The buzzing never stops

August 6, 2013

Hoboken buzzes with the sounds of saws, workmen busy as bees in the pits of this former parking lot under the window I used to look out from when this was still my office a decade ago.

Every day a new building seems to rise up to hide the view of the river and Manhattan, as the future blots out the past for all those who get used to a particular view.

The Manhattan skyline isn’t the same skyline I grew up with and won’t be the same for those who follow me, each snap shot capturing a piece of history we shall not see again.

I keep watching apocalyptic movies from the 1980s, if only to realize how they got it wrong, and how cities did not explode or implode as they once promised, defying the expectations that they might become ghettos, or even places with obvious two classes of citizens, the privileged few and the hungry, dirty, troublesome masses of poor.

In the new world order, poor betray poor to get rich so that they can be privileged, too, and so not to get driven out of the cities entirely, forced to flee the way whites fled in the 1950s and 1960s when they saw an influx of color.

Hoboken clings to the illusion of old and new, battles being waged to allow poor to cling on with the tips of their fingers – used and abused even by their own kind who see themselves as elite, but pretend to be of the people.

But the buzzing won’t stop even then as the city here and across the Hudson finds new ways to reinvent themselves, never satisfied, always hungry, always seeking something new that will always replace the old, not good or bad particularly, but always different.

Those who accept change rarely get crushed by it, and yes, some of us want what was, and is, and fear what will become partly because we never know when it will be us who gets driven out by the new reality.

That cruel year (from Poems from a Garden Wall)

October 7, 1980

The year 1974 was a hard year for me – not that any year is easy.

But this one marked a major change in my life. The poetry I had written up to that point was stiff and former – I guess the way Allen Ginsberg’s was until William Carlos Williams told him to use his journals.

My Williams was Rosemary, who I had known since Kindergarten, but hadn’t seen since the late 1960s when our lives took different directions. She flew with the jet set and I hit the streets, something less than Abbie Hoffman in stature, but not in rebelliousness.

Until I started to read Rosemary’s poems, my stuff was all rime and meter, most of which wasn’t very good – filled with every cliché possible.

I started writing some of the new stuff in this book I titled “Poems from a Garden Wall,” and while still far from good, the poems were a vast improvement over what I had written before.

One dated from early winter went something like this:

The snow must fall

And wind must blow
as winter rages one

I feel warm and foolish

Laughing with you,

Our cheeks pressed

Against the cool glass

We look out

At the lonely world,

And wonder why

We can’t touch it

And why the people

We see outside

Seem so hard

Frost bitten

Their faces fading

Away as they pass.

Maybe if we

Travel inside them

We might feel

A little of what

They feel,

Taste a little

What they taste,

Understand their

Rage as they glare

Back at us

We feel so safe

Here on this side

Our chill we think

Coming only

From the glass,

As we look out

And realize

What we see is

A reflection.

Not good, I understand, but my concept of anything, was never to strive to make art, but to keep doing whatever it was I did until I got good, making progress incrementally until at some point, what I did became art.

When I wrote that poem, I still worked for The Drawing Board, a greeting card company based in Dallas, but with a warehouse in Fairfield I took the bus to and from daily, from Montclair, through Verona, Caldwell and West Caldwell.

I wrote a lot on the bus.

By that time, Hank had been fired.  But I was still living in a rooming house, still licking my wounds over a failed marriage, smoking cigarettes and pot, even though probation did random drug tests I somehow managed to pass unscathed.

This was the year Nixon would resign, a year we all spent in anticipation of the event, and couldn’t quite believe when it happened.

In a rooming house, faces change almost weekly, so I made only a few friends, and no girlfriends, except for the part time waitress who lived in the house next door with a very protective madam and a host of other women.

Many of the residents of our house attended college, and so stayed only for a semester or two until they could find other arrangements such as with roommates.

Meatball, Ellen, Sue, Ed, even Mike – Rosemary’s cousin – stayed only for a short time before moving on, though Mike stayed longer than everybody except for me, and even I moved out for a time to an apartment in Passaic, until driven back by lack of money, finally moving out in 1978.

I suppose until then, I didn’t want to live any place where I was totally alone, and liked the rooming house because – except on holidays – someone was almost always there, even if they were hogging up one of the two shared bathrooms, or held private parties in our supposedly shared kitchen.

Often, I wrote about the people who I met there or on the bus or at work, little realizing that this would become my poetry, too – and most likely will continue to be for the rest of my life.

Only the masks are real

July 3, 1982

The sky is bland gray with splotches here and there hinting of rain.

I am up and awake, although awake is the wrong word. My dreams cling to me like wet clothing and yet I cannot remember them.

They are only the impressions of cold and loneliness that comes with the dark.

I wait and rush to print my name on the fabric of the day, This is me, here, alive, breathing in, the shape and scents of the morning – the monoxides and the ozone that mingle above me.

I stretch and stretch this space like some new big bang, burning away the haze that fills my head and eyes. But what comes of it is no better than the haze.

There is only a hint of rain and me with objects scattered here and there for effect.

Reality is this thought I think, this impression I make, this pretense which others believe.

We keep looking into the souls of our friends for some measure of truth. We believe that under their skin there is another self.

But is there?

Is the surface reality or a mask? Is what lies beneath something different or an extension of what we see?

Is not the mask that Machiavelli would have us wear mere license to release another aspect of ourselves?

So this morning, I don this mask and with a splash of cold water from the sink, I secure it in place.

This is me now.

But the distinction between which me is me is fragile.

The thoughts I think behind the mask is always the same pattern.

Me is a pattern of thoughts, ideas, shuffling in and out of line in the same manner.

Sometimes I want to scramble them, toss them up like monkey dice to see what comes up next.

A new man?

A new creation?

My poet friend, Michael, worries about being original; I simply worry about being.

Another fine distinction made by the subtraction of words. Michael’s latest prophet is my best friend, Pauly.

I guess this makes sense in his world where prophets climb out of your head and invest themselves in others.

I want to be my own prophet, not an island, but a continent whose mask is an island with boundless resources.

The object of life is creation, I think, and dress, then decide I’m wrong.

Life is a mask, too.

Just as the distinction between human and inhuman is a mask.

There are things in nature that are wiser than we are, and we kill them – all the time calling ourselves creators.

We are not.

We call ourselves intelligent; but we are not.

We call ourselves masters of the world, and yet the nature we destroy cries out in pain, denying us any real satisfaction from our mastery.

We cannot even master ourselves, for we need these masks to hide all the things inside of which we are not.

Perhaps in the end, only the masks are real.

Christmas lights

Sunday, July 28, 2013

My grandfather had the same string of lights from the first Christmas after his first child, my mother was born (today is her birthday)

The wires on this string were so thick they looked like strands of rope; cloth-covered writer entwined, and often so entangled my grandfather needed from Thanksgiving for his work-blistered fingers to get them straight in time to put them on the tree.

This was a chore of love he gook on each season, untangling this array of ancient light to rewind it onto the tree the weekend before Christmas, always placing it the same way with all the colored lights in the same order, always adding the same Christmas ornaments to populate the space between each light so that this tree varies from previous trees only by the new ornaments he added that particular year, ornaments that stood for a child he reared that year or a dream he aspired towards. That first year was a very rich year since it was the year of his first child and a year before the Stock Market crash. During the less rich years that followed when money was too scarce to waste on such things, he had to make the ornament himself. But some of these during the Great Depression reflecting one of the baker’s dozen kids he reared were among the grandest and utterly previous. The grandest of all came in the post ward years when he foresaw an amazingly bright future and added an angel at the top to reflect that vision – blindly bright with inspiration.

In the later years before his death, my grandfather struggled to find bulbs to replace those that burned out, even though the cloth had worn off the wires, and the string was of the variety that if one bulb went out, none would light. And some years, he spent as much time searching for which particular bulb was bad as he did the rest of the ritual, refusing to give up until the whole string was lighted again – even though the brightest light was always the one in his eyes. He never gave up. He never lost the vision.  

Seed no one sees

July 26, 2013

Journal Square does not bake under harsh sunlight today as it did a week ago when I was here last  -- nor is it as busy with a train stuck inside some tunnel under the Hudson River – with trains backed up and the announcer here saying over and over and over again that there will be a delay.

People still come and go, thin crowds coming up the escalators from the stop the announcer still calls “The World Trade Center,” although this isn’t the same World Trade I used to sit under to read more than a decade ago

People come and go with these trains. A man in a broken straw hat struggled to get his bicycle up the stairs, his brown pants, baggy, his sandals slapping the pavement with every step, sweat discolored part of his un-tucked cream-colored shirt as its tail hangs down to the back of his knees.

Self-important men in tucked white shirts and creased black pants yak into cell phones about some deal that has soured or about some private matter that his no business being aired in a public place such as this.

Each train from Wall Street brings a new wave of similar people, men in green shorts, black shoes, white socks and baseball caps, women wearing tight pants that come down just below their knees and even tighter blouses and sunglasses they don’t need with the sky as clouded as it is today.

The pigeons scatter to each approaching set of feet, to resettle on feed on feed no one but they can see.

An man settling flavored ice passes, jangling his hand bell with the was nuns used to back when I was in elementary school, seeking to draw customers to their carts, but managing only to bring over people as poor as they are, while the big shots from Lower Manhattan pretend the ice man or the poor do not exist, and they can’t hear the persisting ring of the bell over the roar of rush hour traffic.

For some reason, I always come early and watch this perpetual dance, unable to tell the difference between the people and the pigeons, all going through the motions of life, pecking at seed none of us can see, seed that can no more sustain us than pieces of stone.

Summer of 77

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Some people tell me a small tornado touched down in Bayonne a few days ago, part of what is supposed to a strange weather pattern.

This coupled with the death of Elvis Tribute Artist Eddie O’Rourke only served to bring me back to that horrible summer in 1977 when I was working in a warehouse in Fairfield when a small tornado ripped up a portion of the roof.

For some reason, I was up front in the office rather than where I should have been back near the loading bay when I heard the crunch of metal ripping, and rushed back to find the area where I worked uncovered, and rain dripping off the rip along with sunlight.

Cliff, a one-time linebacker for the University of Pittsburgh (whose injured knee kept from the pros – a fact that allowed me to pick on him with impunity since I could run faster than him) stood with giant hands on his giant hips staring up at the roof, looking at it, then me, as if he expected me not to be there, drawn up into the funnel perhaps to become that fake wizard I more our less pretended to be.

This was a summer full of such disasters, full of fear of some guy in New York that would later be called “Son of Sam” but whom the news reports referred to as the 44 caliber killer, and the great black out that showed us all how terrible humanity can be when there are no rules to keep us in order, and then, the death of Elvis, who most of us didn’t feel much about until his death, although his songs had haunted me my whole life, especially when I served in the army.

It was that summer my family moved south to Toms River, and my mother forced to move with them, clinging with all her fingernails to the Paterson she loved and leaving scratch marks down the New Jersey Turnpike a blind man could follow.

Some years just don’t set right in the universe, ripping up the tarmac of our lives, taking their place in our collective memories not for any good reason.

And yet, there are times when I think back at that summer with fondness, and puzzled by the ironies. Such as my best friend falling in love with a girl from Toms River that summer so that each weekend we both wound up wandering the Sea Side board walk, finding each other, getting drunk in one of the cheap Sea Side bars, both of us trying to pick up the girls who didn’t want hippie types like us, but the macho muscle-bound beach bums who wanted to beat us up for even looking at the girls they wanted.

I remember standing at the mouth of Toms River and the bay and being awed by sunset and the light flickering off the water, and by the old Victorian hotel that sat there like a queen, and by the widows walks where in old days the wives of sailors kept watch for sight of ships returning, although the only sails I saw were those of small sail boats struggling against the wind.

All these years later, I still remember the ducks and geese, who quacked in lowered voices while I strummed guitar and sang, not to them but to the waves and the gusts of wind, feeling as if somehow being there was part of destiny, and that the measure of sadness that year brought, was more than made up for by the powerful images that remain fixed in my mind, images that return when I hear things elsewhere – even this far north in Bayonne.

Happy birthday, momma

 

July 28, 1977

I’m always confusing my mother’s birthday with the day she got married, then recall the marriage came earlier in July, and how by the time the 28^th came along, she was alone again because my father had to travel to Washington D.C. to straighten out his dishonorable discharge from the U.S. Navy.

Now all these years later, I have abandoned her the way my father did, refusing to let my family force me into living with her again.

I’m 26 years old. The last thing I need is to live with my mother, which is exactly what I told them, and so forced her to move south with her mother and her brother and his family, she seeing it as some kind of prison sentence similar to when they locked her up in the mental institution when I was a kid.

This is her first birthday in Toms River – her first birthday out of Paterson.

She doesn’t hate the sea shore, but she has to rely on other people to get around now when back up in Paterson she could walk or take a bus.

I was supposed to go to see the New York Yankees with Cliff from work, a rare Thursday excursion to the bleachers where he and I usually get falling down drunk, more than enough excuse not to show up at the warehouse tomorrow. Now I have no excuse.

I have to visit my mother instead, driving down the Garden State Parkway waiting for the Yankee came to come on the radio and my hero Thurmond Munson to come to the plate, but all I get is some newscaster ranting about some oil pipeline in Alaska so I tune to FM and the fading WNEW playing old rock and roll I know by heart.

It is not hot. But I have no air conditioning. I have the windows open and like the looks I get from other people seeing me in my brand new Ford Pinto, my first new car ever after a series of broken down hotrods I spent most of my time trying to fix. I love the car even some news reports claim it might blow up if hit from behind.

My mother turns 49 years old today, and sadly, she’s already started to show the gray. She was my grandparent’s first baby, back in 1928 when they had so much hope, only to have the stock market crash a year later ruining their dreams and forcing them into hard labor.

I suppose they got drunk that night. I would have.

I wonder if my mother ever got drunk. I know my father did, often. My uncle Ritchie told me. My father was a sailor and a rowdy one at that, a boy who joined a medical corps. early in the war only to have the Navy take over even when he was still under age.  A sailor on the Yancy, his ship sat in Tokyo Harbor during the surrender, and later sailed through an atomic cloud, and still later to the North Pole before he was drummed out for a reason I never knew. He worked for my grandfather building houses after the Navy, and often snuck off the work site with Ritchie and Little Bill to drink in a Haledon bar.

I don’t know what my mother saw in him.

Maybe she thought she could reform him, just as she tries to reform me with her constant rosaries.

And as I drive I keep thinking of how lonely that birthday was, a two-week newlywed whose husband deserted her, looking out that window that July 28 wondering if he would ever come back. Did she know I was already taking shape inside her?

So I press down harder on the gas, determined not to let her spend her first birthday away from Paterson alone.

My present to her is me.

It’s the best I have to offer.