I’ve got a devil inside of me! SHE GOT LOVE!

the electronic dispenser is out of order yet the automated voice keeps repeating it’s not a problem it’s not a problem it’s not a problem it’s not a problem it’s not a problem it’s not a problem it’s not a problem it’s not a problem…



i hint to Mom maybe the nightly sleeping pills might contribute to her forgetfulness she replies what? i didn’t hear what you said i repeat maybe the nightly sleeping pills might add to your forgetfulness she answers what? i can’t hear you i say Mom you’ve been using sleeping pills since i was little maybe they’re a source of your fogginess she snaps what? what are you saying i can’t hear you



Tucson 2001 in the heat of disagreement Mom accuses i am the cause for her need to rely on sleeping pills do you understand what that means Mom you’ve been taking sleeping pills as far back as i can remember miltown seconal nebutal placidal ambient (when i was young i took some from your medicine cabinet then sold them to friends) was it always because of me your off-beat weird troubled kid or were there other reasons thank you Mom for all you have given me i am grateful appreciative truth is none of us trust each other these defenses we’ve created will someday turn on us



2010 it is difficult to write about Mom so many conflicted feelings our struggles contentious exchanges expectations criticisms blame all the money she and Dad poured into me hoping i would turn out successfully employed married with children instead her difficult child chose painting writing punk rock yoga Mom will be 90 in October she caught viral pneumonia last month concerned for her i flew to Chicago to see her my beautiful glamorous Mom who lives high up in tall high-rise doorman deskman elegantly decorated 3 bedroom apartment along lakefront my little Mom who’s once lovely figure shrunk in size morphed in shape with arthritic painfully twisted fingers hair color light ash skin spotted with dark purple brown splotches estate dwindled to crumbs my clever shrewd Mom still so talented socially telephone constantly ringing lunch dinner engagements accompanied by frantic loony sister both dressed to the nines shopping returning hairdresser appointments manicures yet memory rapidly disintegrating my poor sweet Mom who now needs my loving protection it is time for me to step up to the plate shield her from caregivers poised to pilfer my vulnerable Mom leaves her wallet in cab loses her glasses forgets events 2 hours ago furious at pharmacy for neglecting to include her sleeping pills i know i cannot change her whirlwind 24/7 world of gossip scandal denial it is i who will need to change sacrifice my simple sparse existence quiet desperation scrambling for pay gardening gazing up at the moon stars adapt to her dizzy drama driven life style in order to look after her



i’ve written about this before a defining moment that haunts me Bayli and i are staying at Toby Martin’s spacious loft near corner of Bleeker and Broadway 1973 Toby offers me job building stretchers canvases for Warhol he tells me lots of nyc women will model for me if i want to keep drawing vaginas he advises me to drop out of art school like he did assures me i will become famous it is October Sunday i am wearing white turtleneck wheat colored corduroy Levis jeans taupe suede clogs Bayle is dressed almost exactly as me except powder blue clingy top we are just art students Toby takes us up to Rauschenberg’s loft on Lafayette Street Rauschenberg is in the Bahamas the kitchen is all industrial size stainless steel coffee stained glass Chemex drip coffeemaker on stove  upstairs on roof many currently trendy painters edgy artists a sculptor who uses dynamite to blow up quarries in Vermont they scrutinize Bayli and Odysseus with voracious glares the men eye Bayli several women send flirtatious looks at Odysseus he feels fright protection for Bayli it is all too much too complex too threatening and in that moment he drops the ball creeped out fearful he takes her hand and they flee back to Hartford Art School but maybe he was wrong possibly Bayli could have handled those depths heights perhaps she would have blossomed i’ve thought about that moment many times torturing myself with my cowardice insecurity adoration for Bayli our love remaining pure never corrupted



a boy/man makes love with a girl/woman once twice in bed then falls blissfully asleep wakes up makes love all night in secluded room in sheltered house on quiet street in sleepy New England town in the morning with Velvet Underground turned up real loud they dance wild then make more love



perhaps my fears insecurities shyness are about a diminutive ***** or concave ***** at center of chest or all my weird physical psychological inhibitions idiosyncrasies not wanting the world to ever find out know a secret between Bayli and me possibly Bayli never noticed but probably she realized my desire longing to be recognized acclaimed yet remain unrecognizable live in quiet privacy i don’t know sometimes i wonder if Bayli loved me like i love her if there was only one twinkling star in her sky like there is in mine Mom says it’s wrong to limit my skies to one star she says Bayli separated from me and married someone else she asks has Bayli ever made an attempt to contact you since her 2nd marriage i answer you don’t understand Bayli is entirely devoted she would never look up or away from her man Mom says open your eyes there are lots of special stars meant just for you in the sky



at some point it becomes obvious the latest is instantly embarrassingly obsolete why would anyone want the latest



let them come these winds of change blowing sands garbage leaves twisting branches bending trees up the coast down the hole displacing erasing everything oceans rising currents colliding mountains crumbling fiery red skies there was a time once but that time is gone there was a girl once but that girl is gone a street a house  a room  a bed once but that street house room bed are gone hunter buried under hill sailor lost at sea he who steps courageous mindful compassionate will pass beyond the terror

How wise I am to have instructed the butler
to instruct the first footman to instruct the second
footman to instruct the doorman to order my carriage;
I am about to volunteer a definition of marriage.
Just as I know that there are two Hagens, Walter and Copen,
I know that marriage is a legal and religious alliance entered
into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut and a
woman who can't sleep with the window open.
Moreover, just as I am unsure of the difference between
flora and fauna and flotsam and jetsam,
I am quite sure that marriage is the alliance of two people
one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other
never forgetsam,
And he refuses to believe there is a leak in the water pipe or
the gas pipe and she is convinced she is about to asphyxiate
or drown,
And she says Quick get up and get my hairbrushes off the
windowsill, it's raining in, and he replies Oh they're all right,

it's only raining straight down.
That is why marriage is so much more interesting than divorce,
Because it's the only known example of the happy meeting of
the immovable object and the irresistible force.
So I hope husbands and wives will continue to debate and
combat over everything debatable and combatable,
Because I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life,
particularly if he has income and she is pattable.

Water only runs in the house of a holy man
But the prayers of a parched child are ignored
in favour of the money man's plan
Believe in a God all you want
he won't save you

Nihilism saves valor
Believe in nothing and nothing can hurt you
Those empty symbiotic phrases of the faithless

Listen to the chimes of the ice cream van
and despair at the crimes of a suit and tie man
Crunch of steel in a midnight collision
they collude in hopes of derision

Under desk lamp ambiance, in heated rooms
13th floor apartment blocks
where the doorman knocks
where the doorman knocks

Time and crime again, and lie and try again
Paid protests in the streets
Digest your intellect, removal of a safe space
So that they might turn the power switch

The blackout comes when revenue succumbs


In your ancient catacombs, where matted bandages hang
and drip crimson onto dusty floors
Smeared where they jeered at the death of a democracy

This is the corner of civilisation, torn down and replaced with a bank

That’s how it would be
I’d forever be the one
telling your doorman
“I won’t be staying”
his accusing looks
knowing I’m only around
when the Mrs. to your Mr.
isn’t
That copy of your apartment key
that won’t be returned
because you only needed two before,
rests on my keychain.
As the doorman winks, I realize
why I’m the one worth leaving
why I’m the one with bare fingers
while her’s are adorned-
she wouldn’t do this
For I love you enough
to keep coming to you
but not enough
to leave you.

a google-whack for the ultimate news reel: #jigo'hudami.

and not another Shakespeare to come, #blues,
and not another Milton to come, #blues,
and not another Beckett to come, #blues,
an not another unforced Bukowski to come, #blues,
and not another papa Ginsberg to come, #blues,
and not another fusion of poetry and jazz, #blues -
not another, the lost interest in jazz,
the it's been done, and only in America, #blues -
and not another Dostoyevsky to come, #blues,
and no one is digging digital trenches like at Ypres
             capitalising on the gambling of
giving it all, even if it means giving it for nothing
imagining daymares of homelessness, #blues -
and no more fusion worked from the stale juggernauts
of voice in the wilderness, or voice among aghast silence -
and no one is writing intoxicated odes in a Dionysian
woodland shade naked or at least half naked - #blues,
and no one new knows how having voyeuristic eyes
not looking at your poetry on the internet feels like,
before the broadband hyper super hyper mega tron
optic wires before the ancient tee p p **** dial to
connect - rotary dial telephones and aesthetic patience -
dial-a-meaning now, collect, appropriate, discard -
super-communicative efficiency like the Chinese
but in lesser number - lesser number - a moment to
unwind - choose a graphic for the front-cover -
Dali? really? quote: morbid and dark and a surrealist?
surrealists wrote their poetry at the beginning of the
20th century - again, what a treat, cook up a 21st century
manifesto - overshoot the mark - the macabre non-Gothic,
and so no angel with a sword near the chapel entrance
but a gargoyle - a gargantuan bore - agreed...
and not another william blake to come, #blues,
and not another richard brautigan to come, #blues,
dual citizen of the world - from one underworld to another,
Morse code typescript, or telegram poetry -
poetry telegramic - the reinvention of the cut-up technique,
but less paper clippings of single words shoved in
a hat like someone about to wear latex gloves and write
a ransom letter - telegramic poetry - the cut up is more
linear, less word from newspapers cut and then picked
at random, hoping for the big winner - conscious of
the river course - telegram! - opening page from
l'Étranger (e.g.):
mother died - - - - - - - telegram - - - - - - - at Marengo - - -
2 days leave - - - - - absurd already, apologies for death -
- - - - - (yes, a reader, not the narrator, and not - - - - - - - -
explicitly like a telegram) - - - - (self-explanatory auto-) -
- exactly, at every turn some excuse, but what a grand
excuse, god's turn, excuses after the fashionable 15 minutes -
nothing prior - - - - lunch at Céleste’s restaurant - - - - -
starting to look anti-autobigraphical (i.e. written much too
late, not day-by-day, *Kronos Witold Gombrowicz) - - -
calls Emmanuel to be lent a black tie - - - joke, karate - -
not so funny - - - d'uh, belt - - - mourning band - - - - - - -
with a white ******* rotated 45° from that famous
re-interpretation - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - good something -
running for the bus - - - soldier's shoulder, sleep - - - - -
warden absent, waiting with a chatty doorman - - - - - - - -.
well it could work -this telegram style, it's the easiest style
to read, the Nova Express proves it, the Soft Machine
proves it, Naked Lunch proves it - the incoherent distraction,
well, coherently incoherent - sometimes you want to
see a tornado rather than an open stretch of road in a desert -
a ****** tornado - whirling and whirling with Loki
playing a flute - and something about the great milkman
being choked by a marshmallow monster in the sky -
or, of course, with the sensible people - an Ikea assembly
manual for a chair - with one but the most crucial ***** missing:
metaphor for the 10% books, that's 10% in, 20% up on sales
of audiobooks - hyper-readers, ages: 18-24 - 24-35 (21%) -
and then thick mud ahead, an opera of yawns and a gym
membership one tier above the no-fun zone of sometimes
an index wet and a judo flick of the page - or any other
comparison - but on the plus - and not another Walt Whitman
to come - #bangersandmash, and not another Pound
to come - #blues - in with the pretentious you say out
with the feral? maybe... maybe not - but all of this for only
one sentence: to be nervous over ethnicity and vocabulary -
shouldn't exist - to pursue active censorship of a person's
vocabulary is to undermine them completely -
when corporations copyright words because they're logos
i can understand - but people copyright words something's
obviously wrong, somehow i imagine corporate influence
at having taught this lesson - it should exist - or... in what tone?
but already, people what inoffensive and frail - they
want cushions but don't want stones - and it's every single
time - where once words flowed freely no words stumble
against everyone being politicised - it's hard to do your job
these days, whatever it might be - some would say once
the figurehead a throng of courtesans and you knew of importance,
you were so far away from the seat of power you enjoyed
one sq. mile rather than daydreaming about if you ruled
the world - cost-effective inefficiency of politics -
life? unaffected - and it's not even some glorious technique
behind it - the same children that lied have simply
learned to evolve lying into negation - ah, whatever, #blues,
#Rakı.

The hotel we booked looked breezy and bright
just as well
as we planned on staying the night.

But the Doorman named Stan,said this,and deadpan,'you ain't coming in because you're not wed.
'Aye 'we're over the brush' no rush to get wed', 's what I said,
'well
you ain't getting in, get that in your head', is what Stan the doorman then said.

So we to and we fro'd 'til I punched him in the nose,a bad move on my part,got carted away to spend that night and the next day in a cell.

And she gave me hell when I got home.

1st Movement:

When I hear the knocks at my door I’m filled with hope. Hope that it’s my good old friend coming to see me again and fill me with his familiar presence. By equal measures, though, I feel fear. Fear that it’s my good old friend back again to fill me with that all too familiar darkness. They’re gentle knocks, sinister but as grating and aggressive as a great dog’s bark. The sound turns the air to a particular darkness which fills my lungs and heart. Fear interspersed with curiosity compels me to answer the door with haste and resignation to his behest, if only to refine this binary mixture of emotions to one or the other. Both are equally awful as each other, for this old friend is not the kind of friend one would willingly welcome. He’s the sort of friend who, when he wants to come in, he will, and I’ve learned over the years that it’s easier to let him. Let him in to wreak his worst on me and let him go again until his return. He always returns.

This ‘good old friend’ I speak of is the crafty external force which deceives me with my heart’s treachery to believe his bogus internality. He deceives me and he deceives my heart, my mind, my soul; my whole being, the whole world. The sooner I let him in and the more open and receptive I am to his abuse, the sooner he will leave. Leave me for a moment’s respite from his damning indictment which screams of anger at his own futility.

The figurative door barks only in my brain, but the definite door knocks gently, devoid of any disturbance. As I open the door the darkness dissipates making way to a bright clarity. My fallible heart was presuming the worst, yet not knowing it. Standing before me is my friend, my brother securely holding in his hands the words written that everything will be alright. Not now, and we know not when, but everything was, and will be again.

I put on a mask of happiness to fool my brother to altruistically manipulate his altruism toward me, but to my own detriment. My own success backfires. My brother, fooled in my eyes, serves the manipulation straight back to me. Facile happiness abounds us both driving enthusiasm with which to examine the words he holds, and to diligently extrapolate the truth from the book he bears quenching our thirst driven by our mutual love for truth.  As his eyes close to another world, another dimension, mine too close seeing only the questions asked in my imagination. What does he under his eye lids see? Where are his words going, and to whom other than me? These are the questions he is here to answer, unbeknownst to me. The questions I’ve been silently asking ever since I learned to question. The same questions every single person in existence, excluding none, asks all the time. Some ask with hope of an answer. Others, enveloped with contentiousness, ask to prove a nonexistent point and perpetually fail to succeed, mocking only themselves. But do they know they mock? The self ridicule is cloaked in self righteousness woven by this world with its daily, bite size propaganda fed through speakers and screens right into the deepest recesses of the mind. The dangling carrot promising satisfaction. Playing on our inherent knowledge that there is something better, something more resemblant of that originally intended perfection for which we all strive in our divinely uneducated way. There is something better than the devastation we witness encompassing our souls and poisoning our hearts, making us sick. A sickness self inflicted from the view of the original intender. A donkey won’t chase the dangling carrot without the hunger. The screens drip feed us hunger and, offering the unattainable antidote, it keeps us chasing.

My brother has come to help me use my mental tools to instil the abiding antidote from these words. Words with which to gradually alter my outlook on their beauty. My previous reverence for poetry changing like the tides, flowing and ebbing over and again, gently moulding the lands into more beauteous forms making known nature’s true name.

יהוה; quintessence of the words,
Of beauty to our ears.
Not love of mind nor fanciful sight,
Nor tenacity of breath of those who might,
Speak provocation of effusive tears.

Diversification of those whose diction,
Expansion was sought imploringly,
Displayed meek thirst,
For knowledge first;
They’ll be blessedly beset linguistically.

Longing rills of liquefied utterance,
Reverberating waves aplenty,
Bellowing whispers loud,
Heard from within a shroud,
Giving rise to a barrel never empty.

Roaring murmurs of ripples in thousands
Cascading to oceans below,
A fast falling downward demise,
Sounding white truth and that of black lies,
Of onomatopoeic H2O.

Not stringent is the string of letters,
Lax are the words to be strung.
Not sequentially,
But dulcetly,
Outward beauty will be rung.

With a patterned strike using one’s cerebella Mallet
On the gong of one’s cerebral stock,
Eloquence imbues,
The mind your ears use,
Curtailing the perpetual tick tock – tick tock.

Facile masks circle that face,
Consuming as they revolve.
Filched is elation,
Taken is creation.
Yet knowing the inevitable resolve.

We know now, consciously or not, with whom we originate. What stops us from connecting the dots. A dot-to-dot; something so easy to do, but where those dots continue to move, we fail to place the blame succeeding to rue. Frustration turns to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to he; The dot mover, the obstructer, the distractor, the decoy from truth, from love, justice, from every good thing. We know whose power the world lies within, yet choose ignorance over the truth which we already know in our hearts.

These realisations are made like Wordsworth’s frost at midnight. They perform their secret ministry through the air, over my body and penetrating my mind and heart, upheld by any wind from my or my brothers mouth. Each and every utterance supports any later rumination on the truth, the lie, and anything in between these extreme poles of all that’s known and that which is unknown, seen and unseen, loved and hated.

These reciprocal uplifting and upbuilding exchanges, each a divine gift, a string of gems to have and hold for time indefinite, aid an understanding of the one responsible for such. So little time we have left, yet such extravagant lengths of this most precious dimension is wasted arguing for and against, but never asking who or why? Surely only a fool argues a case about that which is unknown. The facts form irrefutability, yet the propensity to form too fast with a one sided judgement still wins while we dote on our own supposed intelligence.

Acknowledging the light seeping through the cracks in the still darkness, he rages with a concentrated anger at his self generated, perpetual, vindictive blindness. He is that getter in the way of things, the shadow caster, the adversary, שָׂטָן.

He is the darkness licking round the door frame, to my mind with all his might and yet crafty restraint. Not one of us can escape this darkness, not on our own. We can, though, shed light on it. Light will always win where both are present. Darkness may be the fundamental state, but where light is allowed, darkness is always destroyed.

But then it comes over me like a tidal wave. A darkness rushes at me like a sledgehammer for making this realisation. Past the point of no return do I give in. I give up. It’s too much. Only so much ducking and weaving can one man’s energy let him do till there is none left, and now it’s gone. I’ve run dry to doom, run into the ground. I’m broken.

Time rolls on filled with a single solid nothing. The weeks pass. The days, the hours go by sniggering and sneering. The clock’s face look down his nose and finds me. To us, time seems the highest of all dimensions, but as obscure as it is, by what does it run? A question we have not enough time to fully answer scientifically. Science by it’s very nature is the perpetuation of posing question after question until the answer lies beyond comprehension. Posing question after question to answer with evidence is categorically finite. Uncertainty is an underlying rule pervading science itself, though faith follows beyond the apparent end. One will never know just how much of a threat obtaining this faith can be to he, the adversary.

Life’s doorman presenting my open garment inviting me into the warm wrappings of my winter coat to deceptively soften the mourning of the summer we lost. That paradise on which we passed. Beaconing me into the warm wrapping only to send me astray, away, adrift from the truth to eternal ruth and regret of one day.

At this my brother departs for his own trials in his own house, thus leaving me to petition and plead for a helping hand out of the ill-lighted and lurid cavernous fog I find myself in. There’s a relentless pain pervading my whole soul, but the pane in the wall frames nature’s beauty which taunts me so. A picture plane presenting a small glimmer of the bliss meant to be. A hope of spiritual prosperity, assurance for which we have been given, though the reminders are not easy. The doorman’s world drives his crafty vehicle of dangling carrots with such ferocity to blind us. The speed blinds the minds of those who stopping, would realise there’s string and a stick. It’s a trick. A trick which has seen us plough through a vast array of food, a banquet, chasing the ever out of reach embellished single grain, though always the closest.

Try as he might to perpetuate this fight, us, his captives, continue to fight longer and harder with a never ending and unlimited supply of the best weapon known to man. Love. From where does it flow? To where does it go? First we have to know, and once harboured, we must direct its flow.

Five years have passed. Five summers with the length of five long winters, and again I hear these waters rolling from their mountain springs with soft in-land murmur.
(William Wordsworth - Lines Written at Tintern Abbey)

The mountain spring is where. A monumental spring of an historic scale from mount zion producing a never ending murmur of love to cascade over the ocean of a people lowering themselves to the strongest and most sturdy section of the mountain.

As the result of a string of mutations, always mutating and never improving, is always the same, such a long string will never become rope. An infinite number of monkeys given an infinite number of typewriters and infinity itself will rewrite the entire works of Shakespear. Those who read a Shakespear and surmise the existence of a lot of literate monkeys, are vacuous victims of international mind-numbing, but wilfully so.

Saturated with such a concentrated concoction of diverse threads erratically woven into a veil, a cloak of lies behind which their lack of faith is hiding, a falsity for their fallacy; the world frantically searches for truths using tools honed only by the world, on which the adversary hones his trident. Needles in haystacks the truths may be, but once found they’re overt, obviously. They are the flames that burn the darkness, a holocaust of murk, the Wally amongst the distracting cacophonous din of hustle-bustle of faceless herds trudging in binary directions to their fraudulent feed of false food disguised as noble inflections.

The casting of light in our eyes, as pennies of an historic value drop, irradiates the notion that our eyeballs have been boring into truths and truth has been peering back for all time past. Have we not seen because the want to see was lacking, or did we not see because our ability was cracking? Were the lights on with nobody home, or were they residing in darkness? The utterance of my brother came inspired, “If we focus on misfortune, we will reap what we sow. Focus on the truth and let everyone know”.

Asking is merely making known one’s requirement for information. Prior to this we must attest the intent of receiving such. Though, the truth has been granted devoid of request, negate it has not our silent behest. Do we need to know the truths we now see in plain sight, to live our lives in harmony?

In a world without compassion, where the hungry are starved, the thirsty desiccated, the poor deprived, and the weak expended; does the supposed prime driver really give two hoots about the starving, desiccated, deprived and expendable; me, you, us? Ostensibly not.

Surely a world of war where we’re sick and we suffer will have been founded by not one whit related to love, but a halfwit wilfully innate and cognate to hate. Paying heed to words written with the elusive love we seek, I see the distinction from consent and cause. Trudging through Satan’s cesspit with consent from whom we cannot blame for causing the sewage in which we wade.

I know there is to do, but what to do, how to do, where to do and when. Knowing why is too little to do by. Answers are only information and information is worthless until actions are born. A gift unappreciated lies stagnant and not used. A gift gratefully received produces infectious joy.

Pleasures spiral and sprawl outward
Escaping the small chamber your parents regulated it to
Devouring dollops of your time
Until you become sick and restless
Fevers, blankets, and soup for recovery
Seeking madness once you’re rested and wrestling with boredom
This ruinous routine is never naturally rundown
Only perishing once true passion is found

Love isn't all about
sunshine, lollipops and rainbows
it's about hard work and mayhem
and psychological blows

It's about betrayal and jealousy
infidelity and boredom
it's about looking the wrong way
and getting slapped by the doorman

It's about leaving the seat up
and many sleepless nights
it's about slamming the doors and making up
after many countless fights

It's about verbally vomiting sweet nothings
with warm and fuzzy glee
it's about finding pairs of ***** socks
hiding behind the settee

It's about holding hands and snogging
while everybody stares
it's about embarrassing storytelling
and pretending not to care

It's about realising that you need someone
no matter if they cause you bedlam
you just know it's because you love them warts and all
and you just can't live without them.

"There are monsters on the building," she said in the sad song of a West Texas drawl.  She sounded like she did when she talked in her sleep.  We had paused there to examine the doorway the way people do when they know something frightening and important will happen to them on the other side.  

Somehow the banality of the details seemed at odds with the profundity of the situation:  A hot breeze taunted us with the smell of garbage.  Pigeons did their stupid strut and pecked and **** on the sidewalk.  Manhattan pedestrians slogged past through the May heat wave in a sweaty river of hurried lives, each stranger a subtle hint that perhaps our pain wasn't so profound after all.  My own rivers of perspiration seemed to drive the point home.

Molly had more than once accused me of being attracted to the dramatic, and she was right.  In response to this weakness, this juvenile habit of seeing myself as a hero in the story of my life rather than just another person in the world, the God I still half believed in seemed to be punishing me with mundane aggravation as we prepared to defy him:  crowded subways, humidity that pressed in from all sides, growing stains in my armpits.  Now that we had reached the building the half-believed God added a master stroke of lewdness.  Squatting on the threshold of our destination were a pair of gargoyles [cement artistic tradition combined with superstition] that peered down at us with obscene toothy grins.  

Molly tugged on my damp fingers, and asked again,  "Greg, why are there monster's on the building?" Her eyes seemed both accusatory and desperate for affection, but her voice was sleepy, like she was trying to pretend it was all just a dream.

"I don't know," I said.  "It doesn't matter."

It was true.  It didn't matter accept as a symbol in a story that somewhere deep in my mind I was shamefully conscious I would someday write.  Disgusting but unavoidable for the boy I was at 19, a boy who wanted to be important someday, wanted to be important by being "a writer," and didn't see how he could ever be anything else.  

"Write what you know" they say, but I was just an upper middle class white kid, nothing important had ever happened to me.  This was important.  This was life and death.  Most of me lived it but part of me watched from outside.

We went inside and found the elevator, then the waiting room.  I held her left hand while she filled out the forms with her right.  I told her I loved her, trying to say it like a transcendent spiritual truth that could make all the facts of our situation irrelevant and sweep them off somewhere they didn't matter.  

Then a nurse came and took her away.  

It offended me that despite the life and death business conducted behind the wall, the waiting room looked just like any other.  Maybe worse.  Worn out office furniture in generic shades of brown.  Stacks of magazines that looked like they had been procured second hand from some cleaner pricier office where happier people sit and smile about life while they fill out forms and wait.

I glanced around the room, careful to avoid eye contact.  There were two other men, one white one black, both looking sad and dejected, staring into space, thinking of the women in that other room I just like me I figured, wishing there was something they could do.  

I selected a magazine with half its cover missing.  Celebrities at a party.  Celebrities at the beach.  I put the magazine down.

I should be feeling more than this, I thought, and that thought seemed shameful too.

It was still a question about me.  The pathetic existential question that has always gnawed my television generation:  Why can't I just be real?  The question brought more shame.  Why are you asking these questions?  This inner monologue  ...  they are killing your son in there!  They are ripping him out of the girl you love.  Shut up and just feel!  Or don't feel, and just shut up.  

Searching myself for sadness I found again a numb disgust for being outside myself and looking in.  

I thought of praying but an image came to me of Jesus struggling to carry his cross up a hill.  He was being chased by His Father who took the form of the God of old paintings, a long white beard, muscled body, the eyes of a tyrant. God was leading an angry mob, scaring Jesus up the hill to his death, screaming at Him:  "This is what my son was meant for!  You don't have any other choice!"  It was not the sort of image I hoped prayer would inspire.

Finally I arrived at the thought I was avoiding:  Molly crying on a cold table, machines inside her, everything happening too fast.  I had asked if I could go with her and hold her hand.

"No," the nurse had said with a touch of scorn, like the question was not just dumb, but an insult to women everywhere.  Why would she let the guilty party make things worse?

A few yards away there were doctors working machines inside the womb of the only girl I had ever loved, taking the life of a child I would never know.  But even if I had wanted to stop them, which I didn't, it was too late now.  

It was the first life and death decision either of us would make, and even though I would try to console her with the idea that we had chosen life, our own lives, our own futures, right or wrong, I knew we had also chosen death for our first child. Death always brings sadness, and despite whatever happiness we might still enjoy in the years to come, this sadness would would linger with us, in some form, forever, unless we came together to conceive another child and raise it.  This is not what Jesus told me.  This is what I told him.  He listened but he didn't seem to care.  He had no time for *******.

Molly appeared in the doorway to the back rooms where I had not been allowed to go with her.  I would have liked to go with her back there.  I would have held her hand, made her know that we were doing it together, that I was equally if not more culpable in this death than her, and if that were not possible, and it probably was not, at least I could have held her hand.            

But I was not allowed back there.  She went through it alone with strangers all around her speaking in professionally sensitive tones.
      
I put down the magazine and went to her.  Her face was blotchy, and there was still dampness in her eyes.  She had been crying for awhile and she was crying still.  A nurse's hand was on her shoulder.
      
"She was very brave,"  the nurse said, like Molly was a four year old who had just made it through her first hair cut without squirming.
      
"Will she be okay?"
      
"Yes, but now you need to take her home so she can rest."
      
The nurse disappeared.  I held Molly, and kissed her forehead, and told her how much I loved her and always would.  She did not speak and her body felt lifeless in my arms.  I led her back to the elevator and then out into the Manhattan bustle.  The humid heat had reached its most brutal hour, and I began to sweat immediately as we walked towards the subway.
      
We passed a deli.  I asked if she was hungry and she nodded.  I went inside and used the little money I had to buy a sandwich and two bottles of juice and we found a bench in the shade and sat there to eat.  She ate a little and drank some of her juice and then finally
spoke.
      
"It was a spot."
      
"What?"
      
"It was a spot.  They showed me.  It was a little black spot on a screen."
      
"It's okay, Molly  It's going to be okay," I lied.
      
"It was my little girl, but she was just a spot.  They showed me and then they took her away forever."
      
"I love you.  I love you so much."  It was true and all I could think to say and it didn't help much.
      
I brought her downtown to the financial district where I was staying that Summer in an NYU dorm with a friend from High School.  We were there to take film classes together.  Our parent's had allowed us to spend extra on the best housing, and the dorm we stayed in was actually an apartment on the 14th floor of a building with a doorman across from South Street Seaport.  It had a kitchen, high ceilings, and huge windows with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, and even a
separate bedroom.  Fortunately Rick had allowed me the private room so he could have the larger one with the view and the television, so there was a place for Molly and I to go behind a locked door and lay down.

We got in the little bed together and curled into a combined fetal position.  I kissed the back of her neck and she took my hand and placed it on her pelvis where I could feel the bandage rustling under her sweatpants.
      
"Can you feel it?"
      
"Everything will be all right," I almost said, but it felt like garbage on the tip of my tongue and I had not yet grown used to lying except to myself.

I hadn't known there would be a bandage.

"Yes.  I can feel it,"  I said.  This, at least, I knew was true.

I lay there with her like that with my hand where our child had
grown for a few weeks and we fell asleep.

When I awoke, the room was gray with dusk, and Molly was snoring peacefully.  I got out of the bed carefully without disturbing her, sat at my desk, and opened my favorite drawer.  There was my small purple glass pipe, and a little baggy stuffed with the high quality marijuana that in my experience, you can only find in New York City, the Pacific Northwest and American Colleges.  I filled the pipe, lit it, and pulled hard, holding it in as long as I could and then coughing intentionally on the exhale for the fullest effect.  I repeated the process until the bag was nearly empty, lit a cigarette, and sat at the desk with my feet up, looking back and forth from the
high rise across the street to the young woman in my bed, contemplating life and love and God and the future.  

In that moment, high as I was on the drug and the city and the relief of having made it through the day, it truly did seem that everything would be all right.

I had taken to writing poetry a few months before, and I found a
piece of paper and began to write another:

God sat in the abortion clinic waiting room
while they killed his only son.
"My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
"I don't know.  It seemed like the right thing to do."
      
I thought I had the beginnings of a very good poem.  I hoped maybe, someday, somehow my poetry might change the way people thought about things.  I was young and stupid and ****** and my mind was about to crack open completely and let forth a torrent of strangeness.

I was very sad.

-2001

fightingcopsnaked.blogspot.com
brickdumbsublime.blog­spot.com

You painted your eyelids with green velvet and ruby red. The fractured mirror kept your insecurity at bay, as sparkle blue glitter poured all over your head from a little tin can.

We drove across the bridge, and through Shocko bottom, stopping at a nearly deserted parking lot sanctioned by an honor code. We double parked behind an Acura sedan, and waited as you snorted half a gram of Molly off your manicured fingernail into each
nostril.

You took in a deep breath, smoked a Parliament, and blew smoke out the
window. After ten minutes we shambled out of the car with our purses tucked under our armpits, and red fire dying in our eyes. When we reached the Hat Factory venue, the line disappeared from our view and we walked to the entrance where two bouncers were posted up. The tall giants marked our hands with black sharpie ink, drawing a large, bold “X” on each one.

Once inside the spacious warehouse, we ascended a white marble staircase and paid a ten dollar entry fee. Another doorman took out his marker and drew a red line, crossing through the dark black “X” that was drying on our hands. You broke off and away, going
straight to the bar. The bartender asked what you wanted to drink, and you requested water. She smiled and gave you a red solo cup filed with tap water and ice-cubes. After you thanked her, she handed you a bright pink glow stick that you wrapped around your forearm, fitting a figure 8 around your skin like a cloth sleeve.

On the stage was a young man dressed in neon colored plaid and skinny jeans. He climbed up a tall stepladder and jumped from the top, belly flopping on a beautiful African Queen bodacious gluteus Maximus, daggering deep into her soaking black spandex, the decadent bodies swimming on top of each other, stroking and staining the pink gymnastic mat with hot sweat and salt. A huge beach ball colored with red, white,
yellow, and blue pinwheel stripes sailed through the air over the balcony, smacking into a deathly thin model who was smoldering her Parliament cigarette into a clear glass
ashtray.

Mollywopped undergraduates gathered around circles where reggae artists harpooned inflatable black and white killer whales with thrift store bought switchblades.

Laying flat on his stomach was an Asian photographer snapping away with his Nikon digital SLR camera, pale hipsters in ***** black blazers and black fedoras hurling red and purple plastic assault rifles into the intense mass of worry-stricken college students carefree for the moment, gyrating and grinding to the womp-womp bass booming from rectangular speakers that squished in a disc jockey and his hardwood stand with his mixer and two turn tables. He scratched the needle along the worn edge of a battle-scarred vinyl record. His fingers zigzagged the sliders, pressed down on buttons, turned up the volume knobs.

Some hyper-maniac golden child bounced around the dance floor, sneaking up behind university sophomores mesmerized by the makeshift floodlights in the rafters blinking on and off. Conversations were made in the head, but never opened up when the girl approached. Stuck up super senior girls with heavy black mascara and matted eyelashes raised their eyebrows and swatted away ***** flies with a wave of their lotioned hand.

***** girls dress in high heels and septum piercing, their ear cartilage stabbed through by unclean metal. A rude person bumps into the Hyper-maniac golden child, causing the golden child to shove squarely into the rude person’s back. Name-calling ensues, threats fired and received, looks exchanged and bitterness rose over any other tension in the fuming room.

In the far right corner were a couple of kids making out; they’d just met.

Walking away from the fight, sidling between sweaty ugly people, the golden child swayed upstairs to the second floor, passed another bar and balcony tables, chairs, and dance platforms.
He went through a swinging door and joined a conversation between
a bunch of strangers. Wary around the golden boy, he starts practicing his standup Comedy routine, almost bombing on the first joke. Cheap jacks burned bright orange after a blue flame ignited the tapered paper end. Arms snared around the golden child’s body. Oh how nice! It was his friend from Modern Grammar class, he used to sit next to
her in the second row and copied homework answers from the blackboard with her.
She was happy.
And he was happy.

Leeza (the 13 year old sister of my roommate Lisa) and I are in the building 220 lobby, heads-down on our phones, waiting for Lisa and Peter (my BF). The lobby is huge and deserted except for a lady concierge at the front desk, a security guard and the doorman - all far away from us. This is by way of explaining that our masks are off - mine hanging, useless, on my left ear.

When this unmasked guy, I was grazingly introduced to at last year’s 220-building Christmas party walks up to us and says, “Anais, Hi. You’re back!”

I flinched. I know a lot of people are over the whole mask thing and the covid thing - and have the temerity to risk it all, but I don’t - did I mention flu season or covid variations? Someone unmasked getting unexpectedly up in my personal space is jarring, rude, and on several levels dangerous and scary.

“Oh, hi,” I said. I vaguely recognized him, but I couldn’t remember his name. He’s one of those guys who’s cutely strange looking. He’s short (5’4”) (nothing wrong with that, short kings, you’re valid), his hair’s dark at the roots but blonde tipped (beach-hair?) and when he smiles, and he smiles a lot, his smile looks too big for his face. I remember he’d seemed socially awkward when we met, and Lisa had said his father is someone important.

“Yeah,” I said, with a shrug, “Holidays again.” I briefly bob up on my toes, to glance over Leeza’s head and to my relief, I see Lisa and Peter coming out of the elevator. I decide to mask up and seeing me do it, Leeza does as well.

“I’m sorry,” I said apologetically, “I remember you, but I can’t remember your NAME. I’m an idiot.” I give him my best, ditzy shrug.

He reintroduced himself, “Merritt,” he said, offering his hand and smiling again, still unmasked. As I shook his hand he twisted in Leeza’s direction and said, “Hi Leeza!” She gave him the smallest possible 13-year-old’s courtesy nod.

Peter and Lisa arrived, having masked up. “Merritt, hey!” Lisa said, greeting him warmly. “Have you got senioritis yet?” she asked, cheerfully. “Merritt’s graduating from Brown this year,” she announced, turning to include us all in the good news. “Public policy, ya?” She followed up.
“That’s it,” he confirmed, beaming.
“Congratulations!” I said, nodding.
“Way to go!” Peter added with a “yes” nod.
“Merritt, this is Peter,” Lisa said, taking charge. “He belongs to Anais.” she reported, as they shook hands and exchanged nods. “Merrit,” Lisa said, in a disappointed tone, “I hate to rush off, but we’re in a scramble for a dress fitting,” she lied. Lisa can lie like a politician.

And just like that, in something like 45 seconds she shook-off Merritt - who seems like a very sticky guy indeed - without resorting to mace or anything - Lisa’s got charm.

Thoughts about charm..
My grade, in physics 3 (an A-) was 2-one-hundredths from an A+. I almost certainly (like 85%) could have charmed the professor for that tiny bit. We’ve all seen it done - you put on a self-effacing smile and say, “I’m so close, is there something I can do for extra credit?” But I can’t DO it, physically, I can’t say the words and beg for grades. It’s like I can picture my mom watching me having to beg for something she earned, and I’d be mortified to even try. It’s my small disadvantage, a self-imposed handicap.

Besides, if I did betray my code, there’s the awful chance the professor might say no - and that would **** me.

Lisa, on the other hand, wouldn’t actually have to charm. She’d ask about her grade, periodt. The teacher, seeing there’s something he or she could do for this goddess - would just do it. With no asking involved.

Imagine you’re an airline agent and Beyonce´ stepped up to your station. She has a little problem you could effortlessly fix with a click of your mouse. Would you, do it? Hells-yes you would and before she even asked. “It’s already done,” you’d say - just to have Queen Bey smile at you.

The rest of us have to work at it (sigh) - and take our chances..

They say God works in mysterious ways…let’s hope this young genius boy proves God’s ingenious ways. A poet, profoundly compound, some say he was Godly driven. Finally, a chance proudly found, he was to prove himself in poetry Godly given. It was nearing winter, writers and poets shiver… as each prepare to prove, they’re not just a sinner. It was the ultimate ‘spoken word’ talent search, respect goes to the winner. He has been waiting for this moment all his life.  
His stream of consciousness was so deep; he never saw the way, busy sharpening ciphers in mind and bag crafting the perfect knife. The streets of Hillbrow hailed him in, like the seat of death row kills the men. The taxi driver forgot him and took a detour by accident. Our talent was left dumb-founded, unaware; he dropped off at the core of Esselen.  Just a blink, the exit of a bullet hole brought him home; he was caught in a triangle of beasts, the piece demanded his phone and so he reached…but there’s no trust amongst thieves, so the piece found peace in a heart hole. The heat from his chest made him dizzy; he realised the bullet must’ve went in…he felt his soul…and so he fell and found peace in God’s hole…piece was just glad it’s over, plus he was on drugs and **** so it really did not matter. The others were excited over the money they could consume from the cell phone to escape being sober, piece just watched…and took what was left, the bag. Somehow this time Victory didn’t feel so good, he left unnoticed ‘coz he felt it was a nag.  He knew the demons were coming later that night for what he did. In his mind rolling trees nightly pushes the clock of insanity anti; he has to blunt to fight the dead. He arrived at his place he calls it the ‘cave’, he closed the door, threw the bag on the floor, and rolled a blunt as he sat on his favourite place, many call it a crate. The trees had him focused on the bag what’s inside? He tried to ignore it ‘coz he knew it was the **** burning his curiosity inside, but nevertheless gave into his own insight. He opened the bag, and found papers, papers and papers…he went on a rampage crying, he found nothing for buying and felt like dying, to replace the Man he killed for papers, papers and papers…Time passed and somehow the sun kept shining through his nightmares, day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month, he read each page with sight and care. piece even learned how to utilize the dictionary, he tried to show his friends, but they sparked jealousy ‘coz in him they could sense a flair. piece went on and dug deeper, he felt the dead man’s poetry and wanted to know more about life, he started reading the newspaper. His friends, his only family thought he’s strange, piece again tried to explain the change ‘coz once in while he would smoke fire with Rastafari, they taught him to take time for soul searching, death comes at any age. It’s true, piece was changing…he even started writing poetry, but always wondered…will people listen to a background of poverty? One day, piece was taken by surprise; one of his friends showed him an article on the newspaper about the man he killed. The Police failed to find the killer, so the case was sealed. piece felt pain when he read about the dead man’s mission and immediately understood the burden he carried to continue that mission. The article was also based on a Tribute that was to take place that winter. Piece knew what he had to do to prove he’s not just a sinner. Winter came with flu’s and coughs, piece came with dos and don’ts. He managed to arrive at the place where the Tribute was held. He heard poetry recitations in progress, heartfelt and felt a bit nervous, but for some reason he looked up and said help. Unexpectedly, piece didn’t know he had to pay to get in, ‘coz he saw white men just go in. He knew he smelt bad, the doorman kept touching his nose; piece always said his armpits have a mind of its own. The doorman found hate quick and pushed piece to the ground like he’s sick, organisers saw…piece stood up, picked up his papers as tears fell down, a bit hurt but even more his heart was sore. Organisers asked him why he came, piece said it’s not a game, it’s about his name. He was told the recitations were to end, hence he pleaded if he could just blend. He was not prepared to give up on the Late just because a commotion says it’s too late, therefore he climbed on the stage and said,

“I killed a Man, your Tribute through him I found peace…
Listen why I call this poem, piece!”

At first there are only the linens,
Soft as a breath.
I am lost in the snow,
In that gentle place on the edge of sleep,
Not knowing my own name.
And the moment lasts for hours

Until the first touch,
An explosion of light and heat.
We are two blind cave creatures
Feeling our way toward each other,
Moving under the covers
Like continental drift.
A surge of blood and memories
Drawing us together to discover
and remember ourselves.

As we become aware,
I clutch you close to me
And swear I'll never let you go,
Because I know what that will mean—

We'll climb out of bed, dress,
And open the blinds to let in the city
Before stepping into
Your parents' Fifth Avenue apartment
To eat like royalty at the round marble table
by the bay window
Where we look out at our subjects below.
 

Sometime after breakfast,
Reality slips in.
Your folks are on their way back
From some business trip or spa,
So I'll pull on my coat and scarf
Eager as a condemned man.
Rise and fall of the elevator, a guillotine.

You'll walk me out
Past whichever doorman is on duty
And on Fifth Avenue,
Under the shade of the scaffolding,
We'll kiss madly and hungrily and
Finally.

You return to Xanadu
While I take the train downtown,
Waking from a dream
To a life with no doormen,
No housekeepers,
Just cigarette butts
And bills to be paid.

Yes, I'll miss the bay window,
And its view of the city.
I'll miss the plush linens and all of the marble.
But it's not those things that I remember
In the cold quiet of my bed.
It's the warmth of your skin in the morning
And your smile as I open my eyes.

I saw Sting in the lobby this morning, we were going out and he was coming in. Lisa nudged me, “Sting” was all she whispered. He was with a woman and a man. The woman was talking to the doorman. Sting was dressed all in black except for a long stark-white cashmere scarf, he was chatting and working a dark-gray French-flat-cap around in his hands. His hair is very short and white.

We wanted to walk in the snow, if only for a minute.
A gust of wind caught us as we reached the sidewalk. The two American flags, on either side of the entrance, went rigid, at 9-o’clock as if saluting us. “Jeeez!” I said, like the Georgia girl I am - or was. “Don’t be a baby,” Lisa answered, like a true, pittyless New Yorker but her cheeks had turned a child-like pink. She flipped up her collar.

I patted my pocket, relieved to feel my phone and know that if we froze to death the authorities could use “find my friends” to locate our bodies.

Leeza joins us a moment later and I can’t help but notice that she’s dressed like it’s a cool fall day. Back in the day, when my brother would dress like summer even though temperatures in Georgia had dipped cruelly into the fifties. Seeing him, my mom would say, “Where there’s no sense, there’s no feeling,” but I don’t.

“Did you see Sting?” I asked Leeza (12). She gives me a blank look. “Sting”, I said, “the lead singer for The Police?” I add, as clarification. “I don’t know who that is,” she says flatly. “He was famous,” I say in surrender, “a long time ago, in the 90s.” Maybe the next generation won’t be as celebrity driven.

Thank God Lisa suggested I pin my artist-beret down or it would have blown away, like my resolve to walk in the snow. Still, I followed Lisa into the park like a cat on a leash - unwilling to be seen as any less Canadian. The show crunched like we were trampling over snow-cones.

Trees began turning away the wind as we entered Central Park, “I think we may survive.” I said cheerfully. Just because you're freezing to death doesn’t mean you can’t be ​​affable.

Why don’t pigeons freeze to death - I thought birds flew south for the winter?

Should I ever come to the end of my road,
when I  meet the doorman of death,
I shall hope that he care just enough to heed my last request.

I would not pray for hope, nor life, nor freedom.

I should ask him, "Dear Death,
might you listen to me now?

I beg to find my final breath
upon Earth's broken brow;

the crashing waves, day or night,
the pum'ling seaside cloud,

the falling rocks, their endless plight,
and distant ******* growls,

the fading sun, the rising moon;
I even feel their gaze.

Dear Death, I shall not wait the more,
please take me where I lay."

Candied black licorice.
Hair made of silk.
Memories mix dissolve meetings
Of love's labor of leering.
A warning between the moons.

She said her name in a whisper.
I knew by her eyes that I couldn't keep her.
Nightingale look razor strap barren.
Secrets between two torn in caring.

A can full of roses.
Dog dares in a moment.
Build me a fire
With two seats and the stars
We can look off in the distance
Not caring how far.

Since then I've never been able to hold
A thought longer then three seconds.
Leafing through these worn pictures,
Seeing these faces red and blistered,
I try to recall what I was feeling back then,
And what letters I wrote and what I didn't send.

Cabin alone up on the mountains *****
I take my canister and my four foot rope.
The sun's behind me, big and bright.
Gotta' make camp before the fall of the night.

When my name was misery, everyone knew me.
When my name was love, not a soul did.
When my name was honor, no one even bothered.
When my name was jealously, everyone writhed righteously.

Telling doorman upset by the Autumn;
He says it is too cold for him.
I - taking the things from its pockets -
Offer him my black, woolen pea coat.
He huffs and puffs and leaves,
Without even a word being spoke.

A simple sentence can change the world.

Alissa had mentioned that Leonardo invited the cheerleaders to a private after-party at club Erehwon (“Nowhere” backwards). Leigh had an idea. It might be crazy but why should her sister have all the fun? She looked in Alissa’s closet and found some clean cheerleader uniforms. She called an Uber, then slipped into one of the white uniforms.

The Uber dropped her off in front of club Erehwon and the bouncer-sized doorman, noting the uniform, let her in, saying, “Take the second stairs on the left.” At the stairs, another large man unhitched a velvet rope and said, “First turn on the right.” She climbed the stairs to booming music and a pounding heart.

The door was closed - disappointment stirred in her. She’d expected the door to be open - all she wanted was a peek. Her curiosity immobilized her - she’d never seen someone as famous as Leonardo in person. She noticed the little camera above the door then there was a metallic clack as the door was pulled open - she could only gape at Leonardo in the flesh.

What did he see? A young creature caught in the spill of light. Pale blue eyes, a fragile neck, an ill fitting white cheerleader uniform, bagging slightly where there wasn’t enough breast or hip to fill it, white sneakers like hooves below narrow ankles. A gleaming yellow crown of hair wrapped an upturned face. Slender wrists, long fingers. He saw her startle. He saw fear and then something in her gaze flared like bared teeth. Defiance. He didn’t recognize her as a child. He wouldn’t expect to see a child here. He’d been expecting Alissa and radiated a perceptible and impatient hunger.

What did Leigh see? A surprisingly tall man, in dark gray slacks, a black t-shirt and a matching dark gray jacket. A fine gold chain hung from his neck and there was a diamond earring in one ear - blonde hair barbered precisely and a slight stubble of beard framed that familiar face pin-pricked with freckles up close. His complexion was tan but fair and his eyes were deep pools of turquoise. He was flat-out beautiful but looked older than on screen and right now his eye lids seemed heavy and his posture made her think of an alert animal.

She saw him see her, sensing how the sight of her arrested him. “Who are you?” he said. Then Alissa was coming up the stairs, she had on a crimson cheerleader uniform which fit her like her own skin. Leigh slid away, along the wall, and Leonardo followed, getting slightly ahead.

There was laughter and music coming from the room “Where’s Leo?” someone shouted.

She’d been foolish to think she could just observe the party. A silly child, all dressed up.

“Who are you?” he asked again. Helplessly, she looked at Alissa, who appeared to be both angry and trying to squelch the giggles. She couldn’t admit her name - say who she was and why she was here, not when she was dressed up like this and he was looking at her that way. There was no answer.

“She’s just a kid,” Alissa said, taking Leonardo’s arm. “She’s not supposed to be here.” she said, as she glanced at Leigh and twisted her head to signal “GO.” He didn’t shake her off, but he didn’t respond to her touch, either. He was still looking at Leigh. Alissa was looking at her, too, he couldn’t see that Alissa was biting her lip, eyes full of mirth.

Their faces cornered her like hounds surrounding a fox. “Shall we?” Alissa said, after a moment, her voice was rising. He yielded, and started to follow. Leigh pressed back against the wall and turned her face away as he passed, she caught the smell of his cologne and some other fragrance, slightly bitter. She wasn’t used to strange men examining her and her skin seemed to prickle. As he moved away, his step slowed. She knew he was willing her to look up into his face, but she wouldn’t.

“She’s just a kid,” Alissa said again. “Leigh, go home.”
“Leigh,” he repeated.

Still she didn’t look up, not until Leonardo and Alissa had finally closed the door. Leigh darted down the stairs and out of the club. There was a crowd now and what looked like paparazzi - but no one took notice of her as she moved partway down the block and began to pace, and chew a fingernail, while waiting for her Uber.

I never dreamt
Like most people do;
Lived my life
A minute at a time
Come what may
My stride was wide
As my path was narrow
Never straying
From what I believed
To be my highway
To the doorman
In the sky;
And then one night
I slept;
Woke up in a world
Not alone;
She was there
The cliché's came
One after another,
Too good to be true
Not bad enough to be not;
She was the sweetest
Dream I ever dreamt;
Never wanted to wake
From this bliss ever again;
I can't wait to sleep forever...
© okpoet

school girl skirt
doorman
taste of corona in a coffee mug
sitting by the east river
red wine
kisses
drunk kissing
laughing
the beatles
dancing
harsh sunlight
wooden floor
no food in the fridge
only two coffee mugs
and a few beers.

Sometimes I tell myself that I am normal.
Sometimes I tell myself that I am not.
Sometimes I could drown within the contents of that needle.
I wonder at what time do things work out
I wonder how many hits or how many highs
Could help me arrive to the place of no doubt.
That is my destination, but traveling never seems to cease.
The ceiling over my resting place
Will tell you secrets, if you just remember to say, "please."
Because so often in this world, we just take
We take from whatever is there, when there's nothing even to give.
We have assuredly erased the word "keepsake"
So if you do remember to ask before you assume
If you know that good things come to those who wait
Go with a question and ask the ceiling in my room.
Ask it for the needle or the tears on my pillow
But brace yourself, "Ignorance is bliss."
Some secrets can pierce, like an arrow.
Ask the ceiling for me, if you would
Because I should like to know about myself
All the things I never understood.
My ceiling has seen me, no doubt
The naked me, in the purest sense,
That will ever come about.
Sometimes I wonder just what it would say
"Oh that girl? She lies awake every night.
The edges of her mind have begun to fray."
Or maybe something quite different,
Maybe something like, "Sometimes,
She is very quite brilliant."
I wonder if it might speak with a british voice
For I imagine it does, but watch, it's probably harsh
It probably has no choice.
Sometimes I act like the ceiling cannot speak
Or other times I simply know it can't
But when I believe it can, it makes my knees weak.
But please, I beg of you, If you can
Tell my ceiling to hide the needle
Because my skin is tired of being the doorman
For my brain, my skin would rather be
Wholesome and healed,
The bodyguard to protect my immunity.
And If you happen to get the chance
Throw a wink at mirror
For it never gets more than a glance.
Don't bother to go to my room at all
If you can save yourself the trouble
There's nothing there at all.
The ceiling won't talk.
The pillow has no tears.
There is no needle.
There is no room.
In fact, there is no "she."
Only sometimes,
In my mind,
Are there even words
To define me.

Briefly entranced
by a swish of hips
as they sashay past a doorman,
he takes a breath, approaches
and asks to get through.

"Sorry sir," the tall man says,
"your purchasing record suggests
"that you dislike jazz.
"I think you'd better move along."

Of course, of course,
what was he thinking?
A narrow escape, that.
And on home through the empty streets he goes,
Untroubled by the wide wild sounds,
the horns and pianos,
the reckless freeform blast and chatter
that might ruthlessly have smashed through
his carefully constructed identity.

Safe at home,
his television allows him to watch
a comedy he has seen thirteen times before
and so must really love.

The garden meeting adjourned and moved...
Management abruptly cleared the premises,
Canceled return visits,
Speculations inconveniently disrupted,
Wonder-rousings interrupted...
We found ourselves somehow
Standing on the Great Outside.

No wistful entreatments heard He,
The Grand Proprietor,
In spite of our new knowledges,
Our now-wise forays philosophical,
Our sophisticated posturing;
He seemed without empathy
In His Garden's sudden closure,
In our ejection and dismissal.

Stumblers of unexpected freedom,
Following a shadowed river
Narrowing down into a Valley,
Darkening down into a pinprick end,
We gaze behind, ahead, behind,
To see, high sword gleaming,
The standing doorman, glowering.

Eden, receding from our view,
Serpent joins us as we walk,
"Where were we when we left our talk?"
His lowered voice renews.
We notice now, the air is chill
As an endless sun slips down
Behind a darkening hill.

London England*


I am old now
old and tired the music Hall is fading
old clowns in baggy pants don't seem funny anymore.
The flickering silver light of the cinema
was growing brighter almost everyday.
My days are over playing for Victoria  Empress of Britain .
My whole life vanished like it never happened so meaningless.

I am alone never married, the stage is a wife I suppose.
No wife to turn to  I turn to the bottle
she puts me to sleep numbs my soul.
Old Jack the doorman at the Gaiety in London.
He lets me in for free every night to watch the Music Hall artist.
There not like you were sir --he still calls me sir.

A  juggler, a singer,a magician,a comedian, and showgirls.
And  oh yes A ballet dancer.she is so young and beautiful
I think I come here just to see her.
If I had not found the bouquet of flowers
in the entrance, she would be dead now.
I watched her dance so talented like an Angel in flight
on gossamer wings.I am far too old for her of course
but I cannot help but be drawn to her outstanding talent.
And her beauty if truth be known.

I take the flowers to her dressing room and knock on the door.
There is a moan from inside a low painful moan.
I take a deep breath and open the door
she is laying on the floor an empty vial of something  
I had seen this before the stage carries many dark secrets.
I found a box of salt and poured it into a glass of water
then poured it down her throat
At first, I thought I was too late.
then the salts caused her to throw up the poison.

She lay on the sofa and slept I never left her side.
After a few hours, she said I cannot move my legs
I carried her to my old room and placed her in bed.
I no longer can dance she cried my legs are paralyzed she cried.

I made her tea and a sandwich.
We are a great pair you andI.
A dancer who cant dance
and a comedian whocant make people laugh.

There was no money for a doctor
but I had her trying to walk every day.
After, a few months she walked again
Slowly at first then stronger day by day.
I brought out her dance outfit ballet shoes.

Old Jack let us in to use the Gaiety stage as her dance floor.
I felt so ashamed that I was so in love with her.
But I think in the chest of every comedian
lies a fragile tender heart that is so easily bruised.

A few weeks later she was dancing again
and then moved away to follow her career.
I was desolate
I returned to the bottle.
Then a catalysmic event brought us together
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo.
On the 4th of August 1914,
Great Britain declared war on Germany.

A group of performers were chosen
to form an entertainment group for the troops.
She was amongst them
and refused to participate if they did not select me.
Under duress, they agreed and the first performance was in London.

I went on and gave the performance of my life.
The soldiers roared in laughter
my heart filled to the brim with happiness.
I then watched from the wings as she danced so beautifully
My eyes were wet with both happiness and sadness so bittersweet.
Around and around she would pirouette.
Like a dream-like a beautiful dream.

My mind was  spinning in harmony with her movements.
if only I was twenty-five again.
if only I could have been with her.
if only I did not love her
quiet so much.
....if only .....if only.

The crowd roared for her a complete standing ovation
they were almost the last words I would hear.
As I clutched my breast
and fell onto the floor she rushed to me
and kissed me on the head
stay with me, stay with me
I love you so much she whispered.

But I slipped quietly into the dark unknown
happy and content to go there.
I finally knew
she had loved me as far as it is possible
given the circumstances that is.

Most shared nights start with blissful lies told to the doorman. You’re going to a fancy party; you’ll probably sit next to someone famous. Lean on perfectly polished bannisters down golden stairs.

Party dresses attend cocktail parties and you’re the tux. She rests her hand. Tails and all like a penguin. Don’t they mate for life?

Laughing down gum stuck pavement. Her heel caught in the sidewalk, fractured. But you got to carry her letting fingers find homes in the places she bends.

You told the doorman another lie.