http://youtu.be/RGFytiWwsRo
(this is a link to a video that I created for this poem)
Ridgewood (Where We Wait)
We take the most delicious train
to the Queens-Brooklyn border to get here
Where everything is liminal, uncertain, undecided
Even the foundation, Arbitration Rock, at the house on Onderdonk
Was buried for centuries, dug up, and chucked on another imaginary line
The streets are on a grid, and the border on a diagonal
making a stair-stepping hypotenuse of the confused
A challenge to put your time to good use
even on the oz-like yellow brick road on Stockholm
You hear Poles on the street muttering “Marnowanie mojego
czasu tutaj” through the bachata dripping
from the apartments above the stores on Fresh Pond Road

Two of the best restaurants in the boroughs
Rosa’s pizza and Zum Stammtisch mark
the north and south borders of the hill where we wait  
During the seventy-seven riots, Ridgewood
seceded from her stepsister, broke from Boswijk and Breuckelen
-
There’s racism here like carbon monoxide smoke:
at the Ridgewood Y, a man sweats through his shirt
revealing swastikas pierced through the skin underneath
and the Romanian dentist down the street drilling
says “Cred ca am pierd timpul meu aici”
through the machinery scream and burning enamel
she won’t say this if you understand what she means

Walking past the 99 cent stores and the pharmacies,
remembering that there is good, fast, and cheap
But you can only have two of them at the same time,
Crazy Loretta, under her navy knit woolen hat
in her pink sweatsuit and winter coat, smokes
her shaking hand-rolled cigarettes below the train
trestle grinning with her jaw-jutting through
her inch thick specs.  She waggles her chicken bone fingers
saying, “Hiya honey” when you walk by.
If you are brave enough to stop and talk to her,
she’ll tell you that her nephew plays
for the Texas Rangers and her daughter
is a doctor and she’ll probably give you bedbugs
She’ll tell you, fascinated, like a child: “when you squish them - the blood comes out”
She’ll tell you the same thing tomorrow - Loretta forgets.  
In her mind, a phrase like green smoke from her youth
Ich glaube, ich bin meine Zeit hier

The playgrounds are packed with children
practicing how to swear, the girls huddled
reading Twilight like the Bible, and the boys
huddled reading the girls like the Bible
A woman yells to her son to come home a third time
and mutters “Creo que estoy perdiendo mi tiempo aquí”

Buried in Machpelah Cemetary less than a mile from my house,
is the place Houdini is still staging his greatest escape
He has a wide audience.  Sometimes I think there are more dead
residents of Ridgewood than living ones.  The cemeteries stretch
the borders of the appropriate spilling into Christ
the King high school’s front lawn.  Driving Cypress Hills street,
the Manhattan skyscrapers rise looking tomb-toothed parallaxed and
blurry through ephemeral sepulchres, stones, and cement angels pointing at the sky

On one of the stones it says simply: Videor perdo temporis hic
I think we are wasting our time here.

Four walls through a first person point of view.



That’s how I saw it, laying in the center of the empty room on the bamboo floor board my daddy laid.  



Staring at the ceiling, tracing the corners with raw and broken eyes.



I would be the last person to leave this place, and rightfully so. The last person to say goodbye. The last person to lock the door, and let the house go.



Four walls through a first person point of view. I spoke to the woman inside of my bones gently, as my voice cracked for the last time.



In this room, I became a warrior. In this room, I became a woman. In this room, I became a writer. In this room, I became a wanderer.



Four walls through a first person point of view.  I carried the weight of the world with me as I walked out that door.

Pawn to E-4
Just jumped my way to some money
A favor, a ride and some of my time
I'm not sure if I’ll survive

On the way to Newark to make a pick up
What are we getting?
Don’t worry about it
Just be cool

We have to go to the pines first
Pick up a friend
Out patient
Addicted to *******

The truth comes out
And what a smack in the face
We’re getting ******
And it's going in my trunk

The two start doing lines in the back seat
As I get on to the highway
My palms sweat and thoughts go 70 miles per hours as the car goes 50
How did I get here?

I’m an escort
Escorting them to buy powdered death
To spread to the junkies and the ******
And I’m as guilty as they are

We get to a burger place
And I run to the bathroom stall
And I make a call to my friend
I tell him what's going on

I rant and rave
And plan an escape
But there's no way  out
And I'm stuck here now, ride it out

We get to the destination
We walked through the doors
Three guys pulled out their guns
And patted us down

They're clean
We were clean
I felt anything but
Covered in guilt and doused in paranoia

The money is traded for the smack
We all walk away happy and less tense
All but me, I leave with anxiety and a deep fear
So much fear

Fear of getting shot
Fear of getting caught
Fear of killing someone
Fear of myself

I let myself get here because I wanted an adventure
I continued even after I found out where we were going and why
I even took part in buying it with them
And now were off to Ridgewood
Who am I?

Come and get it
The eager hopeless junkies flock
In half an hour it’s all gone
I held the money
It was so heavy

The weight of the guilt and shame dragged me down
Down to a place I'd never been before
Where I know how disgusting I am
The thought of myself was enough to make me *****
The two guys I was with couldn’t be happier
They made their money for the day
The two of them made me apprehensive
So uneasy and unfamiliar

The one kid had sold me the key a few weeks back
And now hes asked of me the task I had completed
He had just tried this stuff yesterday
And plans to do it again, hes gone

His friend, had more experience
Heroine, coke, uppers and downers
Addicted, enslaved to substance
His manic mental state didn’t help matters either

By then my trunk was empty
And my heart was full of guilt
My mind was full of whys
But my pocket had 50 bucks in it

And now we all ride back to school
I cut class for this adventure
I went to the farthest place from my comfort zone
And now I know my limits

Never again
Never again
I'm sorry, never again
Check mate

A bird at port authority
has no wings
he just sits there
whimpering
because he has no wings

He can not fly
so he hops
for his food
and he dances a soft shoe
for his tips

A disabled american
picks him up
I will be your wings
says the vet
but, we can not fly

He hides the bird
in his coat
as he pays the fare
to go through the tunnel
into jersey

In ridgewood, rutherford,
passaic, and paterson
and other train/bus stations
the bird dances for vets of one nation
but, only one vet gets drunk on that

& when I think of your hands
nervous around a coffee cup
somewhere in Ridgewood, Queens,
I understand what it feels like
to grieve;
I know what it means to set aside
the most fragile things
like they aren't worth anything,
even when they are.

Most of the time, we don't really like to tell the story as it is. Sure, we give glimpses. But we don't really give ourselves over to the full open heart surgery. I'm giving my story up now. Do what you will with it. Judge for yourself whether I'm justified, or don't judge at all. Look for a message or read just to know me. This is our secret now, passed on through pixels and light. Do what you will with it. All I ask is that you listen.

As a kid, I think I was happy.
My memories of those times are like sepia photographs, snapshots of moments that are intact except for their color, their feeling. They are few and far between. There's a purple seesaw, a tortoise named Shelly and I think we all were happy.

My dad died when I was in 8th grade, a heart attack, but the funny thing is, I don't think that's what broke me.
It made me a little more worldly-wise, sure, but the memories of that time are all the same as the one before. There's a boat in DC, and a dancer named Rebecca and I think we all were happy.

My sophomore year, that's when the memories change. They come alive. They burn with colors so bright that I have to stick my head into a pillowcase just to breathe.
The funny thing is, I can get over my dad dying just fine, but when my coaches were mean to us, that is when I broke.

They were a little more than mean. They lied to us, told us that the judges said we'd never be good enough for a higher class, just because we were Ridgewood. They told us we were cry babies. They had us do things without teaching us how. We kept getting hurt. Someone threw up on the right side of the gym. They pulled me and my co-captain aside and told us that they had chosen us for a reason- what possible reason? i wonder now. To manipulate us?- and that we weren't doing our jobs and we needed to push our team harder.

We just wanted to be good enough. I thought maybe I could work harder. I guess that's always been one of my problems. So when asked by an administrator what on earth was going wrong...

I defended them.

When my team needed me most, I stood up for our coaches. And then they quit on us. Because they were only twenty or so? Because we were all incompatible? Because, though I never want to think this way, maybe they're just not very nice people?

Of course then I could see how badly my team was hurting. And I was supposed to be a leader? I tried to keep everyone together, to make up for what I had let happen. We organized our own performance, we got new coaches. I helped build my team into a place where people felt built up, not torn down.

I looked for closure. I sent our old coach a message, saying I wanted to understand her side of the story, telling her that she had hurt me. She said she was sorry about that. But what got me was that she never admitted that she too could've done something wrong.

The funny thing is, this all should've been easy to let go. I mean, I never have to see her, be reminded of her, ever again. People go through so, so much worse.

But it was like the moment she quit, someone opened my own personal Pandora's box.

And I know I'm not happy now.

I smile all the time, I work hard as a leader, I'm an A student, a merit scholar. But I see so much now that it hurts. Does anyone else keep thinking about how random our cute, little existence is? I see and I know what the right thing to do is, so I have to keep doing it. It's 24/7 awareness. It's not very fun. In fact, it makes me so tired, I can hardly do the things that need to get done.

I don't know if I'm okay. Maybe I'm just some imposter, looking for a little love in this lonely world and I'm actually doing fine. Maybe I'm just some lonely, smart kid.

Or maybe, inexplicably, with no right to be so,
I'm really very broken.

That's my story, the why I am the way I am at least. Thoughts on a page, my own catharsis sent out into the world. Now, at the very end of this all, I think this was more for myself, than those who will see this tomorrow. But if you have read to the end, I thank you for being interested in another broken soul.