We Didn't Mean to Spray the Car

Orion rested where my eyes stopped,

By the street-

Waiting for the words,

“This is mine.”

Saying the words,

“This is mine.”

This is mine

This is mine-

Looking for the words,

This is mine.

Printed on the side of the street,

This is mine,

and in stenciled charming purgatory-

In stink-

We smell the evidence of obvious wasted time-

We-

Who drink to the mantra:

This is mine.

This is mine.

This is mine.

This is mine.

Bienvenue

Cheers from the avenue,

“BIENVENUE”

There are stop like that we run through,

Reciting the mantra, “BE HERE.”

BE HERE NOW

With vigor-

And rigid lines set in sort soap stone,

Carved by the phallic old man with his pompous hat askew.

Ne’er prepared.

The allegory of Man, Wife, Child. Child, and War.

This two-a-day dose of invention-

Where my simple shoulders make you my pimp,

and this face-

Pockmarked and beautiful becomes Woman,

Taken atop the trapeze stand.

And residing holy, here-

In this haus of tool,

Rotting wood and broken lipstick stains,

This agent of agency,

In Black tie, corduroy and lace.

Masturbating in the mirror with his eyes closed,

And a pencil.

BIENVENUE.

Sweet Prophet

When, in the dawning of the wholesome shift,
& when we walk along the country road,
Will you find yourself alone?

Among me and the Magi-

Oh, Moses of the modern midnight,
Moses on the mount-
Fear the destiny of freed man,
Left in the hands of freed men.

We- who walk through the pillared gates,
More mauve than pearly white,
Join hands with he creatures of habit,
Those who have so aptly waited in vain-

Oh, lost Israel in the hills of highway nine.

Do not stand in the shadow of you,
or Her.
or Them, if they are in the mind of he who will not enter,
and he who preaches and does not know.

Tho-

Sweet prophet.
I urge you to go.
And, in the crook of your arm, maintain the marks of our humble entwinement,
and, walk the streets where we once found peace.
Oh, Moses-
wait with the sparrows where we will never go,
in the Heavens we will never know.

Fetishism of the Authentic

Rocked to sleep by some ambient noise, with a classic, indiscernible rhythm, his head sways and he falls back. He allows his body to bounce a few volatile times on the cushions behind him, he calls, “Princess…”

*

            I would have done it, too. A tiny shot in the crook of the arm and it’s like the best sex you could ever imagine. If you are in real deep, I hear it’s even better than that. The fast life moves slower than you’d think, and here we are. Thinking- or waiting too passively to accomplish anything notable, but that’s all we want- maybe one day the writing scrawled in a hurried hand on the bathroom stall doors will make it to the main stage- scoring a spread in the New Yorker, or some Canadian anarchist rag. I’ve always heard, “my word is my bond,” but when will someone buy into that, or perhaps listen to me for once. A leap of faith for the pedestrian.

            The pedestrian- because when you think about it, that’s all the little ants are that walk around carrying three times their own body weight to some mound of dirt, set in succinct, fairly unreasonable lines of intent. Walking to work, to the train, car or coffee shop. Staring at the screens and diverting gazes away from fellow pedestrians, their peers. With all respect paid, they are our peers and we ignore them. Bumping shoulders with a cringe.

*

            On good days, we’re sitting on the stoop, with the people and the birds. They pick at the scraps, feeding indiscriminately without a thought in their minds but to consume enough to carry them through to the next day, the people and the birds. No one notices the six of us, melting into the steps of someone else’s abode, pretending our backs are flush against some primitive adobe structure, set in some far away primitive mountain slant.

            It is a hot day and we wait, like everyone else. But, instead of passively moving through nothing as the flowing lousy public does, we wait and watch the masses move. Passive, perhaps in its own right, but with the crystalline beads of sweat moving in swift streams from our hairline to the crested drip at our chins, we productively conserve. Pretending we’re not suffering like everything else in the heat of the day and in the responsibility for moving to then next spot, to work, the car or the coffee shop. We don’t have enough money to buy a glass of water, let alone a five-dollar coffee.  There is a tin can in front of my feet that I have been tapping without much vigilance for the past couple of hours, in a meager attempt to get some lukewarm coinage from a tepid passerby, for the tepid traveler I look like.

            James and I had been walking for a couple of day before Cath, Kevin and Josh showed up in the city. My place was down South Huntington, if you turn by the gas station on route nine, but I haven’t paid the landlord bitch for a couple of months. The charm my mother taught me, in the guise of politeness, seems to only work when you don’t owe someone a couple thousand, so we split.

Rose, a friend, had asked the two of us to jump in on her business plan. Some art collective they were starting down in Southie. They gutted one of the warehouses and came across some blind funding to pump the meat into the socialist-cult-commune artists’ residence Rose has been fighting for since her underappreciated stint at Mass Art with my brother. I had been thinking about it.

We decided on the streets that buzz with buses, the hum of some motorized bike, or the rhythmic peddles of the hipsters’ horse. The paved carpets of the private turned public, a new gallery display with whitewashed walls. I would call the exhibit; “Fluxus of Post-Modern Shit in Concrete” with no subjects but the omnipotent subjective data concerning the “real” us with our “real” friends in “real” time. Little ants on little devices, all moving in the opposite direction, going to the same nowhere place. That was my proposal for Rose. She laughed at me, kindly I’m sure, and told me I was an idealist. James and I decided to cop out and just join in later during an opening for some free wine and cheese.

*

            Someone dropped a Dunkin Donuts gift card near a bus stop sometime before we stumbled under the black metal overhang. That’s a paradox or something. We grabbed it and ran with a little more paranoia in our step them was probably necessary, given it was mid-afternoon and everyone looked sweaty and bored. It had been a couple of days since we had had a cup of coffee and when your mouth waters in anticipation for their corporate, slightly burned beans- you deserve a hot chalice or two. There was enough on the card to get us all something to put in our stomachs. Like every other day of our years, we sat and watched everyone else go about what needed to get done. Against the John Hancock building, his metal skeleton elegantly exposed with blackened, one-way mirror glass, making a smooth heated backrest. Forty-two stories of business meetings and phone calls to China.

*

            The cats still living at my place were throwing a party. While the six of us sat in a sort of authorial daze, with our own narration of the system in front of us, sipping coffee in silence- I turned around and Pat, a cat, was sitting next to James who was next to me. Without my prompting him, he spilled what was sheltered in our monologues:

“I can’t imagine where we will end up.”

I kissed him in greeting on his painted cheek. Cath passed him her last sips of coffee and asked about the large cart parked beside us. Pat had just started his own “gallery” as he proudly looked at the collection of ceramics, t-shirt designs and weirdly cut canvases with his trademark, “The Forty and the Butt: a twist on the children’s story,” painted on them. If you asked him what children’s story, he would just wheel himself away because there was no children’s story- it was just a soon-to-be sensation, so he says. We laughed, he didn’t. He handed Cath a cup from the cart that she had gotten up to dote on, and invited us to the party. “It’s your going away digs, Shan.” Smiling at me while he unlocked his cart’s wheels.

            I hadn’t intended on leaving. I loved our place, where the porch swung arbitrarily in the slight wind would wave our way, and the kitchen had the distinct stink of the compost by the back door. My cat was still there, and I had heard from Kevin who had been crashing there before Cath and Josh showed up, that Gerry the puss had somehow gotten a hold of Eliot’s favorite frog.

I first met Eliot in San Francisco, originally a friend of my brother’s from school. He was a film student, quiet and painfully awkward and even though we had spent a week together in one of the most exciting cities in America, whenever he looked at me or brought himself to speak it looked as though he was on the verge of puking. Sweat would bead on his temples in slow moving tension. His eyes would redden and beg for mercy. Usually all he would urk out was a formal, “Hello,” and he would regularly orbit around me, obeying the path of some anti-femme force field. I mean, I guess, but we had been living together for the past four years, having assumed my brothers room after he left for Alaska for a fellowship and he decided to never come back. I had been fucking Pat at the time, and it seemed appropriate.

We decided to go down South Huntington for the night and send ourselves off.

            Pat greeted us at the front door when we rang. Naked. We were late for the party, but he had put enough beers aside for us, knowing we’d show up. He always knew I would come back. Four flights up and there were kids in a chaotic file, passively trying to get in the door, to the fridge or the couch. Something- they looked excited, enough. James leaned forward towards my ear, “Ants,” he whispered and laughed. He pushed a baggie into my hand and put one in his mouth. His was brown and mine was white. We’d been broke, together, for about a year and half now. Not the melodramatic, adolescent broke- the adult broke. Like if we had any assets, we would have filed for bankruptcy about nine months ago. And he had a problem. I wasn’t supposed to support it, but damn, he’s a big kid. He knew the reality of my situation, in the nineteen years I’ve been on in this city, the nineteen years of life I’ve breathed any amount of air- nineteen people I knew died of drug overdose, violence, or accidents- respectfully. We played when we could, but with the last name on the list- Hannah- I knew I couldn’t get back in that, too personal, too hard, too fast, to hurt.  But, hey…

            *

            We were rocked to sleep by this ambient noise. Its classic, indiscernible rhythm taking James away from me- his head swaying and he falls back. He allows his body to bounce a few volatile times on the cushions behind him, he calls, “Princess…” There is a flame that dwindles, but remains lit.

Ruler

In the rapture of you, and words and sound,

I have found something that has been missing.

And in essence, your presence has turned on what was lost,

And at what cost as we speak of travesties and trivialities.

In some dormant want, there is music,

And there is joy.

Coming as only some boy, we play.

And you understood before my finger could lay claim,

You knew before my I laid my head down,

That these were the last words.

The Holy Ghost hath returned in some juvenile moment of redemptive nothing.

And, I ask so naively for an explanation to hold on to,

But is not heeded, not needed or necessary.

We have reached some thing, some personal salvation in the vain absence of you.

Of him.

Of this, and that nativity.

An incessant ringing in my ears, we have struck gold,

A life on hold, that which has found the right.

In awe I am of you.

Filing away in unconscious need.

And throwing ourselves into this, into demise so pure.

Hollowed eyes in the company of few,

Too perfect to corrupt you.

Too much to allow you, we have reached the breach of contract,

In this inconsequential contact,

Of eyes and hands and hearts.

An unreachable peak,

Something amasses from dirt-

From your hands that touch, that grace.

In that coherent thought, I beg for that which I am not above.

As the grace of this washes over,

And over,

And over.

And over and over.

April Fools

You are but a projection of me,

As to say, one is gone.

With some divine right, in exile from Eden,

We choose to write the words of back-washed relief.

In some simultaneous reflection of the naïve light through cloud shot skies-

We move to the sound of a bell,

The call for the next original line.

And if by some projection of you,

On some white-washed wall,

We find some post-modern debt- paying forward our subject,

And counting our loses,

Then, perhaps, in your worthy epilogue we find sense,

Because ‘we’ is me, and ‘you’ never were.

On display, in the window by the bay,

We draw the maps, etched in plaster,

One road to another, from beginning to no end,

In one swift unconscious move towards a meeting point,

By an apple tree,

We see that there is no Me.

The causality of the non-art no movement,

Like the hole we fell down once-

To the place I want you in there with me and perhaps, in the nude.

Because the non-me chooses to revolt in the name of absence.

I am but some poorly constructed contour,

Hung on the wall of your projection,

Your on going film of glory and good intentions,

We find pedistals for the who needs both a home and a box,

Something transient, on the road that we mapped,

To the harbor, to Spain.

And, we will run into the law abiding fantasy marked as freedom,

Marketed to who?

Habitually buying the tickets to fortune.

Vying for fame, to make a name for yourself,

When you can’t even recall that which you were given,

Your name up in lights,

Headlining: POVERTY and the BLUE COLLAR MIDDLE CLASS.

We find ourselves symptoms.

Bed Stuy Free of Charge

Sitting while the ladies walk and congeal into predetermined clusters of talk. Banter back-and-forth with an old tinge of jazz and wrapped in rap, a modern imbalance of nostalgia and real time. A perch like the pigeons, which allows for the violation of some common understanding, urging one not to stare nor inquire- seated and defiant in a shameless guise- but only a white girl from the Boston sub-urban sector in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. Immobile in an alien world, ass imprinted with a seven-minute cigarette break on the grated escape.

Two stories up the white cinder-block building, aged with something akin to the beach-chair crew- an elderly collective of eight regulars, the dark, male senior participants who rest daily in their beach recliners playing with vices, hounds as they name themselves, parked at the base of the building on Throop. Wrinkled, beer stained and darker with age, made simply more beautiful by virtue of interest- both building and man, some edifying paradigm of the urban design. A rot-iron pedestal, rusting and probably ineffective at this point, a structure with intent to save lives, or used to drop your trash into the miniscule and already cracked trash-cans below- some gravity promoted basketball variation. It is the escape from a stuffy apartment when Matt is cooking chicken as though he were on television, or Josh is writing and needs peace, or when the guest needs a cigarette to reflect. It is an excuse to mask the Brooklyn o-zone and mistake it for fresh air, and it is an excuse to stare at the habitat so foreign to a suburban visitor- or a child whose ignorance’s are immediately displayed and marked on her forehead, intensified with every expression of inquiry.

**

Seated on the C-line en route to the apartment from Manhattan with a backpack and a sleeping bag in tow, a visitor waits apprehensively for the Kingston-Throop stop, never quite sure whether if she took the right train. Eyes wander, but this is not the Boston she grew up with, it is New York and eye contact is more of a violation than a passive interaction and the unspoken rule says, “back the fuck off,” and aggressively returns glares. It is not an assumption, or a grand exaggeration of the truth from the perspective of a foreigner, or the Bostonian- this is the reality, because she will keep doing it unintentionally until someone barks. Saved by the bell and the stop is announced, the train moves to a halt and everyone waiting files off.

Street level and things are weird. It is ten o’clock p.m. and there are taxis that look like cop cars wait on corners where groups of people gather and exchange hands, cigarettes or looks. The visitor stops to light a cigarette and makes a phone call to her destination, they tell her to not walk on the left side of Throop on the way down to the apartment. Saturday Night Fever blasts the bass from ‘souped’ up tin-can cars and fuzz alarms scream, careening around corners to attend to something. As she walks, condoms are dropped on the sidewalk to make a bread crumb trail to any door on the block and voices from dark stoops ask for a butt, or a light, or some warm coinage from the pockets of a poor college student- impoverished compared to what, and she feels the slap on her own hand.

 It was never Kansas, but where ever we are is not Manhattan, it is not Boston, or Needham, or a cozy campus in Western Massachusetts.  

A block away from the mock-marble apartment building, a corner store advertises basic junk food, cigarettes, and eggs. The foreigner goes inside and puts her dinner on the counter. The cashier laughs while he is ringing up a buck fifty, “You just move here, girl?” Laughter from both parties- but, no, just visiting friends. Laughter from his side, because she is serious, “Yeah, I thought so. Sweetness, you should run on home-“ Handing over the bag of chips, the door, the night and the absence of the overly grimy florescent lighting of the shop swallowed the ‘Sweetness’ into the streets of an unknown walk. A nighttime world of a neighborhood tainted by movie scenes of gang boys with their cuts and colors and painted street-crawlers. Whether or not this is a reality, the apartment sounded ideal, and she heeded the clerk’s advice as best she could- Boston was a far way away.

Five-fifty Throop Street is not much of a ‘hood’ by cliché definition, but for the visitor’s hosts, this was a far cry from the Jewish haven of the Greater Boston suburbs. A place rich in mural graffiti art, a Biggie memorial down the way, and a series of cracked out neighbors. It is a place for rich observation for those who hail from out of town, but it is a realm in which one does not poke their oblivious and curious heads into other peoples’ business. Staring is not caring, and it should be assumed that the bark not worse than the bite, the assumption should always be equivalence and curiosity will kill the cat who looses his head.

But there is a place where the view is removed enough to go unnoticed, a respite amidst the chaotic world inside a cramped, low-rent apartment and the sidewalk life. The fire escape, only a window lift and curtain shift away. Cold and rusted and intimate, black and blue to such a point that it blends into the nighttime, the smoky air. The fire escape, where seven minutes of burning time allows for the perpetuation of some romantic and grungy view of the city, the neighborhood, our lives- allowing such a screen for the display of the literal ebbs and flows of the human behavior. The nighttime is unsolved, it is intensified and loud- fast paced and hazy with cars moving too fast and dominated by the male element. We hear stories that ward of gentrification and paint an awful picture, however filled with life the moment may really be; but in the opposing twelve hours- in the daylight, so familiar and charming, women collect with their children after church on the Sunday morning stoop steps, dog walkers and shop keepers welcome the business day or some glaring city sun. The sound is different, the light, the time and the voice are different and from the looming catwalk of ethereal power, or maybe more humbly a sanctuary for the foreigner, the lonely, the view of the real-life ‘show’ is the most beautiful performance in New York. Free of charge. Protected from the previously established and unalterable notions we have- she had- safe from the shit and the ash and the hazardous bikes on the sidewalks, there is a trip to be had in being the voyeur. An unadulterated joy in peeking in on the everything, anonymously- the escape is the perpetuation of all urban attributes, and it ignites something in the self-alienated foreigner. It ignites something in the feel of the borough, the neighborhood, the community and there is emotion, and there is sight beyond that which we keep to ourselves on the subway.

**

The same clerk walks back to his apartment while the visitor smokes with one of her hosts a couple of stories up. By chance, while several cars pass and other pedestrians knock shoulders, he looks up and looks until he recognizes her face. He laughs, nods and proceeds, shaking his head while he walks, well aware of the fact that the three of them had shared a rare moment of the mutual violation of an intimate look in. One, a man in meditation following a day of hard work, on his feet and ringing up useless and seemingly essential trinkets of processed crap. The other, a long separated pair of friends, reconnecting in their private space, hanging above the most public of streets- but eyes met, the moment was enjoyed and the example was set. This was the perch of a passive observer, for the creative mind too interested in everyone else’s. 

In the morning, the one-night veteran meets the clerk at the corner store to buy pancake mix and a carton of eggs. He chuckles and calls her champ as she recounts watching the across the street neighbor from the fire escape putting a cat in a trash can, which he promptly brought back into his apartment building. He says he’s seen if before and raps an eloquent anecdote about him and his baby daughter during their nightly moments of fresh air, together, on their fire escape. Him, holding her, cherishing her and simultaneously watching a series of cop cars running after a fleeing buddy, or watching subtle narcotic exchanges from the limbs of a concrete tree, or singing her to sleep while the homeless jazz-rat plays his saxophone on the streets below when he thinks no one else is listening. Nothing but a jovial look and tears in his eyes, the clerk sends her off, back to her perch, telling her to enjoy the idea of being above violation or fear, suspended above the crime or the nightly vexations and temptations. “Run on home, girl, Boston misses you.”