NY, NY – Nov 5-9: Poems and Pics

I had an amazingly full three days in NYC this weekend staying at Jen’s in Brooklyn with Libby (pictured to the left, Jen and Lib figure out the route), eating out, walking around Chinatown, SoHo, the Villiage, the MoMa, the SNL studios with Chris and out to see his girls in Queens, meeting serendipitously with Ben and Brian at the New Museum, out to Glen Ridge for dinner with Ted, Sharon, and Julia, walking through Prospect Park to the farmer’s market, out to lunch with Trystan, and dinner with Patrick, Kelly, Jen, Libby, Diego, Brian and Miranda, and home again.

This is Jen’s station, Parkside Ave. I got good at navigating her Brooklyn hood.

Here is a poem I wrote on the way home, late one evening.

This Train

There is no one but you and me
(and a few others on this train) this evening.
Perhaps you are on your way home
or perhaps you are on your way out.
All I know is that you are here with me
(through this poem) riding along with me.
Nothing like a poem to unite us anonymous travelers.

A fire plug in Little Italy

Reflections of buildings in a building in Manhattan ’round Chinatown

A section of a Dali painting at the MoMa: Reminds me of myself commuting to work with the day’s weight on my head. It’s nice to think I’m not alone. Very Magritte-like.

Partial reflections in a window of the MoMa

A stairwell in the MoMa that struck me as just as artistic as some of the art

Street art

Street art. The red label reads: Long Live Ephemera.

Ballerina (yes, a real person) window-art for some red carpet event on 5th Ave.

The stairwell across the atrium at the MoMa from another floor

The reflection of a homeless man, passers-by, the church opposite

Otherworldly assortment of dried sundries in Chinatown

The New Museum. Hell, Yes!

Feet across a rubber mat at the New Museum

My reflection across the rubber mat at the New Museum

Fall colors in Prospect Park, Brooklyn

Stoop colors, Brooklyn

Me, in Trystan’s Holloween costume

Shot from the plane over Brooklyn, Manhattan

Shot from the plane of what seems to be a layer of pollution

Shot from the plane of a housing development. I love the painting-like quality.

See the whole NYC set.

Here’s a poem I scrawled waiting for the plane in the way-too-early morning before I really woke-up that seems to distill a darker side of the city experience.

Flight From New York

In the breakneck morning
When the ocean swells toward the land
All questions in another tongue
The answer ‘mentira’ spoken low
Slight nausea enters sleepless speculation
Where is that smell seeping in?
Sores of one visable limb cracking
I speed toward you, eyes closed
Beyond the second and third, fifth, seventy-second
season of sayings, suspicious looks
I wait in the seating area clicking my pen
savagely scrawling obnoxious verses
Getting silently worked up over aliens
On bad footing, onerous obligations
Without knowing what wraps me
in another level of confusion
Where the roar of the rider
splits the dreams of hosts
Setting off alarms
Beneath scolding water
Running down stairwells
Like grimy gimmicky gifts unwanted
But finally arriving much too early
With unsent thank-yous, arid, hurtful
Basking in a backache, ripped-off
Forgotten alone among the gallery-goers
Refusing to stop for any masterpiece but our own.