There are the eyes of envy, yes
and countless furtive movements
and one can never see what stays their hands,
yet I can see a traffic cop screaming
at the ipod of a standing pedestrian—
a Marine instructor who has lost all his friends in the war
really has nothing on her.
The sun rises to neon signs
and cleaning crews coming off shift.
There isn't a soul here not working a deal,
or serving a meal, or running the streets with a spreadsheet.
It all seems as natural as breathing, the way
the living stay moving. I come back home to
last pitches in bars, past steel and graffiti curtains.
Life is larger than these larger than life people
who fling like grecian gods the puzzle pieces
like dice rolls from their thrones at The Blind Pig
to corners where the homeless with their cardboard signs
almost are not seen. Too large for what is
they must create a what is not.
The normal have contempt for them, but fools like me can only sigh.
You're never a New Yorker
'til you buy that black umbrella
and maneuver those wind tunnels
as the streets all turn to glass.
The whooshing of the taxis
as the night turns on its beauties
and the must comes up from underneath like jazz.
The courts fill with skateboards, scraping the asphalt like flint
as face-painted urchins running for sausage
blur out the sun rays in chalk.
Merengue's compressed in a transistor radio
from a Jacob Riis window behind a sheer.
The shockingly gorgeous have the sharpest of tongues here
while giants wear braids and giggle to no one in particular.
A yellow tugboat swagging, a trawler's rooster tail,
plastic orange coconuts and palms...
the slurry peaks of river move
with the electro-hypnotic industrial groove
grinding out its juice at the "solar-powered" festival,
and one can see on the other side, through the hulks of factory frames
the sky, the dead, somnolent cranes by Huxley Envelope.
How did I end up in the Bellevue Sobriety Garden?
So many movies: mahjong in the park, orange turbans, blue ukulele.
From Westville East past Avenue D it's chased me
one step ahead of the vortex slip.
"My sister's a wreck and I can't help her, you know."
Art, like crime, 'sbeen removed from the streets.
Pieter Stuyvesant gazes at the tulips. They blush.
It's almost as if I'm in China: the tables pulled out to the streets,
the carriages bicycle-driven, the hanzi in neon green,
the sequined scarves and handbags, the human hair and beads,
glass necklaces and fresh water pearls, toys, fragrance, novelties
in shrinkwrap with strange lettering, Qi Gong and chakara cleansing...
Then a bus with a poster of the Dalai Lama smiling.
I guess I'm not in China anymore.
It's Earth Day in Manhattan,
the most man-made place on Earth -
computer hybrid sprouts are on a tray for the occasion,
100 brands of olive oil on sale.
Late at night mysterious heroes come and lift prodigious weights
black sack by black sack into machines.
Whoever controls the trash controls the city.
The street swarms with Yankees caps!
The standard issue dark, dark blue
and red, green, beige, pink, yellow, too,
corduroy and pinstripe, tennis white and tough black leather,
GI or Mao style, the NY white on white, black on black, red on red.
Like birds of spring they carry news of ghosts remembered.
They go with wings to ride the curls of Hermes' head.
An artist with portfolio and beret
lifts up the stroller with her wide-eyed baby
who's new in town and wants something to say.
Dogs leave the elevator in their sweaters.
A man walks by in jacket, tie and boxers.
100 nuns in blue emerge from corners.
The old man's eyes shine: nothing you can say.
There's a practical value
it turns out, in physics, for
instance, that penny we thought
would split our skulls open if it dropped
from the top of the Empire State Building
doesn't weigh enough really.
I can walk without fear of falling money!
Old man Manhattan
slowly rolls his clothes across the street.
You'd never know his dreams are those of young men.
You'd never guess he was the wizard of the whole experiment
where freedom leads inevitably to oneness.
He watches the sluices open from his roost on some steel nest
forever patient, beyond hoping.
No one is cooperating with the nonexistent plans,
they just stagger on an inch above the ground
and slur like sails into the canyons,
where windblown petals laugh with them
below the emerald moon of the Empire State Building.
The illicit voice of Carmen Bradford settles in
as hungry eyes have found their harlequin.
The Church of the Transfiguration
in the center of town is deserted.
On the sign by the Baptist door
Gautama Buddha is quoted.
The Jesuit corporate President
sighs for the young, how they no longer turn
violent to end violence.
America the pamphlet
is posted in the entrance
of diners gone Arabic,
Korean wallet-makers,
Lithuanian bakeries,
taxis of every language
—translation's left to the birds.
Imagine William Sigler
for the first time hit this place:
the mirrors from the windows,
the fragrant model's gaze.
The tour bus like an open tin,
heads peer down on the sidewalk—
Oh no! They have noticed him!
Somewhere along Crosby Street
the Gods kindly turned away
so that demons could devour
the blood of the young - haunt them
with art, its darkness, martyrs.
Elsewhere all things blend and blur;
here, the unwanted resists.
Squirrels come out of the daffodils
to pose like humans for pictures
at a whistle, yet they unlike us leap
to the grass through the slats in the fence.
We can't even cross the dirty side of Fifth
without feeling the terror longing
how the other half lives.
For R.A.
The richest men in the world deserve our compassion
much more than any bum exposing nullity; the only ones
allowed among them love live through the pain with heroin,
the rest proceed with a mission so strange and solitary,
like the proper hobo, black horsehair layers on the hottest days,
a pacifier hung around his neck, a force field all around him,
pushing his cart with a purpose more than human.
Friday night at work with Yolanta, the cleaning lady,
no Thursday at 3:30 jaunts to LA on East Coast time.
She prays every day to return again to Poland.
She had a house, a washing machine, real books to read.
She had a job, what I do here, but I, she said
would never understand that kind of world,
the normal one, where living life mattered.
The sadness, like the smell here, is unique:
major ninths, a bass concerto,
a cry that one can never be invisible.
It's the urge to complete a thought
that has already dissolved, as the lights
across the way reveal their lives
when they go off.
Money changes hands
but the only currency is words
and even then it doesn't matter
whether they're remembered or even heard;
they create what's real all on their own.
We watch them fly like milkweed floss
away to dance in the babble of honks.
I notice a poignancy:
empty hatracks in the power deli,
and, suddenly, the stores are full of hats.
Black men, as we speak, are wearing them,
and those who only wear black soon will join.
The truth resolves from discord into harmony automatically.
In the future, only bankers will not wear hats.
Around Park's darkened temples
a lightbulb shimmers on stainless steel,
fresh kofta cooks in the street meat wagon
where a socialite with purple eyes tells me
she'll soon kneel mystery-school style at Giza's portals;
you must go to Alexandria, I said, not knowing why.
The vendor who, it turns out, is from there, nods between slices.
The Masonic Lodge in neon blue;
cool is the way every move gets included
in this chess scape vision: it is heaven, real
and hidden in plain view, on this centre isle
of the electric universe. I ask a blessing from the chief
of the Mannahatta wigwam, who laughs like sirens' music,
says "we are all one family. That's a secret."
A final installment of found phrases from Arizona's highways
HOPEY
YIPEEE
RLXDUDE
CHEDDAR
CHEEEKS
BAD HBT
INVERT
TONETGR
ARTWERX
LUKNUP
CHIKEET
OVERNOUT
Sting
played in The Police with
Stewart Copeland
son of
Miles Copeland
CIA agent, who hired
"Messiah" Billy Graham
to create the Islamic puppet
Sheik Abdullah Yusuf Azzam
who recruited and trained
Usama bin Laden