125th Street

An homage to the aftermath of Friday night’s party. Just a simple little observational piece for the We Write Poems challenge to use anaphora. I find it very natural to use anaphora when no one tells me to, and really aggravating when I make specific efforts to.

Last night was night two of the workshop, which I think went better than the first, a bit. (I didn’t go first this time, which was a relief.) The poem I ended up with was pretty personal and tightly-braided, so the feedback this time wasn’t that it was too bloodless, but that it might be too dense: my options would be to take out some of the thematic stuff, or expand the poem tremendously. (I tried to cram in poetry as a theme, travel, Dylan Thomas, differing ideas of beauty, family issues, family history, and questioning what makes life moments significant. All that in 28 lines. So much for trying to be trim!) I do feel a marked improvement with my comfort level about personal stuff lately, but I get so much nitpickier with it than I do about the usual stuff. This one was a dash-off to exercise the word-muscles, but I’m learning how to gild the spare poems with some fresh, bloody emotion. If nothing else, the workshop has been helpful so far for that (and general notions of craft, too).

Getting a cold, though. I think I’ll reward myself with pancakes tonight.

125th Street

where we waited
for the downtown train

and balanced upon the worn backs of benches, crowing
and singing hymns invented out of cracked cement
and the rusted perforated girders
and the rat pawing through Styrofoam cups leaking water
and brown light, reflective, thorough,
and the whole station gleaming snow-covered
and three of us breathing consonants to echo on Broadway
and loving the night, which was also a morning
and a legato of time, with vodka-soaked wishes breathed
and babbled into frozen vapor-roses
and splayed across the graffiti of the chipped wall
and the screeching xylophone tracks
and distant glaring lights that followed long curves
and dipped through tunnels which cried mercy, mercy
and got their siren hooks in us
and drugged us happy to be alive
and standing balanced upon the backs of benches

while we waited
for the downtown train