I
This reality show deafens the nerves.
Numb devices generate the blinding bells,
Pistons aflame, these exotic auctioneers
Jar me in their processed velocity.
The pace they travel.
I’ve got to get my cupcakes for the crowds
We hesitated to inform all afternoon.
They wait for us to get our act together,
But I’ve got nothing to instruct me.
The minutes stomp and I only think of canning
Winter’s tomato stock. “Enough to last the year.”
Bakery smells pillowing the breeze.
On the set of a choreographed street-scene
I am wide-angled into comfortable streets,
Steel lamps shadow me like an assassin’s scope,
Fronting windows of cake.
I wash my hands.
A jaundiced reflection in bakery glass
Is only a poor boy staring up at you with thin fingers
Outstretched and filthy and thinly finally real.
His mother beside him, old, already destroyed
All ready to cannibalize. A lifeline marauded,
Made out in tomato cans and soup kitchens
Decorated with greasy lard lick speckling,
Ten pennies tossed in the air, deflectors.
She is there where you’re going.
The street like the mother-hen of all urchins,
Gang apart, walking the plank stepping over
No one in particular’s furniture,
Over concrete trash and silk stockings,
Balled up at the foot of the bed.
I’ve seen this scene before in some streetlight
Advertisement for evicted childhood.
Intimate, inanimate lighting,
Klieg-like in a cartoon bubble,
Sepia-toned. A cradle of pictures we loved
But rocked away from us
And now I’m lost in the bubble,
Disorganized branches tangling off in
Wisely designed directions
That never occurred to me.
I could barely keep my eyes open, horizontally,
Inclined on dreamtimes deep couch.
They closed like curtains on me,
Thick maroon columns, velveteen, frosted,
The dust running their channels
Like a thousand feudal lords
Gearing up for a fight.
The lamp heat presses on me from below
Grabs at my under-skin. Lit from below,
Lugosi hollowed-out his performance;
screened gumshoes and wishy-washy dames
and Peter Lorre’s dinner jacket lingering, smoking.
Bela’s cue ball sockets that he had to look out at
Those worn pajamas, be seen in those forever.
The old man walks by with a brush,
A flashlight that kept me awake,
Beacon for my derivative dreams.
II
Wasted old man! Why
Keep showing up uninvited when
I never saw the point of you in the first place?
You’re stationed here as the resident
tennis pro but your rook is gone,
You’ve gone blind and that gives you no wisdom
That I can see.
The plug that prevents runoff.
I saw your story in half.
You taught upstate in tweed,
Perennially pacing a leafy quad,
The northeast chill decomposing an August’s wrath.
Your chalk dismissed and the world
Is a Friday afternoon at five in the pastoral fall.
All Iberian ham slices and melon balls,
20-year old vinegars from Modena, artichokes
Frying by the wayside in incorrect oils.
And the misfortune of others tastes the same.
Take from it, to share has nothing for you;
To get the blood boiling, boil away anything
Approaching convenience. Reduce
the unfamiliar elements, the senses smarting
infused with thyme and other
more precious aromatics that I never named.
We didn’t exactly have a family night of it.
More a ruckus chorus, beds in different rooms.
We don’t need those here do we now?
And I know you’re reaching impatience
Like a railway station coming into focus.
The periphery is where the attendant thought occurs,
The knowledge of this, “It’s about to happen.”
We’ll get there soon enough, the day
Not long ago when answers were there
For the taking like low-hanging fruit.
But we never harvested and can’t now.
“We haven’t satchels or proper shoes.”
Though there are those who head out
To the fields with neither and come back
Apple-red in the face in the sky wide autumn
Hoping to peel and core.
But he said that, I didn’t say it
And can’t take the credit now
Not for apples I didn’t pick or mash, boil and core.
Even if I made it mine, part of my crosswords.
It’s in my fancy gallery near the all-night diner
We used to eat rye toast in, checker-boarded
Foyer. Afterwards, we crashed like indices onto 10th Avenue.
III
A talk show begins and ends on a day spent indoors.
The credits slip down working like thick polenta.
It just became a part of my own personal abyss
Sunk in some diabetic cashiers till.
Back-lit lithographs that blemish the perfection.
Can it ever be so precise again?
I’ll see it again. I know that gallery. That diner
We stopped for the imperfect midnight omelet
Stuffed with mushroom caps.
I’ll show you how it was once pure when I had it.
I never did anything with it,
and it was purer still when I lost it,
Its’ sounds, familiar rounds; the road bends to the left
In the special photo that entranced you.
See the sphere teeter like a bowl
And the artist said simply:
“It is enough and too much
See if he gets it”
The courtier went back to the Vatican on horseback
And stopped for lunch and ate with simple peasans.
The landscape was littered with pilgrim’s chips,
Pebbles left on jaundiced monuments as a tithe.
Not a bad rate of return for ghost-investing gods.
They were people of the hills,
Never to see the sea or dream of it.
The courtier enjoyed their clothing and wanted nothing of it.
Further west, it was a fish day at the market.
The mongers with relish shelled
Their tournaments about like tinsel.
Gold-leaf banners hung in the arcade, flapping
Like gull-wings in the sea-swept mistrals.
And the Salon de Gusto went on in the square
The old men in the square went on smoking in red parades,
Playing chess with teenagers that weren’t theirs.
Their hideous tobacco charming the pants off of people.
Sometimes they let themselves win.
“Don’t worry we’ll get there”
Get told it’s a journey
Enough times and you might even
Begin to disbelieve the veracity of cliché,
Wage war against it, like the British.
They’re the ones with the bigger guns
These days though they pump it like moisturizer
Onto their palms and slip their socks on with it,
Thumbnail’s clicking on leather wheels.
This is how a day is supposed to end.
Sleeping in the city, I contain foraging dreams, farms
That fester and root their delicious tangles
Deep into the very earth-root I soak in.
Basidiomycetes.
I have no idea where they sprout,
They fume the tunnels. Electric cords punctured
By a clothespin, sparkling bits, glass that pins my utensils
Up against the steel and glass fences
I once coveted. But now those dreams
May as well be charcoal chips on a forgotten hearth.
We found a hearth once in the Maine-woods
Grill-plates tossed and torn, belly-flesh remnants
Rendered into balls of wax. I smell wood.
And I pass the boy and his mother, the old man;
A couple caught in the rain.
We were taller than the entire street on wheels.
The hundred former delusions that were me. These hockey
Mockers, all rough gloves and baseball caps, pucks and sticks.
It may be delusions on his part, the blinking old man.
I rarely take responsibility for non-actions
Only those things I thought I could do.
I’ve never acted, and the stage I imagined
Was as empty as that black box we jaunted to once.
We felt ourselves so avant-garde.
Another stage-managed affair where the female lead
Refused to leave her dressing room until the lamplighters
Took their place above and angled projections
A bit closer towards her duct-lined cue.
Waving her arms about like a defanged turnstile
She said, “This is where the sun shall shine.”
It’s not all the same scene.
Here are street-lamps, urban oak wands
Rooted and wired into the concrete infrastructure
As sure as a nano animating our waking scenes.
Professional, experienced like the most forgotten stage hands.
The credits roll by like a stuck creek
And we want to change the channel.
We’ve never seen those names and it’s simply not our fault.
It’s still only 4 o’clock and we’re almost never late.
The sun drenched windows soak up the Hudson light,
And the pane is just another flower root
Of the concrete soil, budding.
Coming home at sunset from a day in the country,
A giant orange greeted us on 57th street, furry, pot-holed,
A mirror of the wide street.
That merry warrior has seen all the lives in supple stars,
An album neither fading nor gray, we strain our ears
to hear a foreign soundtrack’s rhythms
another room’s fading dimensions.
And hear our parchment prejudices
Pressed between two fingers, conspicuous.
Bone to bone, one finger always wins that battle
And the children are put to bed a little sadder.
I slept on vinyl chairs, my face stuck to plastic memories,
Not wanting to peel away slow saliva histories.
Rather live here in this forever sofa of the soul.
We cannot see organisms breathe through gills.
A bioluminescent paralyzes a weeknight.
In subway channels they hoard their filmy air,
Sucking at our channel-surfing sensibilities, agog.
The cities organs’ pump and skewer steam through grates,
steam flushes away yesterday evenings’ news
In a rinse cycle.
Softly now, we’re slowing down.
This escalator malfunctions all the time. Stopping,
Starting, rising again, like a delayed attraction.
But only on this stretch of 14th street,
Where the crud is landowner extraordinaire,
A mad developer ponders his statutes.
Upstairs the crazies gather all alit,
A giant forever carnival complete
With lips ticked off at candy apples.
Ventricular passages heaving with magnificent energy,
Heat and steam a rocket propellant,
Warm air plunging the hems,
The universe crackles, an old man with a guitar stares.
And again we have to confront his rot,
His lot a gang of perplexed patrons,
Defending the arts without batteries,
Stepping out of roomy histories,
Never enough space to move around, “in there.”
And what’s going in there
That we haven’t heard a peep out of this one
For ages? How do you measure
The slowly creeping television sounds?
It was always done by feel, the art and faith
Combine and conspire against us,
The young and merely curious,
No intentions other than to foster enough blood and water and air
To propel us forward toward a pure white pillow.
It’s nothing else, the ambition-less have to leave
Empty-handed, like the forever beggars staring up at you.
You’ve seen those stick fingers before
The thin reeds that catch you in a forest sprint,
Entomb your heat, tangle your limbs, stall your hunt.
And you have never been more scared than you are now.
Each created memory moves like a dime on wheels
Into the bank’s vault.
You deplete your savings like a runaway.
Insufficient kaleidoscopes triangulate your position
Like startled bankers heaving at the crush.
Depositors bequeath their mornings to reconciliations.
I’ve worked the spreadsheets and seen their projections
Stretching out like a thousand fuzzy moons lining the horizon,
Golf balls waiting to be shanked.
What more could you possibly want to bestow?
I rode the tide as far as it would take me in
And for a second I felt the seam that runs
Along the beach joining death to life, a raised stitch.
I rode the tide as far as it would take me in
To a place like the beginning of land,
The start of the road.
It doesn’t bend for miles so we have some early
Starts to prepare for, bags packed, keys jingling
In side pockets, water bottles tucked away.
We are warriors now like the sun who never complains.
Image Source: Johnathan Gill on Flickr
