JUST AS WE BROKE - SO THEN WE STUMBLED

263. JUST AS WE BROKE- SO THEN WE STUMBLED (nyc, art-studio, 1968):

The surrendered angle the alcove of some mad perdition the shade of an arching tree – any of those things could have held me forth or kept me dangling just above the edge of danger : masked men shooting randomly into crowds myself included with very inauspicious endings but I just went on paying no mind to what was around me and marveling instead at the sharpness of the attitudes I’d see : the fat guy from the music studio engineering a full board of slides and power turning a set of songs into something they never were – adding tympani and verve to what the poor guy had barely whispered the firemen out front of their station – slowly painting red the old wooden doors – probably their 50th coat of paint (it was thick like its own separate plywood) since its own time began and I wondered ‘why does nothing change do all things just go on?’ and even though of course I knew the answer I asked too - words anew for something sterner to do – 'question existence ! pander to nothing for the common man ! take no prisoners!’ and of course and most importantly ‘whitewash no fools!’ - which last one I never really knew what it was supposed to have meant BUT nonetheless I always thought an idle man to be a dead man and so BECAUSE OF THAT I lived on and just kept working I hoped at something : walking swiftly down Great Jones Street or Cornelia or Sullivan or 7th or Spring - all of those weird little enticements half neighborhood and half trying to be international-in-flavor big-city streets and stores but in essence none of it was anything except for whatever gloss was put over it all by storytellers and guidebooks and tourist crap and truth be told each street such as these was filled up with the anxious the loud or the angry or fired up old Italians on their last red-sauce legs or crinkly wizened Orientals shuffling along bent on something and bent of back with Slovaks and Spanish and Negro porters leaning into doorways or peering out windows to see what was down below – the airshafts filled with debris and mattresses broken bottles and cans the old window sills the stone of which had either been already broken or chipped away or in the process of becoming someone’s ridiculous artboard for profane graffiti or ignorant markings and the tumbling beatnik potheads or ghosted storytelling hippies crossed each other like twisted ships in the night : half-hearted artists and gay young men with brushes and flowers to paint while staring at naked beauties posing as models for artists-to-be (‘there’s nothing easier than this’ she said ‘anyway they’re all queer men so nobody makes a move’) guys drinking black coffee from oversized Okinawa mugs – dark colored hints of something in magenta clothing with oh-so-flamboyant scarves – and the fortune-tellers were out in force squeezing little hearts into over-sized chests while the lesbians geeks sat at the bar at Bar 55 staring out in their overalls and jodphurs and boots and everyone was smoking something while they littered the field-of-play at the Sheridan Street Station with old New York Times or Village Voice junk and gum was stuck to the flagpole and some stinking old rag hung limply forlorn – turpentine-battered oldsters asleep on any bench or guys with their dicks hanging out just barely exposed but touching themselves nonetheless while they watched : cars taxis and buses the subway beneath the Maidenform bra mothers and the 18 years old girls pretending to be pure while salacious horny cops twirled their sticks as they slowly walked on watching everything and nothing too or seeing it all but seeing nothing : and as I watch the fey young kid waltzes by as lightly as an angel with a wiggle to boot he floats along as gaily homosexual as a butterfly or hummingbird could be and I wonder about it all ‘self-consciousness’ at least or ‘what’s he feel as he does that stuff?’ or ‘are they born in the wrong skin or in different skin anyway just trying to get out?’ – and surely nothing of it mattered to me but I wondered like a saint in some pure wind-driven snow and I was thrown to nowhere in this mixed-up mash of people : as I often wondered are we ‘a part of this life’ or just witness to it ? do we take in our awareness while playing a part in it too ? are their still mysteries about - about things which will be found ? and up high above my head I stare at the sunlight passing across the old building top – old wooden-plank siding and two small windows in a leftover house from 200 years back – leaning and creaky small and yet serene amidst all the city verve that’s grown up around it and only in this part of ‘town’ as they call it can these old places yet be found - the twisted lanes and wooded copse of an old Greenwich Village and the surrounding areas of what once were marsh and brook with twisty lanes turned reluctantly into streets and the potter’s field and ammunition grounds to parks and groves and every corner has another old vista - wooden buildings once shacks that housed the masses and these quaint old buildings were still stuffed – like stuttered words in an active mouth – between things and behind others as the new and old mingled and the lazy days and evenings brought forth the memory and attitude of everything that long ago was – I watch the sunlight make a triangle in the sky and a geometric proportion of goodness on high and the imagined tri-arc of light to sun to window and sky somehow sweetly settles my brain – some personal and cosmic overflux of peace and well-being and the storyline of what once was but shall be no more : yet somehow it makes me feel fine.