This sticker is dangerous and inconvenient but I do love Fig Newtons

Saturday, January 5, 2008

New York Journals, part I

These are my New York journals, my Kerouac-lite prose-poems, in my default shitty style that I revert to when I'm being lazy or just want to write fast, but I'm posting them anyway (as I stated below) 'cause it was my first-ever trip to NYC and I was in love with an image before but now I'm in love with the City and these are my puppy dog love letters and also I'm a narcissistic exhibitionist twit, so nothing goes unposted. I'm hoping my earnestness is enough.

New York, NY 12/26/07
Like an outsider, and yet I belonged -- or I wished, at least, or I dreamed, deluded but delirious and HAPPY! stupid grin but who cares! -- it was a crowd at night, and lights, and lights, and lights, all up and alive and I was too, I had finally met the city and mood to match my own where the day starts at Midnight and all is movement, all is tough and mystique, all is lights across the Hudson a vision that's in the frame of every famous movie ever made that skyline, that star-filled-lights-on-black-sticks-that-stick-into-the-air, blacker than the sky, they rise and rise, and me all Midwestern wide-eyed awshucks I've never seen such blackness and buildings and lights -- it's a cliche, I know, but it's like a dream and I can't believe the view from my window in Jersey City. How can I be so at home and yet have it all feel so new? How can I see the Coliseum and Lenin's Tomb and the Bridge of Sighs and yet stand in the tacky, radiant, rushing, brilliant flash of Times Square and cry, a little, out of the corner of my eye, and get a chill? -- How can it be that New York is the greatest city in the world and I'm here?

A dream?
A dream.
Fulfilled.

New York, NY 12/27/07
Subway
Ground Zero
A church yard, cemetery a thousand years old, it seems
A boy, four years old, a headstone
1709
Dead and yet God's Will the faith of our fathers, so seemingly solid but I wonder what doubts entered a weary mother's mind...
St Paul's stands amidst the rubble of the attacks -- the asshats, the jack-offs who did this and for what? -- I love my country so much at this moment and I rejoice in our strength, our humility, and don't laugh, it's true, America is still a shy child in a world of bitter men...
The subway again, and we ride it with apprehensive confidence
Darling I love you!
Park Avenue!
Lexington Avenue!
Fifth Avenue!
The world is contained in this city and I am here and this is all...
The Met is too big to embrace, like a Madison Avenue concoction, like a darling young man, it's the entire sum of perfection, it's the compilation of genius, it's. so. fun. So much stuff!
And Rockefeller Center,
it's the reality of unreality, it's there and it's a picture, it's within reach and it's fake but then I realize it's not, it's there and I'm there and I go to mass in St. Patrick's and I am partaking in the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ and I am here and life, His life, the life of the city and all life all living all reality all truth is here and now I know why writers come to New York City...

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