21 april 2008

princeton junction/

wood-paneled benches attached to the wood trim around the windows and the rest of the blue-tiled wall. large gray I-beams supporting the angled white terra cotta ceiling. an american flag hanging from an overhang between two whirring ceiling fans. a convex mirror across from the three ticket windows. an advertisement printed on the floor. above the doors leading to the platform, a sign flicked on in dull orange letters: TRAIN APPROACHING.

*****

in politics and government, the only thing more pervasive than corruption is incompetence.
corruption is not sexy; it's hardly ever spectacular. it's a daily grind of a multitude of tiny gears. things get done within the machine and in the path of the machine. the only variables are its size, speed and orientation.
nothing is stronger than a guild structure, or pyramid. the upper reaches, the only ones at which accountability is at least asked for and feigned, are utterly disconnected from the daily realities of those at the bottom, the beat cop or the clerk mailing out tax bills.

*****

there's a freight line that runs parallel to the light rail tracks. a slow-moving train sometimes passed by the 22nd street station while he waited. he could see the rails bending and compressing as they were pressed down into the earth by the great grinding wheels.

*****

it's depressing seeing the way real people live. by real i mean real poor.
three women at the police station with two young kids in tow: one was taken in to tell cops how her man had choked her last night. the other two, ignoring the kids, said it was hard for her to do.
they sat in the lobby, sending texts to each other and complaining about their phone bills. one said that when they left, she would go find her roommate at work to get her share of the bill, $45.
both women were fat and shabbily dressed. they looked abused. are they satisfied if they get beat up less by their men than their friends do by theirs? who knows what kind of job they have, if any. health insurance?
maybe bayonne is as big as a country for them. i don't imagine they would even go as far as jersey city except for a custody battle.
one sure thing in bayonne would be to run a liquor store. some things american never change, and hard-bitten destructive alcoholism is one of them.
the third woman hadn't come out by the time i got the reports and left. she was having photos taken of the bruises on her neck.

18 april 2008

safety net/

live in luxury. recuse and abstain. on the waterfront. once in a blue moon. undocumented and unauthorized. superstructure excavation. impervious. HYPERBOLE. buzz. juice. success and achievement. restore what has been forfeited. reclaim what has been lost. new names for old men. landscape rowhouses. easy steps. savings and loan. payment center. free phones. nature's palette. exchange place. a model of prosperity. high efficiency. cool customer. open space. growth share.

15 april 2008

tax day/

fabrication. withdrawal. nickel and dime. death by gravity. beacon oil. biofuel. plumb the depths. it's not your time. keep your word. a change in culture. well-oiled machine. marching orders. storage facility.

jersey lanes/

a piercing new image
in pyramid club karaoke
you wanna be someone, make a difference
propane sold here, so dust off the grill
summer is upon us
your polyglot pulse quickens
AND AWAY WE GO.
this is just a rough draft landstar
with worldwide packaging
teen graffiti judges under the train tracks
avoid the traffic and express race relations in a cage
auto pride in an advanced machine
the mark of a true supersonic so-and-so

I can see the front yard in as many ways as I have memories of it. It had a totally different aspect according to the season, weather, time of day and whatever I happened to be doing. The driveway took on a soft, sandy texture if I imagined it as Wrigley Field's warning track, or the spongy hardness of a tennis court, or the thick turf of the Soldier Field endzone, with yellow Wiffle bats stuck in the hedges as uprights. This made it unrecognizable as the same wet slab of pavement across which an aunt walked from her car for Sunday lunch through the kind of soaking rain that made the grass glow a deep, lush green.

The varying light and my mood even changed the contours of the lawn, smoothing it level after it was mowed in a perfect striped pattern, or allowing it to slope down toward the neighbors' yard and making our house appear to be up on a hill instead of at the bottom of one, as it was, while I lay on their prickly, over-fertilized grass. I can still feel the texture of our lawn in all its variety, from the thin, sparse strands, like an old man's hair, under the shade of the dogwood trees or on the hard-packed short slope on the other side of the hedge, to the thick clumps of sweet onion grass by the front walk.

One day as a young boy, fearful of bumblebees after one returned my stepping on it by stinging me between the toes, I tried to ward them off by cutting each clover stalk with a pair of scissors and taking away the white blooms that attracted them. But that was in the back yard, where instead of the neat arrangements out front for public consumption, wild profusions of asparagus and raspberry plants, dark secret spaces under the lilac bushes, and even a barely remembered pumpkin patch prompted my imagination in all its fantasies and fears. I could construct whole worlds there, and often did, cheered on by the power lines and the three towering silver maples, whose leaves rustled and rippled and flipped over to reveal their light underbellies when storms approached. The heavy air would be pushed aside with a few strong gusts, while fat raindrops began to fall, too real for me, and I would run up the hill to the house, leaving my things behind.