Genius (next door)

The rats are back on Avenue D, I watch them scurry between the hedges and under the cars. Their return is oddly comforting, one habit following its course, feels like home. I scrub the floor until every last dust bunny is eradicated. In my home country we call them dust rats but there is no correlation. I take deep breaths of Pine-Sol and it's almost as good as the pills at reminding me how to smile. There's no pine oil left in the formula, perhaps I wish I didn't know that. The evening reads like déjà-vu, the wikipedia entry drones how people also tend to experience déjà vu more in fragile conditions, and I guess I wish I didn't know that either. June ends. The lightning bugs are out, ephemeral, impossible to catch, they seem to beam their love language when they are just out of your vision. Summer carries on, ignorant of our panic, indifferent to our plight. Just as well. What I wouldn't give to be indifferent to it too. He says for a hundred dollars we can make piña coladas upstate for a month, and in my head I'm already mentally packing my bag. Down the street someone sets off another round of fireworks.

We know so little of what comes in this life. Less, perhaps, than ever. Maybe we're better off leaping into it, than waiting for an answer which may never come. Paint on the ignorance, wear it like a sword.

Yellow Lemon

A tooth hurts and instantly I lose focus. Imagine crumbling infrastructures and the emptiness of my coffers. Wonder if poverty etches itself into your bones like scars you can never outrun. My grandmother saved every scrap of clothing, every dried end of bread until the day she died because they lost their crystal chandeliers to a market crash and their father to the bottle and it occurs to me that after that she never gained anything again, her life was always one of want. I was born thinking some security could never be taken from you but I believe nothing now, there's too little wall between me and the street, too few inches between me and the pain that lives in me. The tooth pulsates and reminds me of my beating heart, how I once thought all of this meant something and now I don't know. Wonder if purpose sits behind the confines of a 9-5 society, wonder if I could find it if I tried. The ledge is constantly so close now, it leers at me while I pretend not to see it, pretend my goals are set elsewhere. My grandmother tried to make her goals and the ledge the same and we never talked about it, never talked about how my grandfather had to pull her out of the car, out of her own way, we never talked about the infinite sadness that lived in her and scared us as children.

We never talked about how some scars come inherited in your bones, a gift you could not return. A debt you did not know how to repay.

Run

By the time I reach the river, the sky is already painted in peaches and golds. A slow barge pulls fireworks up the river, police boats around it with their blinking lights. My steps are strong, willing, twilight twinkles over DUMBO and not an hour ago it was all covered in hail. On my way back, the kids are setting off their own pyrotechnics between the brick giants of the projects. I can't help but smile. The lightning bugs are back, morse coding their love lives into the night: it is summer. The evening is cool after the rain, everything smells like American youth, the humidity makes the foliage greener. Everything is a dream if you let it. On the way home, the tiny shoebox restaurants of the East Village move into parking spaces, plant flowers where before there was only concrete, New York City undulates with the ebb and flow of ingenuity, of life. We sat on the roof this morning and looked out over the skyline, everybody leaves but I have never felt more tapped in to the strange pulsating veins of this alien planet, have never felt more at home.

Sometimes I think I dreamed you into existence.
Sometimes I think my life's work
is believing my life here is real.

, My Girl

don't lie to me
tell me where did you sleep
last night

Sunday night stirs return, I lie for hours trying to sleep but all the quiet of a weekend sets my nerves on fire, races illicit thoughts around the edges of my mind. I jolt awake hours later, a deep dream on the tip of my tongue and I have time to think I'll want to remember this before it slips out of my conscious. Monday arrives not so much a sledgehammer as a persistent ice pick that finally ruptures the newly fitted protective gear around your heart, aren't you tired of bleeding everywhere all the time? I refresh the apartment listings, reset my ruminating pathways to run in other directions, make another cup of coffee to endure just the exhaustion of being alive, is it always like this ma?

I am all questions again, ma. I am all jumbles of unanswered despair and the downward spiral looks not so much like a threat as an invitation to rest my weary head, my traveling shoes. Summer arrives with a resigned sigh, and I am not strong enough to light it into fireworks.

Lava

Some days aren't yours at all
I wake late, move late, sit still, a brain of treacle, sometimes we think we need a rest but when we get it, all the demons wake up and stretch their limbs, giggle in the margins. I try to wait them out, but how persistent they are, how gleeful. Roving gangs of civil rights activist bikers ride down the avenue, ringing bells and yelling into the night. The less oppressed crowd into outdoor bars and breathe down each other's necks like they can afford health insurance, how society crystallizes in chaos. He calls me from the late evening across the ocean, midnight twilight still washed in peaches, that magical birdsong that lingers through midsummer nights near the Arctic circle, he says reading your news is like watching a country implode and we wonder when we'll see each other again. I refresh the apartment listings. The dog falls asleep in the crook of my arm. Rogue fireworks rumble through the night.
They come in all quiet
sweep up.

And then they leave. 

Pier

I spoke with the ocean today. At last I spoke with the ocean, whispered long soliloquys into the rolling waves, carefully against the watchful eyes of gatekeepers but still, unabated, there was poetry. So late in summer, this year a strange marvel, this year a strange answer to our asks of the universe, but once my feet stride into that surf how it feels like home every time. We lit birthday cake candles in the sand and reapplied sunscreen, when at last the ferry came to take us home I slept a peaceful, masked sleep and for short moments this life is so simple. We sailed across the williamsburg bridge in the late afternoon, climbed a roof to watch the sun set behind it, I asked him what he’d wished for over sweaty summer cake and he said peace. The life was not so hard, then.

How each wave breaks,
I thought,
And builds back up again.

Domino

Summer sun, the grass in the park is already turning prickly with drought and heat, the hipsters tumble out of their apartments in droves, fill Bedford Avenue with their attempts at cool. We meet on the south lawn, sit silent for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, wonder at how long it takes to die, how quickly everything can change. Turn to strangers and talk about our insufficiencies. Uptown, they topple statues, there is so much work to do, how can we ever think a white picket fence worth more than this? I'm looking at apartment listings again, I know it happens when my heart itches but it's different this time, it's really different this time. Do you hear me, I regret none of this.

On my way home, I stopped along the river to watch the sun set behind the island across the East River. Dark clouds moved in over the Statue of Liberty, sparking lightning at the edges but making no sound. Manhattan beckoned like a song in twilight, saying you can always come home, isn't it time you came home? and I had no argument left in me. I walked across the bridge as it got dark, watched the city sparkle, Delancey street is a dark back alley nowadays but I have yet to be afraid of this city, have yet to feel its ground shake beneath me. I'm looking at apartment listings again because I'm betting it all on you, New York. My heart itches but my soul knows exactly what it's doing and how could I possibly regret that?

Just because you are broken now
doesn't mean you always will be
and maybe that's enough, for now.

Stories Unheard

Summer swelters into existence, I go out to the river early but already it beats the breath out of me, already it drags me across sticky, melted asphalt. I am grateful for the early hour, for how my thoughts have yet to catch up with my open eyes, I can run in peace, in silence. Later, on a screen, he admits that he is disappointed with his life and that it seems to be going nowhere, and I can't wrap my head around it, when everything looks like a success from the outside. I wonder if we all feel like  frauds and then what the point is. The city moves on to a second phase of reopening, and it seems impossible to think we were once completely locked down, tethered to our choices.

A story calls to me from across the great expanse of the country. I've been hearing it for years, and trying my best not to listen. A star trail spreads, a deep humming inside my chest claims it knows best but it is no use until I'm ready. When you are set to line up that which you actually want with that which you are going to do, then we can talk about fireworks and peace.

I want for you a life of fireworks and peace.

I'm sorry it's taking so long to get there.

Street Spirit

A current of bikers flies past our windows, hands up don't shoot and they stop traffic with their numbers. The summer sun is hot, now, every move is carefully weighed, I had the apartment to myself for an unexpected minute and spent the time staring into nothingness while the dog paced around me nervously. All these pills to no avail, all this sedation and still you wake up with yourself. Perhaps we are only ever trying to fill our beds in order to forget that.

I closed my eyes today, deep breaths and a soothing voice in my ears to try to understand the maelstrom, but all that came out were tidal waves of tears, incessant, steady, a rolling rhythm down my neck that stopped my breath and shrank my little shoulders, how the mountain of my body disintegrates in silence, how I am reduced to rubble. I image there's a reason for rivers, but I've followed so many to try finding a way home when maybe I should have given up long ago. Maybe I cannot fill my cup by carrying yours through no fault of your bleeding wounds but because my cup was too broken to begin with, the river runs straight out and through. People are dying at the hands of their oppressors and here you are being your own assailant.

Another day comes and goes. It didn't kill you
(but are you sure you were alive?).

Solstice

There is no growth without pain, she says on a ragged East Village stoop, take-out pina coladas in our hands and heavy silences in our midst. The city lives on stoops now, I have time to think, and there is no pain so large I do not remember how much I love it. An old lover reaches out and says I have so many stories to tell you. Do you still love the beach? and I wonder what strange magic of the Universe this might be. The dog waits patiently by our feet, wags her tail whenever someone new walks by.

I woke this morning with a great weight on my chest, a rerun behind my eyelids, I thought I can't do this again but the thing is we always can, I paint my nails in bright pink and still exhaust myself along this river, I meant every word I said and so many more I didn't, the thing is love is more than stumbled words on a townhouse stoop in Greenwich Village, it is whatever you do after, and after,  and after. The longest day of the year is here, the brightest moment even in a sea of dark, I think I cannot do this again but the truth is I will because somewhere out there must lie a grain of magic still, and don't you think it might be worth a fight to find it?

Midsummer's Juneteenth

This little light of mine,
I'm going to let it shine

Let it shine

Let it shine

Let it shine.

Sink

How easy it is to wade in the mire, to let yourself spiral down the long, dark slides of your innards, how empty the inside of a balloon when you roll it over shards of glass in the gravel. He writes to say seven weeks vacation start now and you cannot begin to explain how you landed where you did, this jagged country of empty promises, this shining beacon of imminent fireworks. I'm running out of money, ma, I'm running out of steam, and I keep forgetting why I should replenish the wells from which I drink. Make my way back across the bridge and wonder what the point is. I said once I'd give up everything if only I could write and it seems I upheld my end of the bargain, but what did I get in return?

Genies are unmoved by your delayed pleading.

Be specific with your wishes.

Hiding in the Lion's Mouth

Early in the evening, when sunlight is still warm, I speed down the west side on a rickety old bike, mingling with unclear commuters and cooped up city dwellers, and tumble off on an unassuming west village street where the furniture has moved outdoors. We live on this curb now, New York reclaims its old ways, shrugs off that which no longer suits it, I dare you to question its beating heart, I dare you to question mine.

A birthday comes and goes, can you believe I've lived here all this time and rent was $725 then, what a world. The soothing voice with the rolling Rs says she'll stay a little longer than planned, you revel in the gift and daren't look it in the eye. New York taketh away, but oh when it gives, how sweet it does it. We ran out of wine, but we cemented a fact: we are in this, for better or for worse. Here is the permanence you spent a life searching for and just as long trying to avoid. Here is the pill that wasn't unavoidable so much as persistent. The secret to loving me is just do it, I am no more an enigma than any other, if you want the world just join it, we have the rest of our lives left to live.

I'll make room for you,
if you'll take it. 

Instructions for Dancing

How do you do it, she says, how do you want to live?
The hard part about some answers is that you don't know them, even when you live them. The hard part about life is that you have to live it, even when you don't know how. I had such a long run along the river today, all mild sunshine and cool breeze, I had such a winding conversation with you. You said all the right things, we knew all the secrets, I tired my muscles like a trick of the lights but when I landed didn't everything look the same after all? When I woke up, wasn't my bed as empty as ever?

June sweeps in like a kindness over a stormy sea. Do you remember how you used to sweep in over me? I am all bottomless ocean now, all hunger and tears. Perhaps the problem is I was the one with answers all along.

Perhaps the problem is you're the one who needs to listen to them.

Respira

Sound machines create gentle waves along the ceiling, I awake to cool air through open windows, the weather this year has been a dream while everything else has been a nightmare, how do you account for that? We sat on welded chairs in the Allen street median last night and she said Maybe I look at apartment listings in New York, I could drive this car back across the land and again I remembered how everything changes but the city remains. We can always come back. Or not. But when the foundations around us tremble this place doesn't budge. I listened to her reassuring voice, the rounded r and the familiar melody, and thought family is something we create.

I know you want me to walk away from the things that hurt, but I will not. I know you want me to want something more reasonable but the truth is the only people for me are the mad ones and I never despaired over that. We rolled home two water drums from an old lady's basement and said this is the most Brooklyn thing and the moment was the gift, not the drums. I know you want me to follow the script but I have veered off key all my life and never regretted it.

We are burning the cities to the ground this year. Let us build our dreams in their place.

Because I Can't Unsee It

I missed the vigil because I was sitting in a waiting room asking a stranger to shove a stir stick into my brain and whisk it around, this year is all loops and turns. We cry at stand up comedy now, life is too absurd to bother making anything up. You'll get your results in 3-5 days. The thing is I can't get out of these streets now, the thing is these wars are waging at the same time, the thing is we have to burn the whole thing to the ground if we intend to build it back up don't you tell me this ain't my country when I'm sticking around till the flames die out. I stay everywhere too long but one day it'll pay off. I squander my every opportunity but one day.. Well one day, what?

It's too late for games now, you hear?

Summer is here now, everything is here now, people are dying and you are squandering life, you owe it to the blood in the streets to make them better.

N 11th

It was all the rage when I lived in Brooklyn, I hear myself say. Of course, that was 11 years ago now. I don’t know how time passes like it does. The skyline across the river undulates, builds and changes, entire neighborhoods have sprung up and reached for the sky since then, and what have I done? We put in the AC units finally this week, lamenting how anyone else would not understand what it is to take life into your own hands like that, what it is to live in New York sometimes. The windowsill breaks a little each time.

I break a little all the time too, mind you.

But you do it enough and eventually you forget to hurt through it.

I had other things to say,
but sometimes I don’t know how to say them.
Sometimes your best bet is to sit real still
And listen.

Wrecking ball

It's like putting band aids on a wound that requires medical attention, he says, and there are so many things in life that fit the analogy. I'm taking all the vitamins they recommend me and still I wake with tears spilling down my cheeks, it's cruel. I'm looking for easy outs, I admit it, it's just that the hard work is so hard, don't you know I'm just one person and I'm not sure I have what it takes, is it possible you have any pills back there I haven't taken yet? I've started looking at apartment listings again, old wounds break open, old addictions provide their tacky adhesives, I did the god damned hard work and still here I am nursing these same bottles. The city is full of moving trucks, the streets are full of we've had enough, summer is here and I still don't know how to pay rent, is this the country we wanted to create when we ran away from the others? They ask when I'm coming home, but I have made this bed and somehow I'm still in love with it. I gave you everything you ever wanted, it wasn't what you wanted.

You wonder if it's time to throw out your first aid kid.

Go out in search of the scalpel instead.

Whelm

(the life is so long
yet so impossibly hard to hold on
to
if everything around you is heavy,
and sad,
why would you not turn your face toward sunshine
why
would you not let yourself rest
in that which is peace
Whose streets?
Our streets.
Set the world on fire.
Come to rest with those who feel
like home.)

and Out of Darkness

How many weeks we have spent removed from our sanity, from our skin, how long we have spent without the weight of another's body along our borders, it is no wonder we stumble, no wonder our vision turns blurry. I thought I could go a little longer pretending it's okay but I stared at the shifting clouds over Brooklyn today and they seemed to tell me I shouldn't. We have been here before and it was only ever deep cuts into well-trodden paths, did you know you could bleed forever and still refuse to die? I'm talking in riddles because the truth is too bright to look at, it will burn the eyes from out of your heart, it will knock you off your path and you have to stay on it, you have to keep going.

I know you don't want to. I know you're ready to give up and go home. But home burned itself to the ground.

And you promised you'd build yourself something better in its place.

Invisible

For three months we sat indoors, forgetting what it was to be human, to be within six feet of each other, what it was to breathe beyond ourselves. And suddenly the world reminded itself to us again, the state of things, that it was not enough to stay home and be silent because aren’t people still losing their breath over a twenty? Cautious, we flew down the hill to Brooklyn, wedged our bodies into the wave, and we joined the current.

This week I have despaired. Wondered why we bother to carry on at all, when everything we thought we could rely on crumbles around us. A little emperor sits inside his fortress and yells insults at the world from his gilded cage. The point is this: when they go low we must go loud; when they remove hope the right thing is to hope harder. I’m so tired, so tired of hoping, so tired of believing it all will be made right.

But what choice do you have? The children are already here, and they’ll be asking for answers.

Wouldn’t you rather tell them you tried?

blackout

A walk down Broadway looks different now, with the dark cloud of curfew imminent, with the dark cloud of the present pressing down. A hundred riot geared alpha males line Times Square and let me out through the barricades with a ma'am I can no longer appreciate. The streetlights are lined with names of the dead, Union Square is a jumble of anger and whitecoats, the entire length of Broadway is decked in plywood, when dusk comes they shut the city down and soundtrack it with sirens. You sound restless, he says, and I didn't know it was so transparent. I come home to a quiet Friday night and I don't know how it's possible. How are we not raging, how are we not packing our figurative hand grenades and getting to work, how are we not consumed with this rage instead it burns in my split ends.

I know it feels hopeless, I know the streets are slicked with rain instead of voices, I know you wonder at your purpose. But you were born a dandelion, raised in protest, you were fed the idea that there was something worth fighting for, that this world was smaller than they would have you think. It seems bigger than ever now, it seems everything is distant but your neighborhood has never been closer, your city has never been tighter and if you stand for nothing then what will you fall for?

The world is only falling apart if you let it.

June 3

A full moon over the East village, streets slick with rain and the regular interruption of police sirens circling the block, looking for illicit acts after curfew. Curfew. Summer arrived and we didn't have time to see it. My skin is sticky. A wedding is canceled across the sea. No one could have predicted a year such as this. I know so few things, but the ones I know now come into stark relief, arrive unapologetic in my heart. I'm doubling down on you, New York, this heart in me is useless if it beats anywhere else. The things you would save in a fire will always first be people, and don't think I don't know who makes that list.

I have only these two hands, America. I have only this one heart and a handful of years on this earth but I am not ignorant to the power of these truths, not ignorant to the miracle of having been given this breath to begin with. This pause is giving us a chance to think about who we are.

Who are we going to be, after?

the Sword and the Pen

but death from above
is still a death

How many times you can count a train as it passes in the night, how many times you can see color on white walls from emergency vehicles and roving helicopters. I begin to ask the question what does it all mean but the answers that appear in the periphery scare me too much and I put the lid back on the boiling pot, we are ready to explode. You'll need the answers soon enough; what will you otherwise tell your children? Every conversation funnels to despair, ever quiet moment, we lie in separate beds and stare at the same cloudy sky, don't you know that all we have left is our humanity, is holding on to each other, when the revolution comes who do you take with you? That's what we've gotten to now.

When the city is burning,
what remains of you?

Name a City After Us

The trains run past empty, well after curfew now and the cops are stopping anyone trying to get across the bridge. The island is closed. The world is closed, where are you trying to go anyway, what are you trying to do? We're only trying to change the world. When I was young I marched in hopeful protests, we chanted and cheered, believed our voices enough would make a difference, but you did not listen. We played nice, but you did not listen. We mad as hell now, and now you will listen. A little man with an invisible crown parades his military might across a lawn while the nation burns around him, it is easy to despair.

But I've seen this movie before. I read this script and it does not end here. This does not stop now. This city has seen fire, has seen fear and rebuilt. This nation was created out of the wreckage of that which came before. Our end is not his card to play.

It's hard to sleep at night now, I know. The ground is going to tremble for a while.

But when this war is over,
how steady it will be for us to stand.

IHEARTNY

(the only answer is:
you remember the things you know
the things you know matter
to you
and you hold on tight
real tight
to them till
the ends of the earth
and sometimes
that alone
will have to do.)

Only Questions

By morning, only one helicopter remains. The sun is shining, the sky a painful blue of blissful ignorance. My body aches, like it carries the restless sleep in its bones. I make another cup of coffee, take another few painkillers. Try to write, beg my mind for just an hour's break, just an hour's escape into the fantasy worlds I can paint with my own mindfulness, but rest does not come, the stories infiltrated by despair. A country runs itself into the ground while its leaders watch unable or unwilling to start putting together the scaffolding. I'm buying a car, he says late at night when the riot swells past my window. If the war starts, we go. The apartment across from me is suddenly empty, cleaned out. The moving trucks had a busy weekend, this country had a busy few years, the sky is ignorantly blue.

If nothing matters,
then what does?

You think now's a good time to find out.
Because there might not be much of a later.