Looking.
I’m always looking
For the right poem.
The right song.
The right feeling.
Homesick at home.
Coney Island Whitefish floating along the Gowanus Canal down the street from us.
contaminants seeping up from the waterfront,
The cleanup at public place is not moving very quickly
“steady levels of contaminants in the groundwater …”
developers screaming for more, always more, feeding the growth machine.
Looking, I walk down Ninth Street, stopping at Principles GI Coffee House/street bike clubhouse, where Brad is reading about Feral Pockets in his poetry reading.
We drive up to Cortland, NYC, where Apes of State plays song after song about losing and finding, looking for something, “sober intentions,” with a group of us, sweating in an old church, singing along,
“No they can't kill us all”...
Everyone joins the chorus:
“On to the next one,
And it's on to the next one, on to the next one..”
Back in town, I’m trying to write something.
Its more than dangling modifiers that make a poem Dad, says the teenager commenting on my odyssey through poetry.
They play banjo better, write sentences with more pathos.
Still I try, watching the kid grow up.
I ride from Brooklyn over Walt’s bridge, thinking about the ferry on a metaphysical journey to the Palestine demo,
Arriving, someones screaming on the bullhorn.
“Can you move your bike?” incists a women with a mask outside the speakout on Mercer Street. The encampment was raided earlier in the day.
Good to see you too.
Its getting hot out there.
I ride off, between the cars and trucks,
Old clashes, “united and divided” as the spectacle looms, democracy on the precipice.
“Frogs continue to ignore rising temperatures.”
Down Houston to Chinatown where the dumplings soothe at 169 bar.
My friends share cheap beer chatting about old selves.
And I make my way up to St Marks place, perusing the stacks at Village Works,, taking in a little bit, a Kathy Ackner novel here,
Postmodern porn there, Reverse Cowgirl, there, books and zines of semiotics, to look cool on the subway,
Manifestos, subterranean homesick blues from here to there.
Chatting with Damian and Joe, still homesick.
Damian and Dominique are there signing zines, full of stories about losing themselves.
Barbara gives me a book about the Fugs and a magic bookstore.
I pick up a copy of “My Keys Don't Fit These Locks No More”
poetic homage to that lost and found and lost #homesick feeling of being in a city as memories, signs, symbols, things we remember are disappearing.
I sit down to read the stories, thinking about swimming in the Bosphorus, hiking from Venice to Constantinople,
Meeting for beers with friends in Belgrade.
Balkan dreams about jumping in the water, between this continent and that.
Wondering what happened between Holy Roman and Ottoman Empires,
Its a mystery, these crumbling empires, wars, maps redrawn anew…
Thinking about my friends and the poems they will read,
Bear and Japhy and Gary Synder and the Turtles.
Ted Berrigan and things to do on speed.
JC and the Crocodiles
Brennan fucking the pain away, one poem at a time, recalling Peter Shap.
One May after another, through our lives.
Always looking, not quite finding,
Striving, seeking, hoping, looking for something, hoping for diamonds in the seaweed.
Coney Island Whitefish.
A used syringe on my street.
Buzzing the pain away.
Ever lost in the infinite jest.
Plastic bags on the sidewalk, that Pete Seegar picked up walking every day.
Life sustaining.
A car honks at me to get out of their way speeding on their way to a red right.
A strange city, congested with contradictions, crashing, along with SUV’s into bikes in their blind spots.
Careening through the city, alive, dreaming, running into stark reality.
Sublime to the ridiculous, its not at all clear.
I’ll be your mirror, dark broodiness, curiously uplifting.
Back to books, piles to explore,
London skies dissolving memory, poetry of our dreams with Lisa and Peter.
There’s gotta be more to it than that.
But maybe there isn’t?
Thoughts drift, stuck in the reflections of images, mirroring silhouettes bac at at us, shadows,
Look at the emptiness, in the sea, in our dreams.
Draw a line from nothing, says Elizabeth at Judson.
between ourselves and oblivion,
God and that empty interior.
Our souls and the garden,
Our lives and strangers, intersecting on the subway,,
Dangling conversations,
Whirling
Around and around
Draw a line between us.
Whirling through time.
Connecting, separating,
Lights in a kaleidoscope.
A tape about a technicolor dream I searched for on Greenville Avenue in the fall of 1987, stumbling upon it at Metamorphoses Records, the New Bohs demo playing, incense burning, raindrops falling in the Texas sky, no one home.
A bootleg tape someone recorded of jazz at the Caravan of Dreams, that pointed at something.
I tried to write about it all, looking back,
I stayed up all night, drifting off, in between shifts on Market Street in 1995.
See what divides us, whats moving through us, around and around.
Between ourselves and the trees and ruins, strangers and ourselves.
Dad, lets go for a hike says the teenager at 630 AM before school.
A cup of coffee and a playlist, we run away from it all for a day.
Enough doing, time to move, to feel it a little,
On the road again,
Pinefire “dance-on-the-ashes”
"who i was yesterday is already gone and who i am today isn’t who I’ll be for long…”
Time to write a life poem about four years of high school, pandemic to Berlin to Odyssey back to Brooklyn, on the road, by way to Millerton, New York, population of 903, looking for cemeteries, stumbling through old ruins and vintage shops, along the way, passing shuttered asylums and dinners, looking at freedom between crumbling farm houses, junk shops, a shattered psych ward, scenes from Girlhood Interrupted, old bones, flea markets, a cheap cup of coffee, recalling Leipzig buddies sleeping over, hung over trips to Munich, South Tyrol, off to Boston, Just as my dad arrived seven decades prior, another poet, here then there, for a second here, before leaving, lives passing.
Sitting by the water, looking at all we have.
Sand between our fingers, canvases in the sand,
Sandcastles rising, crumbling, the order of things can be messy.
Waves hit our masterpieces, lines disappearing in the water, leaving sweet nothing.
Watching it all disappearing,
Back to out to the ocean, waves crashing on the sand.
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