To drag queens and blood money.
In one corner, a girl quivers like a washing machine. A needle propels toward a vein. A jugular bulges, a book burns, and a butterfly lands on a filthy jar. The user has sores that vomit something like mayonnaise, and–somewhere–I can hear five toes curling.
On the avenue, where streets wrap around skyscrapers like flattened nerves wrapping around stalks of glass and steel, the man finds a urinal after ten-thousand miles of holding it in. The nuns with silver crosses cold against their breasts hand out pamphlets on the corner. And on 152nd street, warm bruises form along the jointed vertebrae of a prostitute’s arching spine.
Your first kiss. Smelling pyramids of rotting fruit, of mangos, papayas, bananas, kiwi, and the stench of burnt sugar at the funnel cake stand. Small, cracked mouths that multiply silences. A symptom, a broken bottle, an old woman’s body undiscovered for months. The lesions on a bald scalp. And an abandoned lover that waits forever in the cloister of Italian opera.
Have written in underground coffeeshops with existential poets and the beautiful waitress who spits in everyone’s drink. Watched the pigeons shit on monuments, the insane standing on windowsills, and the pimply teenager trying to hide his erection in the laundromat. The man changing in the elevator, the cabdriver cussing out the world, and the tourist staring at the sex of naked statues in the heart of Central Park.
Heard an alley cat tear at naked bones, a cruel goddess of the sidestreets. Where a homeless man feeds a sparrow. A woman gives twenty dollars to a stranger. Where the hungry children have legs like vertical snakes–huge knees like the bulge of a rat, midway through digestion. Where leaves die like children without names. Where blisters rupture. Where calluses resume.
In a backyard six feet long and three galaxies wide, a two-year old blows the perfect bubble. In a sidewalk restaurant, the model tries to glimpse his reflection in a spoon. The lawyer files his nails, and the subway screams through a long, dark tunnel. I hear a concert of termites evaluate a rotting beam. A girlfriend tells her boyfriend she’s a lesbian. And an insomniac plays a Nocturne in E minor at 4:17 am.
Have walked up the tenement staircase. A steep six flights of dirt-veined yellow marble steps, worn smooth in the center. The art gallery in a basement. The writer in his closet. The wind-chime made of broken glass hanging by a thread. And the seventeen year old losing his virginity to a bankrupt piano teacher on the thirty-sixth floor.
Outside, the traffic jam is stringing cars like seed beads on a necklace. The exhaust from every pipe, slinking out and flying upward to have a conference in the sky.
Museums like temples, altars, immaculate warehouses where the janitor recites poetry to oil canvas women at midnight. And down the street, I watch the moviehouse. The crumbling, glamorous moviehouse where the old fat couple falls in love all over again. The moviehouse that unveils the changing chronicles of a secret people, of the celebrities that convene in secret clubs with secret passwords and secret lives.
The half-light of a church. The overflowing cavities of certain hospitals. The shelter that seems to continually weep with bodies. The doctor that cries in the bathroom stall. The library breathing with its mass of letter, word, page, history. The young couple that lies on the floor between the biographies of Abelard and Anais Nin.
And I feel the dawn that tumbles over the city like a wave, like a flashlight covered by a sheet, like a sun suspended behind a wall of dust. Like a painter making love to every purple cloud.
I hear the conflicted artists that congregate in wombs of mortality. I see the angry athletes that run and throw and kick and box and sweat an entire afternoon of rain. And there is the cornered homosexual who feels the crunch of knuckles and the landscape of his jaw splinter into dust. And there is the barefoot girl who watches him fall, the bones of her feet raised like ancient scars. The bones of her feet as delicate as the structure of a small bird’s wing.
The boy with green hair and his girlfriend with two rings in each nipple. The theaters (enormous or clandestine) and the assembly of the audience, they are running, running, running. The sound of spray paint on brick walls, on cornershops and rebel fingers.
In an elevator, a delivery boy vomits from motion sickness. At the community center, groups cluster together in tight ringlets of identity. The Mothers Without Daughters, the Friends of Crime, and the Suicide Club. Behind the bakery, an old woman feeds a wide-eyed child.
I have listened to the fortune teller read my palm. Her fingers impregnating my lifeline with a spell. At the intersection, pantomimes stand still on silver unicycles. Their hands become words, their faces become novels. In the center of the plaza, a huge fountain erupts. Pennies, nickels, dimes. They shine like phosphorescent eyes, metal testaments of hope.
I have wandered the market on Saturdays. The sculpted ice and the glistening vegetables. The buckets of fish-heads and the clusters of roses opening themselves the way mouths open for a kiss. The torsos of hanging beef. The mice running like terrestrial darts. And the limousine stretching–always–like a cat.
I have noticed: there aren’t any stars. Night is fluorescent, grinning, raw. On rooftops, the Vs of twelve antennas hold the moon between their wire forceps. Gardens sleep in higher altitudes. A paramedic wakes at midnight for the graveyard shift. A rock-star overdoses in a night club. And a homeless man falls asleep in a telephone booth.
Into gloved hands, a baby is born–a cord is cut, a father and mother are made. In the interstice of a single cell, a virus meditates and murders.
I hear the swell of music inside a conservatory down a block or up one. Is it coming or going? We never know if we are entering or leaving. The violins sweeping in a suspending transience, the way hair rolls down a sleeping back. The city sirens are momentarily abandoned. A woman pins laundry to a clothesline.
Telephone poles are attacked by swarms of penetrating staples. Flyers are ripped apart by a changing city, by a day that doesn’t pass, but by a day that runs. In a city where the pot-bellied construction worker becomes a gymnast. He balances on steel beams that stand undressed one-hundred feet from earth.
And I am a witness to everything.
Sleep becomes a thing of every hour. In a city that we build and destroy and rebuild every time we close our eyes. In a city that is a compulsion of hope and fear and dreams. Where we are created, and where we are forgotten. Where bodies shift, and graveyards creak, and history rolls out like a sticky tongue. Trapping the ghosts and the structures of time. In this city where we stand in a paralytic slum, mesmerized by every sense, taken by the desperation and the dream. Where we will hang on the syllable of tomorrow as we have since every yesterday. In the city where we have always hoped, since time immemorial.
Filed under: Blather on June 7th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
