Fighting on the Phone

We talk and talk until I lose the i in it; am left with just one letter that begins my name and it is not enough although i try to make it so by signing every message with this cross. and she is just vibrations in my ear emitted from glass square bright with steel; the ache is much too animal to be of much or real importance. After all as I explained to students just today, the smartest of us homo sapiens declared that we descend from apes. Our second cousins: monkeys, as one 12-year-old explained to me. A surfeit of words and dearth of rancor blots out self, absolving nothing. Hate: at least it cleanses in its spit of heat. All I had: a stunted sense of self and deadened hall, maroon and beige, I realize now I see it like I grew up on that floor. A hall I studied for an hour for the first time in nine months of living here. The walls were beige, the trimming brown, except for one edge which was white. The plainness had no room for rancor but it welcomed words in smug conviction of their hollowed out insides (all the ones we use are soiled and salvaged, used again). Savagely, we find new ways to maul ourselves: the phone, the empty hall outside of an apartment.

4/2/2012

I swear the buildings are strung
up by floss in this city lit
by fever and florescence.
You'll memorize the neon lights
of different train lines if
you last here long enough. Last
night I kicked a rat or rather
felt one scurry on my foot. I
screamed but only outwardly
(I wasn't really all that shocked).
I wonder if there's any air here at
all that hasn't been inhaled and
exhaled by someone who's already dead.
Don't die without coming to live
on this island, outlined in bridges
and spray painted poems.

Things I Hope to Teach My Students

Science is an investigation of the world and thus us

New discoveries are made everyday

Science is often wrong and proves itself so with time

There's no wholly convincing explanation for life and existence as we know it

Scientists were once understood to be wholly men who sought to better understand God's creations. Scientific and religious beliefs can coexist.

There is joy in understanding food, trains, storms, illness, gravity, skyscrapers, population

Everything in the universe is made of the same stuff put together in different way

All stuff is attracted to other stuff. No one knows why.

Life is really complex

Thoughts while walking to the PATH at 6 a.m.

I'd rather live even briefly in the blue bruise night presses into morning, the smell of love still anchored on my body, wearing off in commute away from her; the city. Last night I dreamt a boat overturned in a torrent of glass water heaved into waves high as houses.

91 Fahrenheit

The first day of sumer came early, roaring in through the open windows of a slum school outside the big city. Kids sat sweating through their standard issue polos in their plastic schoolchild chairs, glazed eyes unseeing what they're reading. Today there are no questions about how the world started, or how it will end, and while they read I read "Here Is New York," a tribute to that piled up heap of metal heaved from the earth that sits in a glow of city heat five miles out our window, an essay written on a day as hot as this one.

I'm lonely in a contented, calm, adult, rational way that's foreign, unlike the wild fits of isolation that wrecked me, younger years. The tug of wishing I were somewhere far from here doing something incredible. Of having a backpack weighing me down, a destination lifting me towards somewhere, something. Hopping across Manhattan from one shitty exurb to another isn't enough. How can I be on top of the world on Sunday, and in it's grimy gutter, of 9 p.m. screenglare and wordfill by Friday. The loneliness of writing in unpublished, never-to-be-published drafts of a half-defunct, go-nowhere poetry blog your two best friends and girlfriend temporarily, sometimes read. Drinking mint tea while my three roommates sleep, indifferent about potentially waking up the older asian girl who hasn't fucked in years who shares my room, glaring at the screen, or it glaring at me, until sometime after nine and one 3 hour nap already packed away, when I'll x out tabs and close this pernicious oyster that saps my energy, and read a bit in the dim spill of light from the bathroom, listen to distant sirens and think about the madness not just near here in the projects, unspeakable madness I'll choose to tune out, but a few miles away in the most famed and fabled and thus underwhelming city I'll ever live in.

Before the Time of Music

Before the time of music, notes drifted about like the weather. Sometimes the sounds fit the scenery so well it was hardly noticed: clear chords as you awoke. Crescendoing symphonies behind a storm. In dissonance is when it was interesting. A circus ballad while you broke up with your lover. A funeral march while making love. The contrast illuminated living, cast it into bas relief in the neurons of the witnesses. The first man to harness music was a man whose first child died amid a flurry of chimed arpeggios. The first sounds captured were taps, the once irregular rhythm of life he learned to make himself with just a stick and stone. Others came later. Leather stretched over a ring of wood. Hollowed gourds filled with seeds. Musicians were seen as magicians who made the world around them bow to their pieced together creations which mimicked the natural noises so well they ceased to exist on their own. New instruments were constructed to make new sounds until only a few remained free. The spacious sound the wind makes. A heartbeat. Breath. The sound of waves. And silence.

Silence was heard as a noise before it was heard as the absence of noise. But no instrument however grand or complex could make it.

Music once gathered in big open places, like beaches and parks and plains, where there was so much music it gave the spaces a vibration like a fourth primary color, a fine dusting of sound. People gathered just to close their eyes and hear. Still sometimes you hear the echoes in a great place, a few feral notes baying for their brethren.

Brooklyn Public Library

At BPL the man besides you falls asleep, cruising slow-mo into his copy of The End
of White World Supremacy. Your best friend is dozing, too, nodding unattractively into the plastic bound paperback Jesus' Son. It's not about God or maybe it is but the prose is violent and lewd. Which is why you like it. Why you picked it out for her. Her dad is a preacher but she is a writer like I am, like you and we all want to be, in this city where even the sidewalks are made out of words, recycled and smashed up and churned out into The Hardest Material that Man Ever Made. Which isn't true, or I doubt it at least, And I doubt that you'll even look it up, knowing I know that you could if you cared to, on any of many screens in arms reach from your swiveling chair of adjustable height. Go ahead. Find out. Or intend to, like I will, but don't get around to it. Too many links, too many inked up arms to ever stand out in this city. Too much to know. To forget. All libraries feel the same. These books aren't even in English. I could live my entire life here and never be at home. That's why you catapult yourself across the sky, right? To be the strangeman on another blob of green smeared on this sphere. Mke the world feel new again like just being born. Fresh like a cut or a hit or a dunk in ice freezing water. Like crawling back in and then out of the womb one fucking more time. Your cousin kept hers, BTW, informs your mom via text. Her womb, that is. But she's still in surgery. Still got HPV, and cancer. So who'd you slap this weekend, half-blacked out from all the things you're "over with completely," like subject-verb agreement, long division. "If y'on't get it now you might as well quit!" and other things you'll never say. Have you, have you conceded yet that the world's just for a few? If y'aren't there yet you're like me but we'll get there evench. Keep cutting off the ends of words like phone calls to your mother and the portion of the day in which you give a shit. Don't try. It's like realizing you're fat. What is? Realizing you're ugly. Which is a lot like sitting in the Brooklyn Public Library next to a black dude reading The End of White Supremacy only now he's awake, and you're dozing.