Soft Pads; Smaller Dots
The median age of the crowd was such that I found no challenge. The lot of us borne out of the same capsized boat, just tragically drowning in electric pools. The pride of having everything together here - our homes, friends, relations and lovers - leveled. The belief in the “such”ness; and just like that, as you are standing in a place you find the circles shift beneath you like soft pads. You find the typewriter “dinged” to the next line, blank page. Nothing sure save the dull click of your “go-go-go”, imperceptible to all but the most discerning ear. Nearly thwarted by this delicate call to life, this blood that twists in you daily, this tickle of a telephone call exploding in your pocket and jettisoning you back to reality. Nearly flattened by the permanence that lays across all you cannot hold, like the fine Odalisque draped across her fainting couch, grapes in her reach.
I lost you but I fell in love with “here,” and in my memory I will always be mapping Brooklyn like a lover; crazy-like. I ride a bike now, each pothole lunging me further into a heart-beat more break-neck than my current speed. I twist and turn around corners, craving new buildings, new faces. I throw my bike at racks, viciously, and padlock it with keys, half-hoping it will get stolen so I have something to hurt over. But it never does get; never has been. Sturdy old beater bike bleating in the corner while I do my things. Then I pick it up like a cartographer his pen at the end of the day and do the same with it, he who traces foreign lands. Like all I go at it alone; like all, who else shall know the hills and valleys of what I sacrificed in order to make it here?
Meanwhile the state of things remains, and it remains without import. I tried to hurtle over the fundamentals; remember how I tried to be the Nietzschian lion? As I shifted over hurdles I felt slain, shattered, amidst reams of notebook failure. My bravery yawned in the void and knocked me right back into the realms of supplication. I tried beer and fornication; I tried just lying there quietly and hoping it all would go away. And I feel as i write, I live. I feel the words pouring out as concretely as substance, sustaining. You will not break me, “evil New York.” I do not care if you throw me out in the gutter because at least it’s cool in there, and I will make friends. I am long for this city, so long for this life, but I tend to live to conquer and I stay til I win. And then like all soft mammals I’ll have shifted again, your most calculated functions re-arranged into slightly smaller dots.
