The following are a sampling of random, mostly incomplete and unedited, musings inspired mainly by people watching on subway platforms.
Pity the woman
Who walks lock kneed
Across the floor
For her eyes never rise
Her head heavy
With the crown
Each thorn a frustration
Self chosen
She shuffles towards
A simple future
Fetered, with blinders,
Helped along by men
Who only desire her
Couldn't imagine
Respecting her
And she will only sit
upon that one thing
Another job
She will blossom
only in retirement
A desiccated rose
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The man who sleeps across the sidewalk, under a wooden roof installed by the construction workers to protect those who walk under it from any debris falling off the new luxury high rise, sleeps in a blue sleeping bag late at night, when the workers are gone, all of his things resting next to him in an "I <3 bag.="" ny="" p="">
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Man playing the balloon at Bedford L:
What happened?
Did your parents love you so very much?
Is your trust fund so large?
Or, conversely, are your converse second hand? Did you drink your way, one way or another,
To this?
Are we all simply fish, climbing out of the ocean to you and your epiphany?
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Film idea:
Title: Dream Cheese
Three friends eat three cheeses to see what they dream. They drink wine and eat cheese and then, promptly, sleep. Each dreams the dream of the cheese given to them; different cheeses invoking different dreams.
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Homo Dejectus:
When I was just 18,
My mother did say to me:
"Son, you'll never be a man,"
"Instead," I was to see,
"All a gay can ever be,
son, a personality."
"Worse yet, a certain doom
Does wait," for those homo-fate,
"Of suicide, drugs or worse"
And with this said, one last curse,
She cried, and then plead
"It's such a lonely life..."
...
What t'say, now mothers gone,
Of these memories? Do I
Pretend wounds do not exist?
Does a child truly forgive,
forget a decades pain and live?
Or belong to that special club:
A gay man alone with
the ghost of a mother's "love."
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Diary:
I wasn't in new York two weeks when I saw the first woman, crushed under its gritty heel. Her head, the scalp twisted off in a curl so red, I thought it a hat at first. The train conductor, lamenting the slowness of the machine, wandered the platform. The passengers lucky enough to have someone else's eyes to cover or someone who would cover their eyes, hurried past, glad for that comforting, blinding pressure... Those alone, we stood and tried to understand the scene, solitary csi agents attempting to build a story from the fragments of bone, sinew...
I wondered why she had done it.
I was to learn.
I came to New York on January 7th with a tan, a single small suitcase and cash. I'd inherited a small fortune when my mother passed; approximately 50 thousand dollars of opportunity, pressed into my hand and signed for.
Within a week, I'd spent 35,000. It was shocking to see it go and I could hear my mother lamenting "abetting my lifestyle," just as she had on the phone when still alive. 24,000 went to paying down my gradschool loans, another 3,000 moving in and the rest on books, some clothes and.. Life. I admit to frittering away about 500 of it, but the rest... I do believe wasn't avoidable.
As a student studying TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), returning to the USA without work and without insurance, I was in a risky position.
My father told me, love in his voice, that I should "try not to spend all of it... We are thinking of getting some property, didn't we tell you? It's a beautiful ranch-style house on 2 acres up in the mountains. But we are trying to see if we can afford it..." Unspoken, but heard: you're on your own, Matthew. In so many words.
My sister, giving in any circumstance other than financial, had rushed to tell me about all of our father's expenses when I'd mentioned maybe asking him for help. "Oh, he can't. He and Karen have a loan on the truck and a house mortgage and Karen has been sick and..."
When had we started counting how much help we got, registering it on some giant abacus in the sky as ammunition for future fights about who was the more mistreated child..?
My stepfather, the inheritor of the vast bulk of Mom's things, was more comforting... But perhaps that was because I couldn't bring myself to ask him for anything.
It was January 31st, the end of the first month of my adulthood. I was mostly friendless, but IN THE CITY OF DREAMS.
Today I walked by the man who only plays "somewhere over the rainbow," busking for money from the Columbia students going downtown, on their way to clubs, bars and other exciting destinations. I wondered if he knew the story of the man who wrote that song, a story I'd heard on Teri gross's show on NPR, about his disappointment... That tinges that song and his other, less famous but more pointed song, "brother can you spare a dime?"
Another train arrives, I tense, but it stops and things go as they should. I'm on my way.
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