Tag Archives: poetry

Money Jungle

I Found That Essence Rare (October 5, 2006)

               I find things alone, when I’m alone. The sizes of things impress me. The look in a small dog’s eyes, the blank stares of cities living in fear. I look for deeper things, the Essence, whatever I am. Discovery is replaced by immutable laws. Perhaps it isn’t that we are moving too fast. Maybe we move fast to distract ourselves from this: nothing lays along the path of the speeding train. It’s over the hill.

               I lived in Ireland for three months for no good reason. I looked for the Essence and found it. But could I have found it in Wilmington, Delaware? Too bad we only get one spin at the wheel. Anyway, I threw a party once and it was a good time. Talked to two Spanish fellows about poetry. There we were, off to the side in a cheaply constructed bedroom turning anything in sight into chairs and beer coasters, getting riled up about poetry. They recited some things I knew and didn’t know. I slang a few on them. One friend remarked how great it was to meet people who could do this – just relate to each other over language barriers and the Atlantic. The Essence.

               The great tragedy of culture, that which can communicate Essence, is its absorption of All Things. All Things illuminate and contaminate, and it all comes out in the wash to a big, fat nothing. And it’s loud. That’s a dangerous way to build a speeding train.

               By the way, if you want to accelerate your search for the Essence, surround yourself with those who don’t speak English. The struggle to perceive and communicate the Essence will be like a beating bass drum in your heart.

               It’s not all good when it’s happening. I had a few different crushes in Ireland. No less than three simultaneously. But they amounted to a Big Fat Nothing.

               Here, the Essence is being pounded flat. It’s no wonder – Essence requires bravery, confidence, knowledge and openness. But there is always a murderer, a blemish, a contorted fact, an unflattering mirror.

               Bruce Lee once instructed to take what works and abandon everything else. The Gang of Four once said, “I found that Essence rare/ it’s what I live for.”

               I once said all this here about the Essence without fully understanding it. I’m dead now, as you’re reading this. Maybe. Wherever I am, I understand the Essence because I’m part of it. Maybe.

               Here’s how it happens to me: I’m walking along, minding my own business, and suddenly a small dog with big eyes, a big man with beady eyes, a strange building alone or 50 normal ones in a row, a joke that gets it so right, a powerful person getting it so wrong, a place that looks like home for anyone and everyone, shoes that command respect, music that’s accidentally good, noise that forms sonic structure, a car sexier than any woman, a hub cap sprung loose rolling cleanly through a crosswalk, people I want to know, children who stare at me, old people frowning, a waterfall of coffee into a cup, a mansion with wall-to-wall books in every room …

               These things, they take my breath and stiffen me up, slap me on the back. My tendons, muscles and ligaments tighten across my bones, calibrated closer to the Essence and ready to be plucked. I turn a corner and a new gale blows through me, playing a new tune.

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Money Jungle

Corpse Ash Dance

            It’s time to hold both hands to your face and think of the worst things you did today.  Did you lie to a coworker with your feigned interest?  Did you rape somebody?  Was your bill unpaid?  Think of these things with closed eyes and hands flatly praying.  Lay hands and bless your head.  Pressure will boil the sludge in you.  It tickles your throat and wants to come back up.  Remove your hands and regurgitate the hours.  Live another day and repeat.

            I charge my captors with the theft of my precious minutes of my youth.  You had the wrong man.  I was a nice person when I met you – you, a promising and attractive jailer.  People warned me.  And I said, “Yeah, yeah.  I’ll sign here, there and everywhere.”

            But ah, ho hum, we move to a new present, new presents, new president.  And we build Babylon onwards and upwards to reach the god we made to love us.  And if we find the wrong god, we’ll still believe and climb higher.  The one we made up has to be up there somewhere.

            Stab City, HELL – Dateline Infinity – Two youths, 13 and 13, dialed pi into a rotary telephone naked while a surrealist painted the scene with one hand while the other was embarrassed, caught red handed by a cop in a bunny suit on Quaaludes bought from Rush Limburger in the back of a new drug store that only sells non-salt margarine made in Belize by teatless young milkmaids who dial for pies delivered from a Rotary Club.  The police had no comment.

            A filthy confession:  This all means something, as the sections inform each other and enlighten to my general disposition.  I want to say things that make sense, but since nothing does, I say things that don’t, to speak truth.  It’s my job.

            This is a story about a man who was murdered, the woman who killed him, the family that covered it up, the man who loved her anyway, the town that couldn’t wait to forget it all and the man who wouldn’t let them.  The end.

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Short Stories

Rolling in the Deep

            There was once a beautiful building by the bay, one that gleamed a bright brown in the sunset hours. It did no harm to anyone. Generations of New Yorkers lived inside it, from the 1920s on. The building housed talented artists, criminals, boys and girls, women of science, men of letters, grandmas of warm cookies, uncles of ill repute, and cats (but no dogs because they were not allowed).

            Through no fault of its own, the building was sinking. As it sat in Manhattan, the city itself was subsiding, as it had since the last ice age. Scientists said that the Great Sinking – as the building preferred to think of it (if it could be said that the building had any thoughts) – had been occurring at 1.6 millimeters per year. And for over one hundred years the sea levels were rising. This had been the century of decline, literally.

            The beautiful building was sinking into the bay and nothing could be done to stop it. Engineers had their hands full with more pressing matters, like pumping water out of the basement of the nearby hospital. Firefighters were farther inland, setting up a new elementary school. The police focused on directing traffic away from the flood zone.

            To be forgotten about could hurt anyone, and if it could be said that buildings had feelings like people and dogs, the building would feel hurt. But little did it know it would soon fall victim to Cupid’s arrow.

            The octopus is known to be the most intelligent invertebrate of the sea. There are more types than humanity could ever dream; sneaky mollusks that they are, they have maps to the deepest, darkest ocean spots ingrained in their minds. In short, what man knows of the octopuses is but the tip of the octopi iceberg.

            The largest octopus could not enter man’s thoughts without causing panic, for it is a creature that takes up all the shadows and all the darkness man can imagine. If one true monster exists at the depths of man’s consciousness it is the Giant Octopus, not because it is specifically lethal to man but because man is in no way a threat to it. Man has discovered the giant Pacific octopus, which can grow up to 30 feet wide and weigh over 600 pounds. Impressive, but a mere flea compared to what lies beneath where light can reach.

            If it is possible for a building to have feelings, can it cry out in pain or sorrow? If so, we know that sound travels faster in water than in air. Did the Giant Octopus hear such a cry? Is that why it turned its slit-shaped eye in the building’s direction? And if a building can have feelings, can the Giant Octopus move out of the shadows to take a closer look? And if all this can happen, why can’t Cupid’s arrow ricochet off the building’s facade and shoot into one of the octopus’ three hearts?

            Yes, there was love brewing in tres corazones. Yes, warm feelings were crackling in the hearth of every apartment on each floor. As the building sank, the Giant Octopus rose to meet it

            As Cupid’s arrow was finding its marks, there were residents of the building who were falling out of love. As they saw their floors tilt and their walls buck, they thought, I’m coming out downside wrong on this deal. It’s time to split. Falling out of love with your place of residence is better than falling out a window of your sinking apartment complex. So, split they did.

            And that sinking feeling was all around town. Every New Yorker wondered who would be next. Who would go home to find that their dwelling had lost air like a flat tire. Who had lost some inches off their vertical like a ballplayer.

            Nobody really cared about the buildings themselves, just the stuff inside.

            The building that was sinking, the one that would soon fall head over heels, the one suddenly empty inside, was not an Art Deco masterpiece like its 1920s brethren. It was eight stories of plain, clean brickwork, and it let everyone walk all over it.

            The Giant Octopus was a loner by design. He wasn’t made to socialize. He didn’t know if there was another of his species around for a thousand miles, let alone a suitable mate. He had lived in the murky depths for so long, it seemed like darkness was all that existed.

            The fish that swam overhead never saw him, and the other octopi were snobs. No man would dare to sink so low, their vessels not able to manage the pressure.

            The Giant Octopus spent most of his life in blackness because he thought he deserved no better. Then he simply looked up and saw his love slipping down towards him. He knew he wanted more.

            When the first tentacle wrapped around the base of the structure, people saw it and remarked, “What?” Their interrogative had a tone of incredulity. In other words, they couldn’t believe what they saw.

            There are videos on social media labeled “sea monster dragging building down NYC,” “giant squid attack in Manhattan,” and “Loch Ness on East Coast.”

            People talked about a monster destroying their beloved building, the one they neglected to paint for decades. The one with cracks in the foundation. With holes in the roof.

            One thing that the building and the Giant Octopus didn’t know (and really, how could they?) is that this is the way everyone sees love from a distance when they know nothing. Someone is the victim of it, someone is the monster, someone is always dragging the other one down to their level.

            Would you believe that there were even older, more established buildings situated more inland that had a view of the entire romance? Would you believe that they looked down on the building and what it wanted? Can you believe that they judged it harshly, remarking that it was throwing its life away with this sea trash?

            An octopus arm can rejuvenate like a building floor can renovate. For so many years, the two lovers looked over the water at the same moon in the same night sky, separately, just from different angles, high and low.

            They had so much in common and they never knew it.

            Did the Giant Octopus reach out from deep, chilly waters into fresh New York City air, wrap its tentacles around the building and drag it down to its level, down in the briny deep? Or did the building, seeing the undulating cephalopod rising upwards in the moonglow, rush its own demise to meet it?

            Whichever the case, the lover’s clinch happened slowly. The Giant Octopus was tentative, holding its breath (both in nervousness and because it couldn’t breathe out of water). The building did everything slowly, and falling into its lover’s eight arms was no exception.

            They had plenty of time to back out if this wasn’t a sure thing.

            Much later, the people who didn’t get it and the fish that didn’t get it and the buildings that didn’t get it will see (either with their wall-eyed gaze or via photograph) the eight-limbed leviathan and the no longer pristine eight-story structure canoodling at the bottom of the ocean, eight tentacles weaving their way through eight windows on eight levels, the tips emerging from the opposite sides, a meshed embrace. Those fish and those people and those buildings will say they saw the whole thing: when they met, the initial connection, and the two of them rolling into the deep blue. And those fish and those people and those buildings will say that they knew it would work out all along.

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