a poem for Zachary Cohen
your footsteps are like echoes
a ticking clock in an empty house
hours earlier the sun has fallen
and strolling down an avenue towards
infinity you no longer care about wallets
and missed calls
questions or the unbearable need for answers
do you remember that night
when we drank whiskey in Brooklyn
and you flirted with some Puerto Rican girl
who was married with kids
I tried speaking Spanish
to her, but all I really wanted
was to black out and wrap myself
twice in that tweed coat
I’d bought
and so maybe it’s important to love
or be loved
to not be the same as your parents
but to maintain a certain moral turpitude
like the villagers of days yore
but I remember evenings
wine stunk in pocket park
reading poems from a memo
pad and imagining Che Guevara
was riding in my ephemeral sidecar
another night, San Francisco breezes
the ocean’s stink and seals bark
as I lay on a bench and drank straight
out of a bottle of sweet 2 dollar port
a whole poem in my blood
and negative space upholding my neck
to care is something different I think.
money is a curse of adulthood
someone should shout fuck you at the banks
I spit on the ATM and pee in garbage cans
buy leather shoes and stick them in the fire
whilst still on my feet
Driving through Nebraska at 18
all I could imagine was something that never could be
do you remember the smell of pages
the stacks of I.O.U.’s and the rivers
of filth flowing through the crescents of our moons?
Do you recall the thunder of rain on
air-conditioner units?
Do you say I love you to the meanings?
in queens she was raped while all the neighbors
watched, but a recent study proved that it wasn’t
apathy, it was faith in others that allowed it to go
unreported
faith that someone else will do what you wish you might do should you do anything
I listen to music
I write novels
I make money
I am a poem
I drink because I have nothing better to do
I drink to black out
I drink to drink
Whiskey and wine remind me that America
can cushion a fall as long as you admit you’re falling
Europe will burn
and so will New York
remember 1977
and the world is all a cycle
nothing is new
money money money
better make sure they pull the net
I want to fall into the abyss
do you smell the rivers mush
the refineries cough
and the powerplants whirr?
On 1st avenue
it’s easy to fall in love
if you don’t try to
I walked all night
until my toes bled and my body ached
across bridges and under
highways searching for a reason
to believe
at the end of it
all I heard were footsteps
and the echoes of those footsteps
and the sound of my voice
reciting a litany of verse
from the columns of my mind
fragile like a beaker
bored like a blade of grass
the summer is not so far away
in milk stained bowls
the wallowing of stinking sinks
rumbles with tectonic shifts
plates crackling
beneath broken toenails
I want to give thanks
thanks for this job I spend too much time at
for the dreams I’ve watched in the windows of my eyes fade into the distance
for poetry, like a lover that’s slighted me
for William Burroughs
and the ideas that nothing is worth a lick because we’ll all be dead
In the boulevards of Hollywood the crown weighs heavy
wealth is the language of love and adoration
multiplying children
scatter over granite sidewalks
unaware of their parents broken marriage
and the ideals of a whole country crumbles
I miss the rivers of my youth
The Hudson and Harlem River
The Mississippi
the peacefulness of water, cool
breezes cutting splinters down the spine
supine memories
undone by adulthood
coming to on the shoulder of some freeway
wearing coffee stained clothes
and water filling green eyes
unsure of the future
and attached to history
fragile like a glass spine
bored like a redwood.
Life is an experiment.
the senses, a stack of
moments collected
& laid to rest some-
-where obscure
and meta-
-physical, waiting to
be triggered back to
life
in a shocking
moment. These thoughts
& impressions are
collected into the
mind and spatially
they lie in the most
uncomfortable crawl
spaces of the
mind.
tiny little details,
sunken pleasures,
that
wet
cracking
sound
of paint peeling
off
a
roller
the feeling of
water
soaked
through the cuffs of
pant legs
the
smell
of
tobacco
when it’s first lit
a
warm
sweatshirt
a spider web
walked
through
and tangled
up on
finger-
-tips
traffic
rain
the
whistle
of a train
cash
registers
and typewriters
a
standup
Bass
someone
w
e
e
p
i
n
g
softly
on of those
bells on
the door
of a
retail store
a
cold
greeting
SPLASH.
It’s only in aging
where we realize
the incredible predictable
nature
of time
humans
and the society we live in
so to emerge from a
collector’s Deco apartment
on West End Avenue
to a freezing
New York night,
a cocaine burn in the nostrils
and trailing red lights
one remembers the simplicity of action:
dig you hands deep into the
pockets
lower head
raise shoulders
and march persistently
towards the nearest
subway station.
~ Craig A. Platt
10.12.2010
http://bit.ly/9yD1dD
There is a slight breeze. There are people all around. The trees sway gently, the air is growing cool in the shade, in the sun I can feel every corpuscle in my skin, the pink forming on me neck, the matted brown hair on my head hot to the touch. I am leaned over, right leg resting on top of the left, chin parallel to my chest and my eyes are moving from left to right at a solid marathoners pace. I am reading. My mouth slightly bitter from the drink I am enjoying. This is a true feeling of calm.
Recently while traveling to Italy I was reminded of something I had learned several years earlier while living in New York City. A time before text messaging, when I would sometimes leave my cellular phone at home, and just read. I would read in Union Square, in Washington Square Park, on a park bench along the Hudson River or on my lunch break while watching the boats from Battery Park. In Italy I sat in Piazzas with a cool beer and read. Dogs running wildly, little children playing in a fountain. I didn’t worry about appointments or bills or what time to be back at the office. I read. I read for hours, while the sun set and the street lights came alive.
In my early twenties there could be a storm outside or a light flurry, the red of tail lights would trail through foggy windows. I would sit and devour words. There is this strange sensation when you sit and read. The mind becomes clear, at least for me. These ideas present themselves, big ideas, things you are afraid to think about when you don’t want to be distracted. And then those ideas vanish and there’s a peace that settles. And you keep reading and then the imagination really kicks in. A city or a nature reserve can materialize in three dimensions.
I find myself transported to the world I am reading about. And I read and read and read. And when I finish the book, or it’s time to go somewhere, I feel something, what I imagine the skydiver feels after he lands and hits the bar for some conversation. An exhilaration and a clarity that I don;t normally feel. Also, a level of inspiration and understanding of the world. Or at least that’s how I perceive it.
And here’s what this really is about. Sometimes you want to have a conversation, an interaction, and the real life one’s don’t fulfill those needs. Well, sitting with a book at a cafe, in a plaza or a park, a hotel room or in bed, these are the conversations I need to have. It is sitting with like minded people, or with people I look up to. It’s an opportunity to see new parts of the world, new perspectives, experience emotions and situations I may never experience. And most importantly it puts my own life in context. Helps to sharpen my intellect and my wit and to help me write. It’s reading for me that inspires writing.
So when I talk about the importance of sitting and reading, what I mean to say is that sitting and reading is as important as breathing for me. I will never be normal, this I know. I will never be at peace. But, when I sit and read for an hour or two I feel more like myself than at any other time in my life. From the day I moved into an apartment on Calhoun Street in New Orleans and sat on the front portch swing and read Hemingway, to this weekend when I say on my lawn and tore into some Murakami. I have made my best friends in the world while sitting quietly and reading. Kerouac, Miller (Arthur and Henry), Hemingway, Ginsberg, Vonnegut, Bolano, Carver, WH Auden, William Carlos Williams, Thoreau, Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, Joseph Heller and Carson McCullers and so many more.
Reading on subways, reading in bars, reading over coffee, over whiskey, reading over rainstorms and heatwaves, snow drifts on large acreages. I love to read. And I love to sit quietly on any type of day and read, finding a gentle peace that can only wash over me at these times.
