“I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However…who said that thing about “the littleness of life that art exaggerates”? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.

“But time…how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but we were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time…give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.”

At the start of the New Year, I went to open mic night at Le Poisson Rouge. People were reading their best erotica. Having none. And having not read (or written) in some time. I decided to share two poems I wrote collaboratively years ago in a bar with strangers. Of course they ended up a bit dirty (and I think not so bad). Here’s one:

Playground Erotica

A well-built ass leads the eyes
wandering…
A true pear, sweet and ripe.
Eyes and tongue so fit for fun! 
How do I proceed?
Proceed where..?
Need leads, from erection,
To the submission of knees…
To my old school
Where my eyes still roam
Playground erotica. 

For January, I have been meditating on the Ganesh Mantra: Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha.

Ganesh, breaker of obstacles and patron of letters.

When I walk towards my new and still-unfamiliar apartment on 140th street & Broadway, two words lead me there: Liquor & Lotto.

Liquor and Lotto. Liquor and Lotto. Sometimes I repeat these words within the cadence of my step, and let my mind make all kinds of associations about My Life, and Liquor, and Lotto.

• I think about what my Grandmother might say if she knew about where I lived (and how I lived).
• I think about impulsivity. And big dreams. Payoffs that I’m still waiting for.
• I think about what others think about when I’ve been drinking. I think about drinking. I think about you. 
• (And you.) 
• (Y tú también.)

I think about how unhappy I am that the storefront pulled down the old marquee lettering—Flashbulbs: LIQUORS—and replaced it with roving neon lights.

Angry, too. “How dare they tear down that old sign,” I often think. It was so classic. Now it just feels obscene.

I put too much meaning into everything, I know. But I can’t help but believe that the sign, and it’s changing look, is subtext.

A subtext for my life that sings like a Howlin’ Wolf song.

“The Laughing Heart”

On Broadway they’re all going downtown—

Except here, where the billboards for beer are en español, and the papis and the mamis circulate up up, out out, and all around the streets below me.

My window seat is stacked with mismatched pillows that I can lean against and watch the world go by.

When I arrived, I opened all the windows and sang doo wop loudly.

A few faces looked up.

Dec 21, 2011