Saturday, June 23, 2012

the bronx: a shopping list


spinach
milled flaxseed
green platanos
the name of that person who plays the saxaphone every saturday morning to the first arcs of sunshine exploring cracked sidewalk quadrants vibrating the weeds and crabgrass in between their teeth
dr bronner's tea tree soap
a 50% success rate with the paid laundry machines
a guy on the subway who isn't doing that wide-stance seating bullshit rubbing his knee against mine in some kind of weird alphamale exultation
a senior citizen in my building who doesn't think to herself why the fuck is this guy living here every time i doom her afternoon into sharing these cramped quarters with me for 45 seconds
whole wheat potato bread
bustelo (find it on sale somewhere)
a halfway decent sushi restaurant closer than 12 bus stops away
a pair of jeans that aren't fucking bedazzled or pocked with any number of stylistic piercings and medallions
any one of ten thousand gorgeous single mothers picking up their kids from the bus stop outside the projects on webster ave next to western beef
(check out western beef the sale on canned beans is thorough)
pomegranates at the korean market where they're always so cheap for some reason
turkey coldcuts for the cats cuz they likes that shit
a handful of yellow pills from an old friend
red cabbage
some kind of weird vegetable i've never cooked but should experiment on
hair stuff although i lack the most basic awareness in what i'm supposed to do with my hair
30 people at the gym who don't stake territorial ownership on three stations at the same time
a sandwich boarded aggressive WE SELL GOLD AND DIAMONDS guy on fordham road who doesn't stab me and my complete lack of gold and diamonds with weaponized business cards
pearled barley
lentils
some free time and the resolve to render them alchemy-like into a pot of soup i won't despise after two days
a new mattress not soaked with loathing
a sidewalk not spackled with weeks of moldering dollarstore trash
something else to walk beside instead of angry or disinterested parking lots
the balls to play 3-card on fordham at least once
bleach
cheap rum
a lottery ticket
papayas
cigarettes
paper towels
the energy to stay or leave
lemons

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

egress from a brightly lit land (part 2)

bonfires to
dance around
singing in your underwear with painted slang runes on skin

you sing your elders
you sing for the lost skincracked molecules of friendships
for the couple on the bus formed around their infant like a forcefield
you sing for what you admire and in the sarcastic face of what you condemn
you sing farces that make light of your insipid and self-absorbed struggle
you sing for absorption spitting cachaca into the blaze
hair whips like a bucking loa soulspanking jerky movements
you sing stupid haircuts
bonfire as panopticon
restless in the center of your own surveillance
you sing calm and croon self-destructing questions
you sing explosions back into themselves as cat claws
you sing consumptions and empty threats
sing old lives that emerge from the heat as nickelodeons animated underneath each error
sing subtitles for each wrongdoing
sing roadside secrets and grand admissions

on the edges of your society we post gypsy tent towns
permanent camp on the borders of your disgrace
we eat
we eat for the first time in a long while but in the dim lanternspace
we eat as if we remembered

there are sounds that emerge from the roads
reminding us of exile and half-confident promises and
the taste of poisoned waters warming
scars reminding

it is quieter here
with those sounds soft and distant and constant and
somehow beautiful
in the darkness the echoes conjure pleasant hallucinations or memories or shadowy dream material
and we recall crippling dangers with humor and pained laughter

we would not trade this night
for all the certainties
we left
behind

Sunday, June 17, 2012

clinic / i'm ok


killed 2(
gunman
inc
luded)

killed 2(
7 wound
ed inc
luded)

killed 2(
the rest
are exp
ected to
survive)

killed 2(
wounded
at rest 2
waiting
2
arrive at
their dest
ination
alive)

in the drag of a lost universe
between the ears and bleeding
captives of deadly ambivalent serotonin place
one foot in front of the other
and wander to the end of their halfbaked goal

there but for the grace of chemistry
and featherlight
dice go
2(wound
ed inc
lusive)
exactly
the same

our pains are identical
even as the maw between
our actions renders no
unity or sympathy
exactly as different as can be

we are both exactly irrelevant
2(wounded)
one continues to elude

you killed 2 because there is no country
for the suffering to own

one of them was you
because you never owned anything
but suffering
not even yourself

Saturday, June 16, 2012

crotona park

i am walking past titanic project buildings in the
buzzing sanctity of six
ay em bronx sidewalk fabric
soaked with miles of porous graffiti and
shrines to the lost beloved of
this forgotten city dangling

the scraped blemished gatherings of fumbled garbage preyed
upon by transient wildlife and the footprints
of commuting mothers are
early morning musical notation
deciphering dawn preludes and
the mournful painted bicycles of dead commuters
the earlybird intoxicated napping on apartment stairs
before being jostled awake by somewhat gentle superintendents who
then walk past the tattoo shop's shuttered windows arms
inert at their sides with brooms and featherweight tools

when she walked around in the morning
in panties and a long shirt teasing
the curve of her ass and the first
drops of awakening are the sounds of a camera seeing
the dawn

i become very small and insignificant
aquatic in the pond of a shrinking brain
i smell the remnants of her shoulder in dented cotton
dead molecules brought to life

as if walking through a city
morning by morning
chemically lengthening and destroying
with lumbered angles of the sun
filtered by leaves and bits of dream
alongside no one and nothing
are

cities of old
infecting moving limbs with the
virus of lost children now men the
virus of lost children now men the
virus of lost children

buy a grapefruit juice across from the bus stop to
feed these painkillers
flowing through wage slave capillaries
and my tongue presses hard onto
nerve endings thirsty for
other tongues
languages concocted of mixed nocturnal drinks
she leans forward on the table with
tumbling hair

-i'm nearly there-
is the only refrain
nearly next to something other than suffering or
mixed reunions with
previous cutouts of selves to be
shuffling neighborhoods like cards held
close and next to me

i walk to work these mornings
smoking pieces of these mornings
finding the plausible elements filling these lungs

i shake off last night's blood like a wet dog