Tropical Storms as Summer Got Weird

We would have been in Mexico City.

But that got canceled.

Weekend rains, Tropical Storms expected for the weekend out of town.

I rode to Williamsburg to visit friends.

Light drizzle,

Through Fort Greene, down Bedford.

Where murals screamed from the walls.

“You said you loved me, you lied.”

“Some things”

“Never change.”

Power plants rising.

Jobs disappearing.

Theaters closing, bars disappearing.

New York changing.

Crime follows poverty.

A man ran around the block screaming, “I’m going to fuck you up.”

Frack talk or rezoning,

Workers losing health insurance.

The aftershocks reverberate.

Down to Coney, along a crumbling path.

Swimming, watching the seagulls.

Brighton Beach forever.

A flat on the Brooklyn Bridge, a man stops to help.

Stoop beers.

Ed offers us PPE and a story.

We give him greens from the garden, mutual aid expanding by the day.

Upstate and down.

Rain on the way out of town, over the bridge, past the autonomous zone.

“Franz Fanon lives!” declares the graffiti on City Hall.

“Black is beautiful.”

The municipal buildings never looked so good.

Up the West Side, through the Lincoln Tunnel,

From Midtown to  Weehawken, New Jersey.

Waves of rain, are we going to make it through it?

North  to Rosendale, New Paltz, old junk shops, a detour through.

Dreams here.

Swimming and hiking.

Fog in the morning.

Could be Galacia or Ireland.

Stone buildings on water.

Spider webs and morning dew.

Walking past the Granery, past the Hemlock Glen on Eagle Cliff, around Humpty Dumpty,

Seeing a mountain, thinking of Frederic Church landscapes.

Back around Copes Lookout Path.

Getting away from home and the troubles there, the roommate with cancer.

The cabin fever.

Thinking feeling.

Images about the ditchdigger, who was in Poughkeepsie, now back in Falmouth,

Where the pubs are closing again.

Will any of us see each other again?

Old dreams, unable to shake em.

Will it be normal again?
Probably not.

That’s ok.

Who knows what will become of us.

Back home to

Essential work.

Where,
Raymond Nat Turner sees,
“We’ll always need Race car drivers roaring
down streets where children chase balls; like
We’ll always need peaceful protesters pepper
sprayed like cockroaches..”

Biking through Brooklyn, the street clash in Bay Ridge,

Fists flying, the cops looking away, defending their own.

Brown shirts vs a rainbow.

Who would fear a ray of colors?

Back down Forth,

Dreaming of Atlantis

made easy…

where

Evie Shockley saw

“intoxication blue across the porch… rose in the attic : :

 : sweet ghost, saturated, deserted :

   wait in the water, wait in the water, children : : .

 trouble (the water)”

Great white sharks lurking off New York beaches,

Making their way North.

The waters changing.

Friends dropping by the stoop,

Sharing a moment.

It could be a place for contact.

Reading about where it all happened.

What went on.

When Samuel found a home here.

Writing in the East Village,

Meeting friends at the Amsterdam Theater on 42^nd Street,

New York in flux.

All that’s gone now.

No deaths fir the first time in months.

Flux everywhere.

Ghosts lurking, pulling at us.