“Queens Boulevard Driftwood”

In my annual calender, on the page I started the poem were these two “bon mots:” “the truth broke my uniqueness” (3.22.7) and “My ability stand pain diminished” (4.2.7). I’m not sure why I wrote them down, who said them, or why they matter, but I’m digitalizing them.

I saw a huge chunk of wood in traffic on Queens Boulevard the other day and the traffic was slowly dissolving it. I though about it and I want ed to write a poem, and this is what I started last night as Erin (M) spoke.

“Queens Boulevard Driftwood”
A six foot block of 8” by 10”
Aged for a century deep in
A warehouse that held barrels of oil
That 2 floors down became pens

Flame de-industrialization
For cold steel replacement buildings:
To fill with pressboard furniture
Covered with white and birch veneer

The rubble of that factory
Trucked away thirty cubic
Yards at a time to a depot
Lashed to barges along the River

The illegal that packed the charred beam
In the 30 yard dumpster lashed loose
The blue plastic tarp containment
Disposable archeology

Too fast turn by stallion carting
Out flew bricks, rubble and plaster
The beam that held up 100 years
Of hard work and new things fell out

Wave after wave of traffic rolls
Over and over the charred cedar
Crumbling and shaving the wood cut
A century ago by dagos

Yellow, then red and green again
The pulsing of the traffic thuds
Over and over the charred cedar
Gnawing away on the old beam

Smoothing the remains of the tree
Felled so long ago in mountain woods
A century hidden in red brick
Supporting piece-work now done by

Dominicans and Poles and
Koreans and Fujianese
And Hondurans and Mexicans
With bleary eyed efficiency

When I see the board dissolving
Under the waves of rush hour tires
It smoothes along the rough grain grown
When Lincoln debated Douglass

The grain shows like the tree itself
Fell down in a cold mountain stream
And was worn away gently in
The most tranquil of rural deaths

Waves of cars on Queens Boulevard
Lap over the wetback hewn board
Eroding it like the bowsprit
Of a shipwrecked sail freighter

Made redundant by steel and steam
Wave after wave on the freezing verge
Wears away the tree cut down quick,
Casually, when Queens was built

By dawn there is only a smooth
Core, the size of a root, halo-ed
By splinters worn off, car after car
Queens Boulevard Driftwood

This poem, on reconsideration, reminds me of this shit.

Physical Therapy and Abu Ghraib

So I’ve been undergoing physical therapy twice a week for a while now. Some of you might notice the photo above from an earlier post. as I am stretched and pulled, massaged and exercised I am for period of ten minutes each time left alone in a cubicle with electrodes strapped to my ankles. My ankles are then wrapped in ice-packs and the power is turned on. This increases bloodflow to the recently “exercised” joints and I think is helping (I am getting better). During those lonely twenty minutes a week I have been composing poems on my crackberry:

As I lie in my curtain-cubicle
Stretched and stretching out
Upon the insurance company wrack
Tring to revive my ligaments

I feel the gentle surge
Of the curative electrodes
Taped to my lower extremities
As I stare up at the curtains

That separate me from
The other patients with
Other infirmities
Stretched shocked wrenched

Each of them must feel
The tears of their own flesh
Rehabbing looking up
At the fluorescent

Curtains that separate us all
Hanging from the tracks
That segregate walls
For our own lonely cures

Stretch (This one is a revision of the first that speaks more directly to an imagined interrogation instead of the isolation that I feel in that cubicle and in the medical world.)

In a hyper-clean cubicle
On a Plynth Three Section Table
Model sixty-four-eighty-five
Sold only to prisons and HMOs

Lies a man Bound by zip-ties
Lies a man who does not speak
The language of his “providers.”
He is to undergo “truth-therapy”

At the hands of a good Hoosier
Raised on corn and bologna
Jello, macaroni, potatoes and
Bread that you can make balls out of

As concerned about march madness
As he is with homeland security
He puts medical electrodes
On the depilated scrotum

Telling the patient patient in poor Urdu
What he is doing just like a real doctor
He explains the range using the LCD readout
Then he connects the wires

He illustrates the discomfort of the number two
With his military training school Urdu
The LCD reminds him of the scoreboard
At McCracken that Hoosiers venerate

Lost in thought he wonders about
The bracket he filled out in the px
And if there were any upsets in the first round.
Then he reads the first urdu question typed on the sheet

There in the hygienic curtained exam room
Two men speak in Urdu one of whom
Is thinking about college basketball
And the other of his flaming balls

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

 

Update and a Quiz

1/26/2008 6:23 AM (sorry, this is a long one)

Yesterday, Friday the 25^th of January, 2008, Lennox came home with a flier about the upcoming 100^th day of school (2/7/8). She is encouraged to bring 100 objects: “Please help your child to choose 1 item and count 100 pieces of that item.” So last night Lennox was counting out 100 pennies from the penny jar and insisting on a “bigger, the biggest ziplock bag, because there are 100 I need to fit in here,” with characteristic eye-rolling, intensity and sarcasm. (The bag she wanted and got is big enough to fit her head in and use as a space helmet.)

I wish that 100 pennies still meant as much to me as they do to Lennox. I fear that Even Mason and Chandler have relegated the copper penny to the economic trash-heap, not worth bending over for unless they are heads’ up. Sigh, I remember when you could get three peach pits for a penny from the (unsanitary) jar on the counter of the corner store kitty corner from the Rice school on Appleton and Dartmouth Streets. A nickel would sugar up all of your friends for a game of baseball or ring-alevio (all-ee-all-ee-in-come-free). They have new and wondrous things in their childhoods, but my kids, trapped in this new city and new apartment, who haven’t discovered their peers and places, lack the independence that we had in 19-and-sixtey-nine. (God, I sound like Abraham Simpson!)

(MMMM-excellent coffee this morning)

Chandler is just loving her school. Everyday she comes home with another anecdote –that can’t wait- about the antic in her classroom. I wish that I had paid closer attention so that I could tell you of the antics of Abla, Chewmaka, Andrew, and Aniqa (accuracy). Mr. Binyaris had them write a poem in Math Class (so the “no-child” tests must be safely in the rear-view and they must be back to their usual talented and gifted antics). Rarely does Chandler come home when she is not excited about the day’s goings-ons, whether it is her latest 90-something exam, some difficult (and interesting) word problem, or some logical ditty that a teacher tossed to the class at the end of the day to keep them busy. So when I meet her, with her 30 pound back-pack (and I don’t think I am exadurating) I take the bag from her shoulders and the stories from her day and walk home in paternal bliss.

Mason is, I think, bored to tears by PS150. He listens to Chandler’s after-school update with seeming blasé-ness, but can always recount the characteristics of the players in her stories if asked. He can often answer the brain teasers that Cha-Cha has brought home, and he usually responds with stories of the incompetence and knuckle-headed-ness of his classmates. He is so ready for a school that challenges him that I can see it like an aura (or the curly half-fro he declines to cut that shoots tendrils towards heaven like a vine thirsting for knowledge).  He’s been home, sick with a fever, for the last two days and we’ve been keeping him from watching the Disney Channel the whole time.  I caught him reading The Outsiders in front of a tivo’d repeat of Zack and Cody (the one where they cut school and end up in a rock video).  When I came in the room he hid the book and pretended to be paying attention to the TV.  I need to remember this when I rag on them about watching too much Cathode Ray.

I’ve been teaching an API (ACT Prep Intensive) for seven days now.  It runs (or crawls) from 9:15 to 12:45 everyday.  I have given an ACT practice exam each day, and we are all really tired.  INTENSive is the right word.  They are so sick of writing body paragraphs, introductions, elaborations, re-writing criterions and examples that I hope none of them has access to guns.  And the worst part is that every time I give them a practice ACT Exam, which gives me an hour that I don’t have to drill, cajole, entertain or teach them, I have to grade it.  It is like a western, where the good-guy is forced to dig his own grave.  Practice exams are good, they teach them how to write a passing essay (or that they are not yet writing at a passing level), and they show the student what is missing from their essays.  But they all need to be graded.  I need to grade them.  I am paid to grade them.  Everyday I go home with 19 ACT Exams to grade.  Now I know the shortcomings of each of the writers six exams in, but I still have to read and mark all of these problems in the hope that they will start to stop making those mistakes.  I like to think of it as erosion, or the _____ (insert non-white-ethnicity here) water torture, but I’m not sure whether it is their compositional defects that are being eroded, or my sanity: drip-drip-drip.

 I spend so much time with them that I feel like we are all victims of the Stockholm Syndrome. I think we all have an unhealthy identification with each other over the stress of this exam and the 4 hours a day we spend together. I am even rooting for the students who don’t “play nice” (do as I say) to pass this exam. The plus side is that we are functioning like a cult; we are the fraternity of true ACT-Test-Takers (Western Queens Council). On Wednesday they will take the test and we will all miss our bank-vault-prison and the captors that put us there.

Today I was working on the Black Literature Series Committee’s Scavenger Hunt: Here is one of the questions I’ve composed:

 

Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 Narrative

Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the

(Choose one to complete the passage)

a. most hypocritical and avaricious, in the south.

b. meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.

c. greediest and neediest of all Americans.

d. generally most Christian and charitable in all of this, God’s land.

 

I think I’ll try and exercise a bit before the kids and Linda wake-up, thanks for reading (and drop me a comment).

Kiko Learns Pack Procedure

Here’s more of Kiko’s Tale.  He’s back, our delivery guy, (if only your intrepid scribe was as dedicated and regular as Kiko). Here Kiko meets another aspect of the City Cycling world, a singular character named Croak. There’s more the pipeline.

And of course, if you want to start from the beginning, go here.  IF this link doesn’t work you can search “Kiko” on this blog and feel yourway back to the beginning by hitting “previous entries” two or three times.

“Kiko, this is Croak,” Mike said gesturing to the chest of the hard 40-something man there by the side of the highway. It was a strange place this road between leafy houses and the trench the LIE was in, and it seemed stranger with Croak there. They all hopped on their bikes, Kiko having locked up Sra Choi’s bike and taken off the baggy jeans and t-shirt he’d worn over the kit. With his street clothes removed Croak and Mike both saw the broad chest and shoulders of Kiko’s Indian ancestry looking like a barrel of muscle barely contained by his mule-like ribs.

The three of them set off with Mike leading to start. As they hit the city limits in about 20 minutes Croak took over and it was not so easy for Kiko to keep up. Mike pulled 20 inches off their line and pedaled more slowly so that Croak and Kiko passed him and he fell back into their slipstream. Croak , a narrow man, rode hard and pulled them at a pace that Mike had not. Inside of Kiko there was a smile on his heart because he was finally being challenged. Kiko dug deep and kept up with florescent advert without much trouble, but he was riding harder and he knew that they were covering a lot of road in a little time. The smile in his chest was his pride at going so fast and working so hard as a team.

20 minutes alter Croak jumped out of line, fell back two places and clicked back into the line like a safe’s tumbler. Kiko kept the pace, maintaining his rhythm and cadence in perfect tight circles. He felt the extra resistance of being in front so he dropped the gear one level and spun away. After a time he felt he was spinning too much and he shifted again, increasing his speed. He didn’t know this but behind him mike had to dig much deeper to keep up and Croak’s face broke into an ear-to-ear grin as he clung to mike’s wheel for every jewel of energy savings that Mike’s big Irish draft offered.

Happy New You

 

12/31/07 05:35:55 AM

Where has the year gone? Has it gone into the trash heap or the archives; I’m not sure which. Into the archives is another beautiful year with a wonderful family. We’ve just moved into an apartment which seems to fit us better. We, for the first time, are in a home big enough for all of us (the second bathroom is key).

Here is an outline of the biggies I can think of this minute:

New House

We love our new house and are looking forward to finishing moving in. Three bedrooms and two baths is the right fit for us. Mason has his own room and it is big enough to send him to. Chandler and Lennox are working out the wrinkles in their new quasi-cohabitation. Generally permission is granted to cross the armistice line; especially since Lenna got her princess netting and pink rug. It is strange to be in a modern building and the view, as I look over the BQE and east into Woodside and Rego Park and watch the sun rise as I write this the sky and the contours of the land are enthralling to me. I love watching when the LIRR rolls out of Woodside on the way to Jamaica: a long silvery snake a half a mile on.

Family

 

I am still so in Love With Linda that it scares me. She is the model for everything beautiful and desirable in my life. I wish I could be with her more and, paradoxically, more like her. I am blessed to be chosen by her to spend these days together with her.

Chandler continues to thrive at the TAG school she’s in. She has a lot of homework and does it without complaint, though she looks at the confections of Cable TV as the just and right compensation for her work. At least is is mostly Disnified Pre-Tween Confections, though she will be a teenager on February 23^rd.

Mason and I survived the soccer season (he’s quite good) with me as coach, though he declined to play winter league indoors. Mason’s way with words continues to amaze Linda and I mostly because he is not the squeaky wheel. Out of -or out from under- the hubbub of the family Mason will make a wry comment that puts everything that we are all elbowing to the front to try and frame just so into context. He does so uproariously and seemingly without effort.

Lennox is growing up so fast in so many ways. Just like with her sister we are often fooled into thinking that she’s older because she’s so damned verbal. She is also sassy in a way Chandler can only dream of (and rue). So when she puts her hand on her splayed hip and rolls her eyes as she wipes stray locks out of her eyes explaining “whatever, duh!” we lose track of her age (5) and size (just right). We start trying to reason with the sarcastic teenager that she apes rather than the Kindergartener that she is. Needless to say we miss having Kindergarten across the street, but we’ll see how this move will effect our lives (passive aggressively I think the earlier wake-up and travel will be good for the family).

School Year

I loved my Fall 1 Classes and I am really enjoying the Lit Elective classes I am teaching. The Contemporary African American Fiction and the Black Lit Survey have been soul-expanding (as much as teaching a class can be). I love the students at LaGuardia CC. Teaching them is a dream come true. In many of their faces and papers I see myself struggling intellectually to come into my own. It is a humbling flashback when I see the same misunderstandings that I made in someone else’s paper. It is a merciful reminder of my current domestic bliss when I see the sturm und drang of youthful courting around campus. I look forward to working on my own intellectual and academic development this next year.

Amir’s Murder

The horror of Amir Hassan Reed’s murder this year has put a lot of things into perspective. I am so grateful to be alive, which I generally take for granted. I take life, mine and my beautiful family’s to be a given that shall continue along, but it “Ain’t Necessarily So.” I had taken it for granted that I would wake up to the same cast that I went to sleep with. It is rare that such a Cause Célèbre visits our lives, and I had often wished that my life would intersect with drama and fame. Sigh, I wish that I had marked my door with blood so this angel never came. What I found most annoying and titillating was the comments left on the SFGate site articles: people who knew the least seemed to make the strongest comments. This puts all of my “Willie-Neckbone-Expertise” into perspective: the more I think I know, the less I know.

48 Years

I turned 48 this December. I remember in 1974 thinking that it would be the year 2000 when I was 40. It seemed so abstract and distant (and of course I took it for granted that I would live that long). Well until this year I’ve held up well. During the spring my Achilles tendons started to act up (and I didn’t go to the doctor). In the Fall, playing soccer with Mason I tore up my ankle (and I didn’t go to the doctor). This December my ankle got infected and I went to the doctor. I will go to physical therapy soon because I really miss my morning runs through Sunnyside, Woodside, Maspeth and Long Island City. I’m feeling trapped by my infirmity in spite of the fact that I did go for a bike ride yesterday. Linda is sick this morning so I don’t think I’ll have that luxury.

Dreams

I still haven’t written the great American novel, but I have been working on a story. I haven’t published my dissertation, but I hope to. I want to do more original scholarship rather than just “willie-neckbone” out opinions on things I know little about. So I will continue to do as the Sanskrit Proverb suggests:

Look to this day
For it is life
The very life of life.
In its brief course lie all
The realities and verities of existence,
The bliss of growth,
The splendor of action,
The glory of power –

For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision,
But today, well-lived,
Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.

Happy New YOU, Love Stafford.

Kiko Rides Again

Here’s the latest installment of Kiko’s Tale, because I haven’t posted anything in a while. He’s back, our delivery guy, (if only your intrepid scribe was as dedicated and regular as Kiko). Here Kiko meets another aspect of the City Cycling world, a character named Croak. There’s more the pipeline, though if I don’t start getting some feedback… (It’s hard to keep going without hits and feedback, of course it is possible that it sucks.)

And of course, if you want to start from the beginning, go here.  IF this link doesn’t work you can search “Kiko” on this blog and feel your way back to the beginning by hitting “previous entries” two or three times.

Once The Blue and Gold Line had caught them Mike taught Kiko about riding in a pack, swapping places at the end of the line, and talking about how to figure out where the wind was coming from and how to fid the best place to draft off of people in the pack. By explaining, without actually executing, mike told Kiko the basics of working your way to the front, climbing the grapevine, and, again, holding your line in a pack, which took equal parts nerve and skill.

As they were breaking up for the day Mike, impressed as much by Kiko’s teachability as his natural skill and stamina, went to the van he had brought the bikes in and got Kiko a set of cycling togs, a pair of shoes (with pedals) and a helmet. He explained a bit of the rational for wearing tight colorful clothes, using the Blue and Gold Line as an example. He pointed out how the Jeans and T-Shirt made him look less able, and how “the kit” (the cycling term for uniform) would cut down on some of the resistance (social and physical), and asked him to come meet him the next week at the same place. 

When they met the next week Mike had a new guy with him. His name was Croak and he looked vaguely familiar to Kiko. He was thin and mean looking in spite of the affable smile that rode beneath the pencil thin mustache on his beige skin. Croak was obviously a black man, though his skin was the color of a paper bag and he had no hair to speak of. Kiko could just make out the outline of a receding hairline in the microscopically barbered hair that was left on his skull. He wore a faded Campagnolo hat that had odd creases ironed into it on the back of his head that reminded him of the soldier’s hats back home. His gaudy “kit” advertised an Italian banking concern in florescent colors from his shoes to his hat and gloves everything matched; the bike and handlebar tape even sang the praises of Tuscan-low-rate-mortagages.

Times Square Ikea (Rough Post)

12/21/07 06:11:58 AM

SO I slept late today and I have not particular interest in writing, but I’ll just update things. I guess that there is a lot of news. And if I get my flow on I’d like to write about the profound alienation that I felt shopping yesterday. First I was struck by how shopping at Ikea is like going to Disneyland designed for or by Martha Stewart. There is something comforting about going to Ikea. It is like the video section of Costco: the symbolism supplants the reality. The reality is that there are dozens of Hollywood movies of dubious merit there for vaguely affordable prices. The semiotic or symbolic value is that each of these DVDs represent two hours of sitting around and doing nothing but consuming ideas (of wealth, love, revenge, and power). In Ikea all of our houses and apartments, our living spaces recede to the semiotic, where they can be clean, safe and convenient with the purchase of some trifle or another. The prices, individually, are cheap, but the bill is always huge.

So the shoestand that will tame our jumble of shoes at the entryway represents, symbolizes, effects a tidiness that will never exist. When we look at the dishdrainer that is so under-priced and cool we never see the dishes that must be washed to make it functional heaped in a greasy cold sink. We don’t imagine the roaches that might run behind it (none spotted in our new house yet). And we certainly don’t imagine the underpaid third world worker who assembled them around dangerous machines at a dizzying speed. What we see is the affect that the cool Swedish showroom puts these gewgaws, trinkets, and gizmos in. When I buy a curtain rod from Ikea I hope that my house will get the “windowtreatment” of the Ikea showroom. I am not buying something to hold the curtain in front of the window I am buying the feeling of neatness, cleanliness, tidiness and service that the blue and gold of the Swedish standard (and helpful employee shirts¹) represent.

Ikea becomes a virus that I hope will infect my house. I want to catch the Martha Stewart cooties from the clean consumer experience. I don;t just want things, I want order and clarity. I want a domestic situation that will make me feel good when I am in my home. I want to live in this world where the dishes are always washed, the clothes always folded and people are always welcomed to come visit (and are duly impressed when they do).

Second, I hate the M&M Store. The M&M Store is branding and consumerism run amok. It is like Scott’s comments about the early MTV, it’s all commercials. Commercials for bands (Videos) mixed with commercials for products. Times Sq, in that regard, has become solipsistic; only the brands and chains are provable (or can afford the rent). I guess that in that regard Times Sq. has followed in its long traditions. First, it is the “crossroads of the world” as it was after WWII when it became institutionalized in the world consciousness (V.E. Day Kiss Photo). Second, it was always a party area, where the young folk would go out and eat, drink and make merry. Third, related to 2, is when it became a red-light district in the 70s and 80s; young people partying can often get seemy (remember the kiss photo had a sailor, a profession whose like to the “oldest profession” is legendary). I am sure that there are pierceling tatooine young burlesquers that will someday be respectable Kansan grandmas clicking their tongues at the behaviors that pleased them so much when they were young running around Times Sq. (or The East Village or Williamsburg). (OK, so I got on a little role here, but this is a great essay that has been free-written, but not really written.)

On Sunday the Bhatia Lin’s will be coming to NY for 4 days before a month in India.

1 a marked contrast to the red jerseys of underpaid Target workers, who seem the rawer and redder face of the globalization game.

Moving Impotence

12/14/0710:46:52 AM

So the movers are packing away and Linda is away at the other apartment cleaning and accepting deliveries of new furniture. “The game is afoot,” as Holmes often said. Things are happening fast and I’m not sure how much I can write here. I am useless now that I’ve washed the dishes and tightened the cheap Ikea chairs that are always falling loose. There is a feeling of impotence that accepting (or paying for) help causes. I want to have meaning in this whole process which I don’t seem to feel just paying for it. I am too 19^th century. I feel like if I don’t put my shoulder to the wheel in this move I am not actually helping. Of course that is ridiculous because Linda and I are the “first movers” of this whole show. These three strong Latinas would not be here if we were not paying for them to be here.

It is strange having people in your house touching all of our stuff. Now I don’t know these women in our house singing away to the popular music they have thumping from our boom box as they yell questions and comments back and forth. I guess this adds to the strange feeling of helplessness that I feel not helping. Here are three total strangers doing what in the past only our dearest (and most willing) friends had done. But they are not Richard Heller, Joel Stanger, Trevor Turner, John Mercer, or any of my Berkeley friends who helped with the last three moves. Interestingly the last move here we were helped by Miss Misti H and the one two moves ago involved Dennis Wolf. Both of those people are out of reach to me now and I am sad that they have been replaced by paid professionals.

Neither am I participating physically (no heave-ho), nor am I intimate with the workers. I am slipping out of my life during this move. In this journal, a sign of my increasing alienation from my life, I am recording my increasing feelings of alienation from my life. The skrittch of packing tape sounds like fingernails on the blackboard of my life as I sit in a house with people working incredibly hard as I sit here and diddle on the computer. I guess the root of it is that I am uncomfortable with and unused to my new status as bourgeois middle class sub-gentry (I can’t even own up to the fact that I am indeed a well paid middle class professional with a post graduate degree and a good union job [I'm prayin' for tenure]). I want to live in my imaginary hey-day of a working class youthful messenger. Sigh. If it was that good I’d have never gone to college.

If I insist on continually romanticizing my youth I will always be unhappy, looking over my shoulder at some thin hungry horny bachelor. The truth of the matter is that he was miserable and empty. I was lonely and bored except when I was misbehaving and in grave peril. The life I fantasize about was the life of a young man with few coping skills and a lot of misused down time. I guess I should be proud of one thing. When I was bored, lonely and venal I at least painted and wrote and some of those drawings and writings still exist. Two moves ago, from one place in the village to another I went through my “archive” and looked at lots of my letters and paintings (that wasted time alone justifies the cost of this packing). Up in the attic are two huge tubes of my work from the early 1980s that are testaments to the fact that there might be something to this nostalgia thing. But if you count out how much time I’ve lived and subtracted the time I “created” you’d still have each and every waking hour of a misspent youth.

So I think, against my better judgment I’ll post this now because I’m tired of writing.

 

When I was trying to stay out of the packers way I thought of a poetic way to characterize our move, but I think I’ve lost it: “from the intimate proximity of the gardens to the phallic modernity of the Big Six. ”

 

Hijabed Air Force ROTC Cadet (Poem)

 

We’re moving tomorrow and I found two poems I had written that I thought I had keyed in.  I’ll key ‘em in now.  The first was about the shy young woman I saw heading to Aviation HS one morning.  Refined and restrained, though she was obviously one of the kids, she seemed apart.

Hijabed Air Force ROTC Cadet

High school phalanx / A boisterous wedge
Tumbling Down / Off the concrete EL

Unapproachable / In stylized youth
A garden of  / Performed individualism

Petals and thorns / Of hidden beauty
Instant adolescent / Fauna wilderness

In the rigid  / Individualism
Is a patch of / Conformity

We’re all sad and scared about moving. I’m nervous as hell. I’ve been snapping at the kids and crabby with Ms. L.  We love it here and I want to spill my guts about it, but I found these poems instead, so I’ll post them and see where it leads.

Above the Taco Truck

Almost 4 Years ago I lived for a time with my mother-in-law on 46th St in Sunnyside, Queens, NY. The block we lived on had a Discothèque, an after hours spot, and two Taco Trucks. After Jaleo and Club Noe Noe, the Discos, closed sending shards of young men and women out into the night there would be a drunken brouhaha in an orderly line waiting for tacos. To parody Hemingway it was a Movable Donnybrook, with high spirits, under the influence of spirits.

Club Tidepool

The yellow streetlight drops them in a pool:
An algae’d aquarium out the window.
I watch these tipsy drunks like Jacques Cousteau;
Filthy ether distorts human desire.

Three clubbers swaying in the pre-dawn air;
The unsteady kiss twists two together.
From right behind the woman the other,
Blinded, is too drunk to look away.

As I’d get up at 4 in the morning to grade papers I would be privy to the slurred inner lives of the same young people whose papers I was grading. There were passionate comparisons of the relative merits of various países latinoamericano. As someone would lose the argument on the eloquence trajectory they’s usually jump to the y-axis of VOLUME:

“¡Viva México,hijos de la chingada!”
(Tomates,Cebollas, y Chiles)

It is very easy to romanticize the hard working facts of these young people, so I did:

Shift Change

Underdressed for the cold of this rainy morning,
They look strange in their clubbing clothes
In early drizzle-gray.

Starched, oversized, faded, denim-gelled hair, laughing
Swaying about the women, long gone
Into the darkest night

Don’t move aside or apart for the bundled braving
On their frigid way to work
Just after dawn on Sunday.

Churchians will to the Assembly of praying,
‘Round the corner past these sidewalks,
Missing the hist’ry of now

Dedicated pre-dawn streets: partying and working
Devoted craft of good time: or work
Or both a long hard day

Working up to a life in America not needing
Sleep-eyed, rooster-time tasks;
Sparking and posing hold no sway

These are the sons of the workers power-walking,
Hunched, backpacked, clutching shopping bags,
Towards a corner of their own

Clucking and cooing rare birds crowding sidewalk crowing
An unsteady conclave relaxed
Don’t see the salt of the earth pass

Ballasted by tools they march to the train, trickling
Past unsteady upright peacocks:
Stagger men their boys’ll be.

These are the same men, on different days of the week, drinking
On different corners, in different rags
The revolving door of the poor

I was both once, dog, drunk and industrious, working
Before I drank the collegiate Cool-Aid™
That was a long-long time ago