Dirty Old Town

Pastel vinyl siding rock and roll New Jersey hey I saw you in the kitchen last night
woke up on the floor, man, I should go home but what's up today have a beer
for breakfast I can hear everyone laughing and the lights are on,
turn on a light or two before the sun goes down

How haunted is that, not too much, rootless people do I have
a land to belong to man, have you ever been to Fairview? I
haven't in a long, long time. I think I know who has or would be
maybe we should start a band, hard core something stay up late -

Man, is my aging as poignant to you as it is to me? Fairview's
32.9% non-families sounds about right or like how does the census
understand what happened in my childhood when all the light
was water grey. The smell of spring time by the tracks, an empty park.

Shit, is there an ancient force beneath the linoluem soul of chaos
wood-paneled carpeted staircase Jersey City for the day
Strange ungovernable child atop the sink with broken glass in hand
No not within my blood my feet upon the land just open me a beer, man.

Deteriorating

Where in the overall framework, the overall time line, the overall arc
of utopia do the next 24 hours fall
I ask myself each night

This is why I'm going mad.

Are we in the failure upswing success downswing midswing halcyon
memories, ease, these lonely hours of peace or descent who knows
each night.

Written over the course of several nights

Disaster just around the corner means these are the best days,
best
years
of
our
lives! But of course every day all day it's
disaster just around the corner. There is no living in the present
without the disaster, coming faster, oh!

Is it another night again now? For whom
did the disaster come today? Not me I'm on
a slow-rolling plan and if I do not spend
all day
every day
thankful for that I am a monster from Hell.

To be from somewhere, a sense of home!

It came a little today but unclear if it's within
my personal Utopian framework to be itself
within the opening flourishes of
the disaster

Are we now in the next day the quiet hum of
days of plenty looking back I remember you bustling
from room to room and family is safe and alive its
radical we're radical it's a salad day night or else
it was a warning, and not the first.

Decades

there are rules for watching it

know that it changes, day to day

which decade is it now and will it

be another in an hour my inner

sense say 70's but I must prepare

for any moment it's the 40's the memories

when does it end but then again

when does it start who else is

meandering through time with me

tonight to hear on this day that

on that day this, and it's a marathon

on this day of that year of course

they took the boys aside and taught

them all the wars the girls did

all the reading though so if its

books they'll know but this

shit isn't books its wars its

presidents (it's Nixon mostly)

right now it's the 60's or 

the part of the 70's that feels

like the 60's on TV to one so young

and fresh as me. When will they give

the rules again I start to lose

the sense

Calm Deep Dark

Cats sitting sadly staring into space me too, my friends, me too.

And tomorrrow? Then as well, then too, the morning first, and then the rest. 

The day is full of paintings or of numbers, formulas, your choice, and space.

And then? The same, my dears, and night as well, and pauses in between. 

Waking up in the Valley After a Troubled Sleep

it's strange but I love the sound in the valley out of body as it is and also the most recognizable of the things the valley does to the body but since I never see the welcome signs nor register my hunger as a welcome sign nor see my distorted body in the mirror as a welcome sign it is the sound that welcomes me so soft with undertones of bellowing and loud ticks as a welcome sign my own ticks
as a welcome sign welcome to the valley I know, I know I've been here before in fact several times this year
well yes of course it feels unsafe here but think how it is up there on the peak the things you can see and once you see them you have to take care of them what? This year just started? The fiscal year I mean I think in fiscal years because you get to say when they start based on your obligations and your debts not stars I'm no hippie so the stars won't help me plan my trips to and from the valley what? I mean I'm not a hippie that way. I mean I've stopped believing in anything other than debts and obligations and that means calendar years too so when I say I've been here several times this year I mean not since a few weeks but since July.
Yes the sound in the valley is my favorite is at its loudest now and also how heavy the gravity is that how it always works are you lighter on mountains or is it just the air that's thin not you and then it's hard to breath? But it's in the valley breathe comes heavy and how loud! How loud it would be with the softness surrounding the accent on the keyboard and a sense of song I heard it first from the alarm clock as a child (the ages run together) but it was the Disney clock, golden, playing bippity boppity boo and Boo! the sound had changed and I was there, or rather here I guess since here I am but at the time of course it was my mind and not my body and feeling them separate I knew not who to tell.
But now I have the language the language of topography and expectation and of sound I love the sound the confirmation not I'm not avoidant just insane and trapped or on vacation I can't help right now can't make decisions but why should I this American obsession with productivity I'm simply a sophisticate in Europe they all take vacations have you heard? So I can't see beyond the sounds the mountain walls green slopes and distant tumbling rocks approaching but so far I'm safe. There's danger but the sound alerts you, so

Matinee in Winter

Rosewater mothball fish perfume what heaven is this am i dead

such ghosts as these beside me now one block up and one block down

the city peeks around and buzzes with my comrades late, in silk, asleep

and then at last the train. Outside the city limits and straight off into the sea.

Mothball candy tin of rose are you my age or older, much much older have I

been here so long to be like you I'm sitting on the curb a single cigarette unsmoked

white sneakers risky in the street it's summer and I look my age not yours, not yet,

who are you? I'm trying to explain the past 5 years and how to pull you back

from internet abyss are you my friend, young man, or just another woman

in the cinema with friends, for once, the gals, faint plastic scent of

rosewater mothball fish perfume our chance is gone it always was when I last saw

you I was young and walking through the park at night and drunk and warm and now

Glaze

a film, a piece of plastic, a cloudy pane of glass.

I wake up without a thought in my head, and so I continue.

edge of the ocean, no clocks, no goals.

I move through the day with an eye towards the end, and so it ends.

blurred pastel, soft sounds, asleep.

Having freed myself from want, I die.

Translucent train of thought towards nothing.

And yet I live, waiting for something to happen.

Urbanist

erased more now than

years before more

afraid and yet less

thoughtful how

afraid and yet more

powerful but how

the country terrifies me

now the nights, the trees

the money for the roof erase

more now begin again

afraid of never

getting better how to

spend a month in bed reset

an early fall

at night in Union Square

away from wolves

or whatever they were

are yet more awful now

Generations

The face of the enemy is

on me!

Sneering, I'm not who I look at

neutral absorbent faces all around

I'm now fully faced with mirror-sharp

certainty that I am me and my face

is absorbing others now, the past now

the corners of the image

on me

through me seeding chills in faces I

once found mine

Roleplay

I am an old man a master of my craft

I have learned so much and how it pains me

lo these many years and for what, I am

heavy with tragedy all around me by virtue of

being observant "life is hell" I say to see a person

sleeping on the street, which I so often do, I mean see

not sleep. But what could be more tragic than me, my 

mere appearance, an old man, my wisdom dulled by

all I do not understand my doubts that life has been well

spent. An old woman would not be so tragic, I am sure,

having been old for almost always, and so good at it

at that.

Forgetting a Task, Avoiding a Call

Who are you failing today? In hypothetical old age
what will you remember you did today, a Saturday?
Did you take down the tree and think how far you are
from radical to have a tree at all, to kill a thing and own it,
most melancholy plant. But you hate plants! Plants kill and
you kill back, that's the way of it. It's cats they kill, your friends you've trapped;
they're evil! if you release them they're a pox upon the land
and then you've failed both them and birds and surely you've
failed birds enough by now. The windmills and the planes and city lights
you love the city lights! You should love the country but you don't,
in winter in Times Square alone at night you're fine, not railing
at the ads you justify the ads you don't think they're the problem
they're just jobs, you think, it's all just jobs. The city lights and winds
and Christmas trees and cats; the birds aren't jobs, you think, but could be
and garbage is a job so that's ok and the dishwasher saves water, so.
Maybe you're not failing anyone! It's Saturday. Your friends are fine and
you're no hero, perhaps won't make old age at all to look back and regret
so sleep now, while you can, turn off your phone, be quiet, let the plants
die slowly in their thirst.

My Field

Rot at the heart of the center of Culture, I get it now;

$25 and anything beautiful is anti-revolutionary, it all makes sense,

how it falls apart and we blame artists for existing, for inhabiting these rooms -

I see a thing that moves me and I hate it, more to know it's work or whats its worth is,

it's just my work, my worthless work for no one, no one much, why even bother

in our culture in our country in a shrine to female-bodied demigods and old money, study,

library, muse, white-walled, climate-controlled, thing-to-do-on-rainy-days-and-hate for what?

For whom?

Not Over It

How long have we been in the valley?
No longer do we mourn an end but did we ever?
Do they end the year with music anymore,
reminiscing sweetly on the recent past, or is it that my
tv habits changed? My tv habit is to love it with no shame.
I said so last year, say it now. When I did not love it,
and was young, er, and moved my body more, I was
in a valley too, as I am now, but how long has it been?
I wonder. Has there ever been a peak or is it future. Is it future?

Historiography

Towards the end of a period of repetition, when
the next beat to be repeated is a reprise so long
in coming that its repetition feels new thus ending
what was understood to be a period of repetition that
on reflection, is unending. All this without any expertise
yet, no credentials in the field no clear methodology and
certainly no remembrance of the standards to be re-learned
late, late this new year (not now). May the year never begin
with falsified freshness, powered by an early rest, may it never
ring so false if false it is. May it always start the same, somehow,
as a reminder that all else shall as well unless
that is too simple now