Glancing Through the Shadows.

Blastin holes in the night till she bled sunshine...
-Mos Def

Look at the city: what you always knew, street corners sparkling, buildings gaping, crumbling, murmuring something about a past that wasn't; a past that wanted to be. Your life is here, and the life you want. Their life is here: the curbside mob. Dirt, trash, faded glory; look. Life washes against the city

And look at the people. People you can't even see, people as platitudes: heroin addicts, dealers, hustlers, students, cops, old, young, broke, rich, speeding by; the city flies. People who could be those things and aren't, and how would you know?

Your imagination knows.

Think about what makes your heart beat: the thin line between order and chaos, mine and yours, sense and nonsense. A man: hooded sweatshirt, sees the siren, ducks to look at a menu, retreats--looks but doesn't check the price.

The city watches, sees, remembers. It lashes out.
The nexus
between this world and the next,
boredom:
bright lights at dusk,
between the tracks of squealing tires.

A to the K

You've seen/ a magistrate inflict visible punishment./ Now see the invisible.
-Rumi

New thoughts circulate and satisfy. Is it possible this dreary place is everything I needed?

I remember rapping Cypress Hill lyrics in fourth grade. The "Crazy white-boy" naive; brought me to a new place, had me in a new mindframe: of knowing Bed-Stuy years before I used to get banana smoothies on Bedford Ave, C-train up top, record shop down low, sirens loud, sidewalk crowded, wanderers wandering, stepping to a steady beat.

A tourist-trap for me. Authentic culture gave me a feel for the rhythm but it was a rhythm rooted in Webster elementary, no P.S. attached. But then reality has a funny way of matching itself to the ideal. Ideas (tick-tock) have a way of keeping it real.

So many realities and so many ideas. They flash in front of me:
A shanty-town girl warning me not to go to the club because someone might drug me and steal my organs, she not sharing my confidence that my body was my own.

A soot-faced beggar, enraged, hitting his mouth,gesturing hunger,eyes wide, ferocious, ready to steal, to kill, ready to drag me into his universe, even as police dragged him from mine.

And fighting off a beggar in the dark streets of a city, me yelling his death, frightening even myself, his world close enough to touch.

Sleeping with the roaches in Mejico, a house for everyone and no one.

A dirty young girl on the subway. I knew her so well; but I didn't know the wide-eyed ferment, disorientation, vertigo-stare, her look; and her infant daughter slung across her hip; her smile, my smile, and yet a gulf between us.

What is this world? Have I stumbled across reality? The memory of pain is fleeting; writing about pain verges on the romantic. If we learn to feel are we forced into the deadly present?

Ideas trickle down as images float up.
I want to float too.
Or stand tall and paint a picture: look.
stand tall and scream:
listen.