Farmingdale

I moved in right quick having found a room that day. Small dormered with a story-book green dresser and a single bed smelling of stale cramped life like the inside of a draw. It was my second time living on a top floor if I include my stay with Grandma, the one I fled that very morning after having been up all night, and when I think of how I might explain why I left I can only say this for now, fright.

So one week in and already found work bussing tables at this Italian family style restaurant, it smelled too and how particular, fetid, damp and garlicky. Finally I thought here is my life. Having made the prodigal return from Queens back home or at least one town over, I thought, this is great, everything being the same but now here and now now.

I had plans to eaves-drop on my customers, study the living, mabey for a screen-play I'd tell others to impress knowing then what I've always known, that everything is a reward unto itself or none at all, and to know people, to live among them with the ears, with the heart open would always be enough.

I still dreamt big but it was a lie to impress myself, to subvert my egoistic conditioning, an attempt to live in between plans, and when those lie's wore thin I thought it was beer or pot I lived for and again another cover for living, for with all its meager winnings and great upset, not once has it been uninteresting.

Like this yule visit with crack toking friends at the end of the hall, a Christmas eve to remember, the unatural acrid smell, the way each would pick and scrape at there pipes at bits of foil in preparation for the next hit, immediate to the last, like insects with big blood filled human hearts and eyes which sought to drink the whole world with you in it, there was real love there.

When living the low life we find it trembling and jewel like there in cramped rooms, in the parking lots of seven-eleven, we hear it falling up the stairs with a head wound, or with pupils grown big enough to house the waking dreams of not one but two boxes of somanex, we clean up a months worth of it's piss in milk pint cartons, we talk with its failure it's deep sadness, how it scams the grocery store's for five towns over, we listen when it describe's the work of carting it's body around, of how it clinicaly died once and the nothing it had seen there, we let it sleep on our floor when it's man-friend is raging scared all the while, we talk with it sipping german dessert wines smoking nat shermans, its face large as life the eyes all a twinkle, blink, blink it says, it claims to be your soul-mate, it begs for sexual favor at three in the morning when your just trying to have a drink, there it stands in it's whities stumbling before a 19" color set clutching a half gallon of Georgi having just bleed its heart out for its boy, it's deceased father, it's failed marriage, it smokes something nameless and black while the last light fades behind the tree-line out of doors, there through the quarter windows, and it thinks, are we out of beer?

karma

Charles claimed his same seat as yesterday and the day before. For 11 years twice a day, once at 12 and again at 4 He had sat there in the last booth along the front wall eating his sausage and eggs staring at the traffic along Liberty Ave. The staff thought it odd until one day he became as the wallpaper, as the glinting polished granite which lined the floor. It was not until he stood up this day clutched his chest and rolled flat upon the floor they noticed him again and finally lying roundly and without breath.

Jerry a florist of 18 years having lovingly made arrangements with flowers totaling the number of days she would be alive had in effect been creating her own offering, a suitable Mandala. When she was done flowers of each kind flooded her every sense and upon this carriage she was alighted forward.

Sam scrubbed dishes at Giovanni’s Family style Italian eatery and catering service for two summers. In that time he had cleaned more plates than days he had been alive, suffering the sense of being the lowest species alive for the duration. He would gladly improve his situation if only there was something to do about it. Often to avoid being at his rented space in his Grandmothers house Sam would drink at Carrington’s over on Jamaica Ave and speculate about the lives of others. This one time he lifted ten dollars right off the bar paying close attention that everyone’s head was turned at that precise moment. At the risk of a terrible beating Sam had won the privilege of 5 more glasses of beer which he gulped triumphantly between drags of his Rothman’s quality Tobacco. It was during his walks that spring to the small Queens Branch library he would come alive. For there behind the iron gating were roses colored in parchment orange white pale-yellow and red so vivid it made the heart ache. There he would sit wondering if he loved these better than anyone else. He decided he must and that this somehow gave him worth and that his would always be the kind unnoticed, a vast epic borne upon an array of passing clouds set within a sky never to be discovered. This he decided was ok, in fact, perfect.

post sunday 5th

peddling endlessly, the Sun-god pressed upon our young shoulders, locusts hissing and space like endless potential hung around our heads. Girls and Women behind every closed door, the promise of elation somewhere at sometime. Dick jokes, Marlborough's, a devil for every shoulder. forever teasing to say how fond we were for one another, ourselves, and everything. love of the blazing sun sunk deep in our chests, God? We prayed without mind word or breath, make it not stop! Waiting anywhere while forever on our way somewhere else. Claiming each place of disinterest for there our hearts were, and that was the where. Seeing these same spaces through the windows of our parents cars, titillated by our secret life, and god, when will we get back? 

C.