cutting great neck

i wanted to save this title for when i will be visiting you.


i couldn't resist.

oh, how i miss you: new york!

those black buildings. the rain's vicious pounding like blood as it surges up to the ears, each angry drop like another long string of muscle in a clenched, bitter fist waiting to pounce. night in the city. being alone in the city. living in the city--

but that's from so long ago.

i've downloaded so many new york city songs today.

so many songs about you, new york. and yet you've let the bay dig me a hole--a three-week-wide hole, a yawning gape deep enough to make me choke on lifetimes of air--so black and so permanent that i will never be able to wash the ennui from my skin.

now at least i'll have both hands on the wheels, like teeth punching through the ear of a corn.




at times when the at&t net coverage falters and i have nothing to do, i find myself reading old word documents. and i found a poem i wrote that i forgot about.

how i miss being able to write poems.

catchtwentytwo
1
i’ve been wondering
how to start this poem
for a while now.

i knew a capital i would be too vague. or may
be too specific.

my limbs are tired. worn-out.
i feel like a bag of arms, and legs,
and fingers and toes,
and tired old eyes. i never thought
the word catch-22 could be applied
to life—
especially to my
life.

but now I know.

2
it’s funny.
truth is cliché. “be careful of what you wish for”

i went to manhattan.

my mistake: dark, quixotic night, skies
that fall on tall, metal buildings like rain,
human beings like puzzle pieces, fit together, and
the sweet salt smell of coal-hot nuts in
aluminum, yellow cabs and rainy streets:

yes. november—i fell in love.

3
don’t look up, and don’t look down,
is how the song goes. mother came to me
and asked me: up or down?

sometimes, i told her, it’s better to keep straight.
i have a world waiting for me here: friends,
word documents. but she has worked. worked hard.

up or down? east or west?
and, you know. i was in love.

4
today the skies were gloomy blue.
the sun was muck yellow.
the sunset was curly, muddy,
like my footprint in the sand.

this is why it’s a catch 22, a cruel
circle: it’s either past, present, future.
and i am stuck deciding.

5
you can say that a catch 22 is a triangle
but i have to disagree.

you can say:
one vertex is where i am right now
and the two others are interchangeable,
one decapitation, another cyanide, and i
only have to choose.

but i think that a catch 22 comes in six round numbers:
which ones, i don’t know.
i am only on number 4.

6
the light in my room is yellow.
jazz music.

i feel stupid. but i know
that this is as profound as it will, can go;
that there is misery, and implausible skepticism here
(about my poem, about my life)

and that the light at the end
is only another tunnel

but at the end of the day the world is just a matter
of atoms—of metal, of plastic, of skin,
and one home or another doesn’t count.
one me or another doesn’t count.
one poem. one ending or another.