On Bridges

On the subway

This is a Manhattan bound B express train.

Look out the window and see

Boroughs in rain through helicopter blade suspension lines.

Not an unfamiliar sight otherwise.

Call me when you’re on the bridge, everyone says.

Before you lose service.

Bicycle baskets are full of one-dollar water bottles.

These guys give good deals on batteries.

Had my first heat stroke here.

Fourth grade class trip walking the Brooklyn Bridge.

Suspension bridges are expensive and require tolls

Some guy just jumped the turnstile, we all saw.

Gives him some kind of celebrity.

This one over here paid even though she’s unemployed and has bad credit.

And she’s tried to make it better

moved from a crypt into a cellar

but the passengers ignore her,

just a girl with an umbrella.

A little Bitch of Brooklyn

Only five in evening and the street lights already broken

Bus drivers still on morning shift,

please park here any time

for premium diesel-fish filet and cookies

snow pile speed bumps funnel traffic to torn down buildings

“Free demolition and Excavation”

Mergers and Acquisitions

murders and executions

“Fantastic bubbly Cleaners”

contribute to catholic choir charities.

Not religion, just a superstitious notion.

forgive me, I’ve got this condition.

Wednesday’s classwork

Where are the elephants?

I predict a pachyderm resurgence of magnanimous proportions.

Please vacate the premises.

Pay no heed just worship

manufacturers of natural disasters.

These employers they are coy

fish in a pond of farmers harvesting.

Tree orchards frozen in onion soup lethargy

Nothing could remedy.

A lake of hydrochloric acid couldn’t soften this.

Root canals sprout from seeds of doubt

Plants educated by spineless spare rib cattle

who frighten themselves into hiding.

But do not feel bad it is not sad,

every society needs its outcasts.

Seek names and split

headaches.

And don’t forget,

the elephants.

Weren’t they on the pamphlet?

Frank O’Hara- references

I don’t think the references O’hara makes, individually, are relevant to his poems. Nor are they meant to belittle or ostracize the reader. As a whole, the references help him establish a general sense of movement through time. A stream at what first seems as personal, circumstantial events including particular items and people. But because he uses references so many times in so many lines of so many of his poems, he trivializes them. They become unimportant and only serve to create monotonous flow of what for him used to be exciting specific events. These trite happenings are not the aim of his poetry. In his poems he is looking to break the on-going pedestrian feeling of mortality.

He’ll reference on and on and then slip in lines like ” First Bunny died, then John Latouche,/ then Jackson Pollock. But is the/ earth as full as life was full, of them?” Those are the moments he’s looking for.

Midnight Cowboy

The strength of this movie is in the performance of the two lead characters, and the director’s ability to cast a desperate, worsening feeling on an already hopeless situation. Joe and Rizzo are hardly able to function in society on their own and do not fare much better after meeting each other. The director makes a point of showing how the two mismanage every situation and how sorry they will be to suffer the consequences.

What engages the audience of this movie is the interaction between Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo. The change in their relationship from parasitic to symbiotic derails their plans and expectations of life. Ratso would never have set foot outside of New York had he not met Joe. He was set up, had his routine perfected. Checking phone booths for extra change and stealing groceries had served him well so far. Meeting Joe threw him off his schedule. Joe needed him because no one else in New York would take a second look at him, besides the gay and elderly. Ironically Joe says at the beginning of the movie: “lotta rich women back there…men, they mostly faggots”. Actually, no one that Ratso hustled ever paid enough mind to him to go after him until Joe Buck came around. The director contrasts the uselessness of the two characters in two scenes. The beginning of the film as everyone is asking, “where’s that Jo Buck” and later in the movie as Ratso imagines women calling his name in Miami.

Joe leaves more behind in Texas than his dishwashing job. In Texas Joe had atleast thought he was a real stud, New York showed him even that wasn’t true. Even though he realizes that his journey to New York has been fruitless, he still wants to help Ratso experience the same hope that comes with moving to a different place. These kinds of feelings make the audience sympathetic to characters as lowly as Rizzo.

Another interesting character was Joe’s radio. Which spat out one especially disturbing message: ” Oh my friends I say unto you, invest with Jesus and put your dollars to work where they’ll pay off at compound interest. The good book says money answereth all things…everyone who sends a dollar to the evangelical congregation of the air will get free gratis, a genuine leatherette hymn book so you can sing along with sister Rosella and the evangelical choir.”

The Colossus of New York

The Colossus of New York

Throughout the book, Colson presents the idea that there are as many New York Cities as there are people living in New York City. The image of New York in any one person’s mind is different from that within the next person. All of these versions are real, true versions. It’s ones responsibility to live in a New York that he or she will enjoy.

Whitehead says something along the lines of ” when it’s raining you’re supposed to get wet”. This doesn’t mean that you’ve got to be completely submissive and allow the city to impose itself upon you, it only suggests that we not look negatively at anything that wasn’t part of the plan.

A friend of mine wants to move out of NY, he’s a college sophomore. His reasons for leaving are the same as my reasons for staying. He doesn’t like the minorities, doesn’t like the train, wants a backyard, etc. He’s focused on every unfriendly aspect that defines the city. Similar to what Edward Norton’s Character does in The 25^th Hour. There are still some up-standing, bat-wielding Italians living in Bensonhurst. It’s just easier to see their flaws than anything else. What is wrong with a place will often be seen before and with more distinction than what is right with it.