Words and images, Chinatown through a stranger’s eyes. For uten212 #lowereastside #lowereastsidenyc#lowereastsideny

photos by guten212

Displaced in 1979.

Careening through the sky,
With a passport with an unmistakable identity,
Signaling danger.

A Rocket Ship from Brezhnev’s USSR 

Between old world and new.

Cossacks and Pograms. 

Eastern Slavs and Brooklyn accents.

Landing at JFK, in Jimmy Carter’s USA.

Walking a Coney Island of the Mind.

A Coke and Burger on the beach the first day.

Stumbling from here to there.

Chinatown and out to Ohio,

Budapest baths.

Like in Tokyo.

A bridge in Paris.

Adventures.

Separations.

And back to Chinatown,

Back to the Lower East Side in constant flux.

Moloch expanding,

Blurring with bodies and colors of the collapses.

Jazz Singer and Synagogues on Eldridge Street.

Pickles on Grand Street.

A beer here,

A Spa there.

Russians coming, 

Jews.

Everyone chosen people.

On the sidewalk.

Displaced bodies,

A city disappearing as he walked it.

Moloch raging.

Blandness encircling, erasing, homogenizing,
Skyscrapers rising.

Not far from where Allen lamented:

“Moloch whose buildings are judgment!”

Images remaining.

Fragments of an unfished world,

Revealed to Saul,

Snapshots on the way home.

The silhouette of old buildings,

Condos and wrecking  balls,

Towering  through the sky.

What is and what will be.

Reminders in the shadows, 
Without them, there would be no beauty

Junichiro reminded. 

City lights flickering.

Waves of light,

circulating through a perfect night

the China sky.

Daydreams after a

Perfect day.

“Drink Sangria in the park

And then later
When it gets dark, we go home”

Lou and Gene.

Here and there.

Mary here, Gene there.

In between All their Little Words.

Magnetic Fields.

 “..a splendid butterfly
It is your wings that make you beautiful
And I could make you fly away
But I could never make you stay”

Flickering in the shadows

Treasures here, transient on the sidewalk.

Snapshots ephemera, street corners,

Painted walls.

Lights and colors.

A city that opened.

Walking with Sabine.

A child of the USA.

The USSR long gone,

Memories linger.

You don’t always have to go to the end of the world.

Sometimes, 

Chinatown will do. 

Even as its disappearing.  

After,

All any of us have,

Auden reminds,

“…a voice to undo the folded lie.”