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

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

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

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

egress from a brightly lit land (part 1)

we take small steps out from what
many like to say is a dark
nightland
a dim graphite-hued landscape
where everything is dead and faded

the truth is
it's very bright
too bright
bright enough to delineate the most
strangling detail in hyperfocus
both lies and truths
illuminated with equal shading
spoken crisply and eloquently and
the faces of the past aren't as
some sloppy distressed watercolor
but really a professionally animated decoupage
individualized and bordered and
sharply recalled
ready to bleed the vomit of your own
magnificent fuckups directly into your
mouth
twisting your own language
torturing you
slicing off your cock
digging beautiful dragon's teeth of glass
into your starving arms wet and pliant and welcoming as
egg custard
laughing delicately then
heartily til you find
yourself horrifically laughing back

we drag our way through the technicolor
trying to understand it at first

well
trying to understand it for a
really
long                               long
while
we ponder it
we arm ourselves intellectually against it
then with it
helping it for a while
then we combat it again in
a kind of schizophrenic musical trench warfare
catching ourselves by our own thrown projectiles
it could be months lived like this
elongated and tallied by the measures of
sleepless eternal evenings
clutching our cold brains
fraught with dreams of justice and reconciliation
dramatic gestures devised
celebrations of delicate grandeur
deadeyed
zombified by what we lack

to pursue a jagged path through we
generate the loveliest distractions:
other people
the centers of our bodies
intoxications and pharmaceutical delights
flickering entertainments
twitch dopamine carousels
riding the hypothalamus bareback and hitting
every obvious obstacle right at the fucking knees
progress is pitilessly slow and mired
sometimes we turn around and are being chased
sometimes we are chasing the stoic end of the day
sometimes we are chasing the fragile morning
sometimes we find we are simply running for some time

you would think that when we hit the gate we
crash heroically through it with
all this stored kinetic energy and
the fury of the chase but
this land never moves and though everything in
this land is moving nothing is moving and
we get there right at the edge of it and
this is probably where we stay the longest
and this
is probably
where many others
still
live
and we think
about that
and we are
no longer
moving

hielo / one hundred and four degrees

maybe it's nothing
cigarette smoke cascading cancer over
old blankets
suffusing particulate suffering as
murmured words
absorbing errors and freewheeling
mental imagery and crushed romantic
dirges into this weathered fabric
rescuing images from the past like a
cloudy sky

she's kind of weird
like that
maybe
it's nothing that she wakes up
early to chuckle over something she's
reading
or make perfect coffee and
hypothesize the day before
bothering me but

it always
seems
to
be 155 in the morning now it
angles into the room like
shafts of ambivalent sunlight
awoken with the ghosts of her and
the hateful architecture of the day
positioned before me
i gather my diseased moorings close and
angle towards it

and
maybe
enlightened by nothing
to nothing
i procrastinate in the softer unseen
edges of her
and designate abandoned boundaries where her
gentle breath breathed tunnels into
mine and
submerge into the discordant ink where her
prose met
mine and find my
enemies in what remains maybe

it's nothing but
the mythic refrains circumnavigating these
streets and rooms which are forever
our moments
a frozen garden
where
nothing grows
or
dies

you may have just won ten million dollars

he will never
hurt himself
he will absorb and
conjure and perjure and
suture and culture but
not injure or
enfeeble or dart
across the surface of
an eye or meet
soft redemption in
hands that run through
hair or asleep in
chemical tendrils be
destroyed
he will
stay
forever
trapped in some kind
of a creased permanent
stance like a specious
bookmark
made of magazine clippings
and fucking stupid taunting
habits and immature
somnambulist ideas and
sincere loathsome
molecular destruction in
a
dream
yesterday
my
left arm and hand sliced
and shredded and scarred
over a mix of
old wounds and new and
the pinky torn off
below the knuckle and the
scars like braille or dna
held down by the throat
unable to speak
or wake until
woken
i was
able to be
silent and dreaming

i remember waking up to calm
adjacent nightmares
i remember a soft breeze at night
blown over and around our
furniture and mixed in
with our breath
the sounds of partying neighbors
and backyard dogs baying and
our selves redacted to
an atomic whole
i remember rhythmic iloveyous
and passion and complacency and disinterest and
verve and thrill and pleasant boredom and
ravenous bloodthirsty boredom and elegant
sated boredom and the boredom of
knowing how not to be bored and avoidance and
the lack of faith and the loss of it and
my old dying frame a hideous
portrait and my face something to be
idly destroyed like junk mail

this is what it looks like
when i'm just walking around:

a king bullshitter
self lacerated
drunk & drugged
staring at pedestrians who
cope like master craftsmen
going through the motions of
emotions breaking up the
composite motions of
smiling hello or buying a granola bar or
taking a shit or two-stepping the subway
stairs or feeling for the right grapefruit

near the end of a given day i
expend the limit of my energies paying
for groceries with a debit
card exactly like a normal
person