May First Oh-Nine

4AM

breathe slowly and enjoy the creeping night /
boy huff puff the shadows with bushy eyes \ sweep out the ashes
till the sickness of venetian blades rising /
burns through delusions \ like a good blunt
smiles and twitches and refuses to grow old //

this industry of immortals, this city of vampires \
deep in our stiletto shoes, we are all a million years old /
lifetimes ago, we must have signed something without reading it  –
pitchforks tuned to disaster
and all tails pointed to a sleepless bliss //

—

10AM

morning class:

every negative thought is an intrusion!
he keeps himself gated up,

mind-twisted, like a peacock

yoga mind
(he progresses)
straining for half the world
like coffee, except coffee is unhealthy
he eats ezekiel and wakes up at 4:09
stretches harder and harder to reassure himself, leg             up so high

so pure
chops critics with his mind

him maverick

——-

5PM

i am nervous, skidding across the surface, aware of my short skirt
i caught an old woman / subway laser tag

wish, wash / gazes across
like being filtered through a synth phaser:
moods changing / attack and frequency rising

tremolo!
everyone so variably perceptive

——

8PM

and then somebody got caught under the L-train
clogged up all the hip arteries to the underworld
blood spills onto buses
unhappy transfers: people i’d never talk to /
asking me where is the J? M? Z?
Metropolitan? Avenue?

on cell phones: “did you hear about the person who died?”
shocked girl. so shocked.

too many people at a bus stop
eyes peer out from tinted windows, dreadfully
stomachs prepare for the crowded air

bag lady hands folded on bus
never asked for this
why people fussing on my route
whi’ people always fussin’

J? M? Z?

artsy artist says i’\m gonna be independent
finds an artsy bicycle

punk with no ears no more
i don’/t know anything about a fucking train delay

home voice:
Crushed Neighbors Make Friendship from Subway Accident

——

11PM

notebook smelling of cigarettes
charred flesh inside me where
pages turn fluff
gray hairs on a strangers’ head
music, never mine

tired cafes
where English sprays out
amid mouthfuls of beer
and chewed up diagnostics
lays afoot all dreams

hi-hats roll over
cracked voices

—–

12AM

runaway children
where are all the families you deny?
pierce your face with me
so we can retrace our roots
with better fantasies

deny our food
prefer to dive into ghettos
treasures from fetishized things tossed aside
but this Spanish ain’t ours: why hide?
walls hugging our romantic corruption
are so fragile

I dare not ask
where you come from, really
we all have our fronts
and our backs
who am I to deny you
your victimhood?
I’m content
we have our smokin’ mirrors to blur out the obvious lack of art here

Chinatown

I.

I, Mott Street Amazon:
fishnets and steel toed boots crossing streets lined with
kitchen equipment
porcelain sets / I trample on
all shy girls with plastic slippers
that smell like 99 cent shower curtains
sour Chanel baked with Canal exhaust
skinny legs and hoop earrings that dangle over fish
I beat down on all cute cartoon animals!
will have no bubble tea or slightly sweet pastries,
refuse pale skin and round surgical eyes
watch me squint
and enjoy my disgust for you
like a fortune cookie you cracked excitedly but stare at confusedly

Take tips from men who
beg to lick my unbound feet: call it Chinese nipple torture
call it whatever
I’ll be the bitter part of Made In China
still falling into the same exotic trap
but armed at least
with spike chains and surgical implements:

my dreadlocks past Grand street create
battlegrounds with each step
Cantonese wisecracks
break mothers’ backs

those men with boxes, in and out of vans
for restaurants that open and close
- and that’s a day:
home to where wives wok and children do homework

make sense of everything
old woman counting her lucky stars

—-

II.

I, Revolution retired
sleeves still rolled up to my elbow
ready to throw stones
at bourgeoisie in hats
not I -

I sent my children to the farmlands
sacrificed my jewelry for Mao
waited over bedsides
where soldiers died in quilts of flowers and tear-soaked letters
my husband in a casket of calligraphy

That was respect.
Now these sour streets I can’t believe
dust over bad language
and bad rice cooked in too much oil.
Raised sons but left with daughters
to a Fujianese dirt camp
not I -

I saw right through the Japanese
and the English
I watched my husband collapse
in a bed of whispers,
I watched my children enter buses
packed senseless,
and slowly, I too fell out of place.

counting the sidewalk cracks
arrogant child with too much makeup

—–

III.

Black stilettos meet Revolutionary sleeves
Neither in their proper landscapes
And so failed to touch

Lucky to be here, says
Mother rolling her sewing machine
fingertips humming of rice fields and industrial kitchens, warrior second
stitching together this town.

Kaufman Illusions @ the Surreal Escape

Alan Kaufman’s poetry
    reveals to me the idols
of this twilight culture, white vultures
    screaming of pain, not theirs, tearing
away at corpses left rotting on a battleground
      they refuse to participate in

Oh, that’s the aesthetic: white dreads
    for Mother Earth, comfort in mushrooms
for discovery of celestial patterns and blown-up brains,
    colors creeping through the cracked walls of the commune
ignore the infestations we live in

He told me,
    as he was tripping:
“We must suck at the great mother’s breast, the great magnet,”
 like leeches, he preaches:
      ”Everyone is confused except for me. I’m
       not confused,” he tells me
that he needs four hours to collect his mind
in the mornings over illegal EBT cigarettes,
     yet in his hippity-hop journey, he tells me:
“I gave a gift to you. Did you get it?” 

I strain to receive,
    lying awake at night,
listening to the throbbing of fifty-three dreams,
    all the molecules pumping through so many veins.
How many veins?

I am a foreigner here.
Alan Kaufman explains white poverty,
    punks and garbage bag ladies
he steals money from,
    calls them racist metaphors, condemns them dead
while they are holding his hand.
How he rages
     against policemen in peaceful towns,
   takes the outcast voice
 (they all do)
       the poverty, the weirdness
    piercings that penetrate the social fabrics
         we were born with, woven into our
skin with our DNA, we dye them away -
     Alan Kaufman knows.

But I am an immigrant, a hipster poser,
     a stranger in a surreal land,
privileged enough to know my Norton verse and
     traveled enough to know what is worse
than America is a lot of other countries,
     governments maybe -
           but is Anarchy safe?

Across the wall, the sleeping man is my subconscious eye,
      all night, I perform for him (he doesn’t know)
how I endow my voice, my moans
      with meaning for him alone.
While “my boyfriend” drools on pillows, three at once – I am incapable of loyalty, 
       he lies there beside me after a day of
          what? nothing. He writes and listens to music
loudly. He is talented. I don’t want to constrain him.

YELLING:
I don’t know! When! I got stuck! In this stupid! Hippie cliche!
Looking around me! Is this a Joke! I don’t recognize! My race.

I am not Kaufman
    I am not angry
    I am not political enough
        except when my mouth is dry and I need
borrowed tears to cry, which
        is rare, because I have my own 

I will not preach you
     my vegan goodness. For
we are all trapped like flies here
     in amber, sweet ego, not
a tool or a lens, not special
     but congealing.
As we believe we are flying, even though
      all the world is already frozen.

I am not one of them. I can not be.
I act damn Capitalist.
I collect books I never finish reading.
I scheme celebrity status, confess
    that even the sale of my body
    can be sold – I have been told, before I
grow old I want to burn through the cold
world with the lamest poetry I can sell

But I am frozen,
    amber never drips
above the horizon of the weavings in ancient patterns,
    Universal deceptions that
sail away into forgotten dreams, Bohemian
    and the dingy basements of abused brains, mine
        sleepless and failed
impatient to make my abstractions real