The Interrupters

This documentary will be showing July 29 through August 7 at IFC and Maysles Cinema in NYC:

Saturday Poetry: Girls At the End of the Month

On Saturday, no less!  Were my computer a car it would have been stranded on I-95 yesterday evening with the hood up and steam blasting out of the radiator.  The PC had been on for most of the day and around 6 pm it was oh.  so.  slow.  (I almost resorted to banging my fist on the CPU, and I know better.)  Effing viruses, I started swearing, now I'm gonna have to take this thing in.  Bitch bitch bitch.  Moany moan moan ... Once I realized that the CPU's fan was turning on every few minutes while simultaneously realizing that sweat was pouring down my chest, I figured it out.  Even a PC can get overheated.  (I don't have air conditioning in my office.  Don't want it.  And, most days of the year don't need it.  So, if Husband No. 1 is reading this please wipe that smirk off your face.  Or, as any formidable no-nonsense parochial schoolteacher would say, I'll wipe it off fer ya.)

Well, that's it, I decided.  Workday's over.  Let me go fix a drink and watch a DVD.  I'm currently doing a marathon viewing of Homicide:  Life on the Street.  I didn't have television when the series ran so I knew little or nothing about it.  Having been mesmerized by The Wire, I needed to see David Simon's earlier work.  You can track, just as one would with a fiction writer, the metamorphosis of his ideas and themes, not to mention the actors who moved with him to The Wire.  No. 1 Niece had other ideas.  As any of you who live with children know, you have a Hobbesian Choice:  either make them watch what you're watching and explain why that man and that man and that man is lying on the ground with red red blood fanning out beneath them (this is Homicide, after all) or give it up and watch Coraline for the 20th time.  Too tired to explain the exigencies of street justice, I let her choose a movie.  She chose Dreamworks' Rango.

What a treat!  Dreamworks' films are like Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons.  The writers only pretend that they're writing for kids.  My favorite scene among many is when Rango, who's a chameleon, arrives in Dirt and mimics the other animals' walks.  It's a sly homage to the American western's a-stranger-comes-to-town setup with its stock characters, Gunsmoke's Chester --  Marshal Dillon!  Marshal Dillon! -- and Agnes DeMille's choreography for Copland's ballet, Rodeo.

Apropos of nothing, here's today's poem:

I love this easy work for which

I get paid on the fourth Friday

unlike the men.

Every week, they preen with their money

plans already made to spend it on a couple drinks

a carburetor a girlfriend.

On the way back to the G

I think of what I’ll do

when there she is:

So young black fat from babies

leaning on a streetlight at the corner

the heat of the day still scolding us all.

No pool for her, no cooling soda.

She is glued to the light, craning her neck.

Sweat glistening shorts

cutting into varicose thighs

Ooh, it’s hot she says to nobody at all

and pulls off her shirt.

I am attacked by whiteness

a tattered brassiere against her black

skin exposed in the street

like getting undressed for a bath.

I turn ashamed.

Slowing down, a swaybacked station wagon.

Inside a sober man

whose side locks graze an oily steering wheel

While his eyes swivel like a lighthouse beacon.

He honks the summons.

Saturday Poetry (on Sunday): Prospect Park II

Okay, I know it's Sunday but I have an excuse.  I was here in my office minding my own business yesterday evening coming to the conclusion that I couldn't blame the temperature for my Elderly-Italian-Widow-In-Support-Hose feet.  The weather's been lovely, n'est-ce pas?  No, it's drugs -- the usage of 2 new ones to control my ever spiralling blood pressure since I can't do it myself through my usual Ironclad Discipline (a joke that).  I went back and read the fine print, the "contraindications" (whatever the hell that means) and wouldn't you know that for some people these drugs cause a person's extremities to swell (check) and make the skin sensitive (check).

I'm middle-aged now so not as blithe about personal health as I once was.  Monday I will dutifully call to make an appointment with my internist.  He will tell me what I already know:  stop takin' em and go back to the other pill.  The one that costs 3 times as much.  And you know I will.

New Haven has been much in the news lately -- much of the coverage unflattering and some of it richly deserved.  But, statistics and news reporting can be "wrong" while being factually correct.  The coverage creates an impression that too many parties take a perverse pride in, i.e, that New Haven is this gun-saturated town, this 'hood that's getting off the hook.  And so you have 2 choices and 2 choices only  -- die young or move to the suburbs.  If we keep thinking this way we will keep holding "Stop the Violence" rallies that are temporarily cathartic but ultimately meaningless.  (See arguments against conducting a War on Terror.)  Gun violence is not a monolith and it's not a being.  It, in and of itself can't be stopped.  The economic, statutory, social and psychological conditions which foster this level of violence can be changed but that takes shrewd and courageous political alliance-building and cooperation, it takes targeted economic and development strategies, and it takes the tenacity of the Red Army during The Long March.

I'll end with poetry:

Prospect Park II

That afternoon trip to the Park

was an outing offered

because I berated my daughters

for being too young.

We walked through the meadow

happy to split in two.

Me to smoke and scowl in my Ray-Ban's,

They to prowl among the families,

looking for love, and complaining about

the one they hated all day.

As usual, the men were teamed for soccer.

Some young, some old,

one thin and vain with a severed arm.

He carried a comb in his only hand

and between plays ran it

through his hair which was thin,

like my cigarette.

And I asked myself was he dying, too,

or only full of regret?

When I joined my girls at the far end

they were ready to love.

We wandered until we could go no further

and chose a path that led into the trees

where my shades hastened me

an early dusk,

but not so much that I missed

the men staring at us.

We, a bitter woman and her spawn,

had trespassed their cruising ground.

The men's caroming eyes

begged us to leave.

Holding their hands

I led my daughters forward

into those woods, until winded,

I found a hole in the fence.

Safe on Flatbush I bought ice cream,

a bribe for forgetting, and talked of

all the pretty flowers in the Park,

and weren't we lucky to find

that hole in the fence

so close to the ice cream truck?

Where an incoming hunter started

when he met this chastened flock.

A ewe and her lambs escaping

as he entered to fuck.

Saturday Poetry: New Birth

My poem, "New Birth"  is an homage to Toi Derricotte and her collection, "Natural Birth". There are few enough transcendent moments in life. One was when I heard Toi read -- not read but incant -- from her first book of poetry. There are works that you write, and there are works that insist on being written. "Natural Birth" was one of those books. By the time she did the reading I attended the books had been out for a few years, the experience which forged the poems was decades old.  Yet I watched a now affluent (having married a banker), middle-aged woman be seized by the memories of giving birth when she was a young unmarried woman.

(i.)

The nurses did not

Want me to see her but I

Scream and they relent.

(ii.)

They never look like

You wish

She?, no exception

White where black was meant.

(iii.)

Baby on my tit

In bed motherhood’s a breeze

Nurse brings me my sleep.

Did I Tell You How Much I Hate the Summer?

As you can see from the last post it has been a while since I wrote anything other than a check.  No Saturday Poetry; no commentary on the game of chicken the President and the Republicans are playing; no disquisition on the Casey Anthony trial and what it means about this nation of ours that the life of one white child is of greater import than say a dozen colored children or so it seems judging from the amount of media coverage; no thoughts at all about gay marriage being legalized in New York nor what it must be like to be Yale University and to have raised a reported $4 billion (don't forget that there are probably undocumented donors) during a worldwide recession and what impact that power will have on the governance of the host city it is devouring.  Nope, I have nothing to say about all that.

Instead, I've been watching my feet and ankles swell.  Yeah, it's summer and I hate it.  Hate it.  On the other hand Husband No. 1 hates the winter.  Every time the temperature dares to go below 30 degrees Fahrenheit it's stop the presses time in our house.  Did I tell you, he bellows to no one in particular, that I hate the winter?  Oh.  Really?  The only thing he hates more than winter is south Florida so I guess he is going to have to suck it up and make peace with November through February in the far Northeast.  As for myself, I want to get a doctor's note that temperatures above 65 degrees are Hazardous To My Health and that in order to prolong my life I should be confined to 24 hour bedrest (with internet access of course) and aging eunuchs to fan my weary brow.  Why aging?  I don't want to look at anybody who has a BMI less than 35 right now.

So again I beg off thinking and writing until I can get shoes on my feet.  I'm going to stick with gardening, swearing, drinking and boycotting Woody Allen movies.

Not that my boycott matters at all, but even liberals such as myself have to draw the line somewhere and that somewhere for me came when Allen wooed and wed his own stepdaughter.  (A pause while I once again say Ewwwwww, with mouth downturned and eyes squeezed shut.)  Husband No. 1 and I don't agree on much but we do agree on the immorality of that behavior.  I will have to remember this story the next time I want to tear off his head for plucking my one last (and frayed) nerve:  Husband No. 1 used to attend New York's School of Practical Philosophy.  He liked it.  I was skeptical largely because I found it a little too precious for my tastes what with students addressing each other as lady and gentleman.  (Yo, this America, yawl!)  But, he liked being in the school for its philosophy and we were at that stage in our marriage where individuation was a highly prized trait.  (Now we're at the "Can I borrow that ink-stained shirt that you're too fat to button up?" stage.)  He told me that the Allen/Farrow breakup came up for discussion in his sex-segregated class (another reason I had no interest in the school) and the men were chortling and basically saying what's wrong with that?  Yuk yuk yuk ....  So, Husband No. 1 said to them, since we had only recently been married and at that time our family was comprised of one 42 year old bride who hadn't shown her legs since 1985 and one bee-u-ti-ful big-eyed clothes horse.  Said Husband says to his chums:  What if I left my wife to run off with 16 year old [D]aughter No. 1?  That shut them the fuck up and not another word was said about the matter.  So, I owe Husband No. 1 a big kiss.  Plus, Woody Allen hasn't been funny or particularly interesting for years.  On those counts alone I can do without him, but it's nice to have a dollop of moral outrage to reinforce shunning him.

Roman Polanski's also on my Do-Not-Watch List, and that's a harder deprivation because I'm sure his work is worth seeing.  But I'll continue my small protest against pedophiles and rapists whose actions are excused because they are famous or powerful.  It will take my mind off the heat.