Poems (New York City)

The Well Worn Path

I watch as I walk the streets of Brooklyn, the well-laid paths for so many I pass told by the ways in which they walk.

Where the paths some walk are so well laid,

Where the fortunate walk amongst the decrepit and trying,

As we may try to understand how this has all come to be,

We walk and consume those places around us which bespeak of a forgotten time,

Where we shared that which we all know:

That most of us, forgiven of our trespasses against one another in the pursuit of

that ever-elusive American dream

May one day remember that none of us, however brazen,

Have reached anywhere but the continual pathway of the pursuit

and the illusions that our struggle’s ends are close

are to be never met but within the idealistic dreams,

Yearnings that one day, somehow, against all odds

We will be better off than our parents, rub shoulders with the well-to-do,

And how little the costs, and how little the personal sales,

And how little we actually take the time to take it all in,

Immersed within our personal ecosystems and the myriad faces of the misconstrued,

Again we walk and lest we perceive

Perhaps this walk

Will simply be enough.

For what are we to do?

The personal revolt once singular bleeds into the stories of all those around us

And so perhaps it is best to talk,

That opening of the mouth perhaps the most trying moment

In some of our lives.

Shared, never forgotten

We ride those pathways well-laid by the multitudinous before

Yet to be recognized, they await resurrection

And perhaps it is to this hope that I walk these streets of Brooklyn.

And so I walk.

White Flowers

I have come home, home to all my brethren.

I have come home, where all are from.

I have come home, and live but to live

Upon the streets, upon the floorboards,

Within that subway, upon your brow.

I have come home.

50 Degrees, Cold and Cloudy

Truly these are troubled times
When the nearest one can get to one’s brethren
Is a ten-foot pole’s length,
And the most one can talk about
With one’s nearest neighbor
Is the goddamn weather.

New York: Silent Entropy

Rock talk
To the concrete walls of New York City
The homeless appear as moles in the tunnels
And the hawkish CEOs of glim-gleam towers
Wait to pick them off
One brandished train tube at a time.

Rock talk
To the glistening rubber of overpriced name-brand boots
On the bitsy feet of Candy, Marsha, or Marlene
That tritz trounce the pavement
And just gliiide.

Rock talk
To the children of our tomorrow
Heads made of candied gaming goop
And ‘gimmie’ hands that can never be satiated.
Give ‘em poisonous input from all directions
And away they’ll munch.

Rock talk
Toa distant neighbor three inches away
And a squandered celebrity in the face of millions
Bringin’ fame only to the median
Of a fish amongst a school of sharks
In the hub-dub drub of underground passageways
And tribulations.

Rock talk
To myself in the sudden dark
Of an unlit underground chamber
And a nest of dreams a ramblin’
Within this projection system of a mind embraced
The roll keeps running, the film ain’t tarnished yet.

Rock talk
A picture frame of streaming continuals
And melt that rock into a thousand soupy strands
Of digestible truth.

To allow the people to reclaim their ears

And converse.

Rising Change, Tempered Falls

The waves remind him of continual change.

Born at sea where moon meets water
They rush towards shore,
Kamikaze waves bent on making one last stand.

White-walled faces arise out of sapphire sea
And then, amongst cousins, face the harsh realities
Of the tempered sand awaiting.

The rise, the fall, the hiss, the backwards crawl
And its over just as it began,
Another time, another wave
Time forever marking one after another,

Change continual,

And there is no need for fear.

Early Pressed Pants and Collars: Soul -1, Corporation +2

The stillness of my cubicle unnerving
As the whitewashed walls of human beings
Carouse the parlors of the corporate phallus.
Eyes sunken, lifeless, they peruse the many ways to be marginal
And succeed in all.

Bitty-ritty tick-tocks on my clock
And I stock
Up on the paper clips  and file folders that comprise my life
I stack them one on top of the other
Till they touch the ceiling in my 4′x5′ cube
In the hopes that through calamitous confusion
They merge to form a robotic companion named Larry
Who I can speak to about philisophical nonsensical menageries
And attend to meaningful repose and reverical rantings
Amidst piles of instant coffee cups and despoiled sugar packets–
Styrofoam as far as the eye can see.

51 floors of what exactly I do not know
But Larry’s with me in our towers of paper, computers, pens and garbage
And guides me through my day
One cube of a second at a go.

Spirit Assault

A.M. comes with the sun and seas of people
Corporate drones march to the hive
In plain, baby-blue shirts and over-sized asses
Heads hung low, briefcases in hand
Unhappiness has become the norm
Plastic smiles and forced laughter coat
A cancer too many
As the machine chug-a-chugs away.

Premature balding on men
Fucked up twisted, junky-chunky knees on women
Stilettos to a painful tomorrow
And a clicking wingtip shoe drives me mad.

Steady, even-paced fury walking
Burning deep drive into souls of push-pin dolls
That some crazed masterful puppet master plays with
In his darkened mahogany offices
Of devils personified.

Money and lucrative personal losses
Breed unspoken discontent and existential yearnings
To know why and what we do
Fro 9-5’s-a-many
And working towards the weekend loses meaning
As we bleed, as our weeks bleed, as our lives bleed
Into the corporate fickle fabric of a never tomorrow.

My fear pushes me forward
As the crowd’s discontented gruntings begin to build
A stop in the flow of ‘progress’
For needless questions
A waste of time
Keep moving,
Keep moving
Just.
Keep.
Moving.

I take a sidelong glance from above my cubicle walls
To observe the madness of the busy bee comrades
And slink back into the recesses of my memory for sustenance.
I can do no more than hide
And wait for the torrential downward blades of skeleton sickles
To cease their slicing
And my soul will arise once the corporate ghosts have perished
In their rat race rave towards nothingness
And I will have survived by an inch.

But that inch will grow.

Nueva York

Nueva York ain’t so new
Prissy Manhattanites parade around the pew
Of 5th Avenue Bloomingdales and other such holes
Giving thousands of examples and a hardened credence to the word
Oblivion.

Rick-rick subticks roll underground
The ‘mole people’ homeless keep keen eyes in the darkened moldy abyss
As the silver bullet rips through their hood
And it’s gone just as it has come
Another hour, another ten trains.

Feathered lawyers and top execs spread their wings
In the skies of Manhattan
And watch eagle-eye style as their phallic shadows extend over the city,
As day turns to night,
And they speedily exit through the entrails of their towers into sleek
And shiny corporate cars—nests of solitudonous cash.

From the high to the low
Rains clichéd headaches
Of a city, of a city, of a god-damned city
That ain’t so new
But is sure as hell addictive in its
Topsy-turvy turmoil.

America

America. America is an ill-fated apartment
In the downtown slums,
New by years but old if you smell the smells
Of its worn, peeling, white-washed walls and
The black mold beginning to grow in the corner.

America is a long highway
Filled with cracks and potholes
And tar-brushed
Streaks of an over-worn tarmac.

America is a semi-truck rattling its bones
Down your not-so-small-anymore neighborhood street,
Calling out for the children of a younger generation
To come and play with its oil-streaked grill.

America is a fat man walking a fat dog
On a fat street filled with fat burger joints
And a cloggety-cloggety we run.

America is a stained plush carpet from the 1960’s.
Its liberal leanings crying out for peace and justice and such
But the cat’s just shat on it and
No one is willing to clean it up.

America is an overcrowded high school
Filled with over stimulated kids
Wording overplayed songs from the
Overly monotonous radio stations.

America is a cancer ward bursting at the seams
And no one knows why.

America in all its fame and glory…is not.

It has a taste of wine gone sour,
Muddled heathen breath of non-believers,
Personal gods on their hum-drum war paths
Cruising for that one good hit
That’ll give them stories 45 cocktail parties later.

America is a home like the home next to it,
Surrounded by pesticidal
Fields of production glory,
Labeled safe for human consumption
And the puppeteers steer clear.

America is a hope and dream gone contradiction
And a lie gone sour.
Please stand for the pledge of allegiance…

And I sit.

America is that bag lady on the street corner
Being beaten by a gang of teenage boys—
A movie in the making and
Four-star entertainment for the masses.

America is the bling without the substance,
The gleam without the eye,
The cream without the crop—
A window dressing to sustain its citizens
Through a long, drawn-out winter of know-nothing
Do-dads and banana splits.

America is a tattered flag flying
In the dusty shadows
Of a yard-stick highway.

America is a father without a son.
A patriarchal licenser of ‘Do this’ but ‘Don’t do that’.
Liberals expound their theories and say,
‘Let’s discuss’.

America, in its finality, is veneer
Without sincere or dear
And we are no where near
What we supposedly intended to achieve.

America is a history book gone fanatical.
The deathly bony fingers of
Columbus reaching up
To state that he was a great adventurer
And the discoverer of a new land—
New like water, wind, or air—
And the heads begin to bobble.

America is a series of weekends and 8-5’s
Of commemorative holidays for dead bodies we use
To keep the fiction rolling.

America is entertainment in war or peace—
Although the latter seems to have gone on leave.
It is a White House filled with white people
And white walls that, although they are prim and proper,
Are reminiscent of the ones I mentioned earlier.
On a bad politico day, which is often,
One can smell the reek
Of whitey politicians running circles in their hamster wheels
From damn-near half the world away.

America is tiring, exhausting, trying.
For, for this many people to
Believe in this place
Is an act of will beyond comprehension—
And we spin and spin away.

America was my home—a fiction of white picket fences
And wide open spaces (which closed minds helped constrict).
But, my childhood has ended,
The fiction must stop sometime.
And so I walk—
As far from this patriarchal poodle as my broken bones can bear.

Granny Insanity

Grandmother’s lost it again
Touting the fly-papered lollipops,
Kindling garbage bin fires
With the heads of her childhood dolls
And cick-cuck cackling at 3:00 in the a.m.

She rides her broomstick high into that dark dream-like dawn
And buzzes the lawns of the neighborhood with a face razor and determination.

She ties her hair to her legs so she doesn’t walk too fast
Likes to keep a snail’s pace,
Smell the roses, taste the lively buds of tree-born ticks,
Smick-smacking lips on little lizard’s heads
Twisting her cockeyed glass eye with her index finger
Till it pops out ‘plop’ into her potato bug soup
And spoons it up, rolls it over her tongue.

Her stockings stretched tightly
Over bony legs of viscous flesh
She applies for modeling positions in the dregs of New York City
Calls herself Marilyn and dons a wig of frizzled bacon.
Thick-rimmed slate glasses adorn her crooked nose
Held together only by the gum of yesteryear
Upside down press-on nails painted orange
Luring butterflies and hummingbirds into her web of nonsequiters.
Grandmother has lost it—completely
My only hope being that time-tested genes have met their fate in her
And found their regeneration in me.

We Forget

We forget the many tumbled tides
Of lonely days in darkened hours.

Our semblance to our sisters and brothers
In quickened paces and frenzied gazes.

Our compassion in whords of cold, hard cash
And spin-spun streamings of whirlish devil-makers.

We forget to say I love you to those who care
In a world where truthfully so few do.
Stretching our necks to continually find profit in other ventures
We forget to say I love you to the arms that hold us still,
The eyes that calm our souls.

We forget to say I love you to the warmth of a smile,
A slight nod of the head, angelic gestures of tenderness that sweep our tiredness to another time,
Another place that is not now.

“Why do we forget?” we ask
And we forget that perhaps it is not for us to know.

When we remember, remember well
And for that moment forget that you are
Ever going to forget again.