Greenwich Village

NYC

“ ‘Siehe, ich lebe, Look, I’m alive’ he said, leaping down the hospital steps.  We roared off in my Dodge, ‘behold, I come like a thief!’ he shouted to the town and then gave his life to poetry.  He lives, now, in the south of France.  His poems arrive by mail, and we read them and do not understand.”

            -from the poem “Angels” by B.H. Fairchild

Christopher Street Station

Greenwich Village

NYC

She said she was going to tattoo his name on her right ankle.  He didn’t know what to

think about this other than he’s closer than he thought to the man he dreamed of being.  

All those wandering spirits, haunted.  Their faces

the burning sun when they’d see her coming.  

Smalls Jazz Club

Greenwich Village

NYC

It didn’t take long to learn from her that a homeless Navajo boy with the saddest happy face is as lovely and relevant as the sun and moon, and even more so than all the movers and shakers huddled around the bar at La Fonda. 

Greenwich Village

NYC

I’ve never been to another planet until now.  If this is not another planet then
it’s the far side of the moon.  Lunar cold and dark, without an atmosphere.    

Waverly Diner 

NYC

“On the third day I found two quarters embedded in the grass in Washington Square Park.  We had coffee, toast and jam, and split an egg at the Waverly Diner.  Fifty cents was real money in 1967.”

            -from Just Kids by Patti Smith

Newport, N.J. Station

He was rarely certain about anything in life
except the scent on the collar of her fur coat.  Lilac. 

Washington Square

NYC

Who can say they’ve walked four miles in frozen darkness to buy toothpaste?  Who can
say they don’t remember except for the cyclopean red moon hanging above the pines? 

Village Vanguard

Greenwich Village

NYC

In Santa Fe he saw an old windblown cowboy who could be him twenty years.  When the cowboy’s cell phone rang he answered with “bonjour mon amour” in perfect French. 

Johnny's Bar

Greenwich Village

NYC

With trickery and guns they pinned us into a house at the end of a street.  They found me staring out the back window at a bald eagle high in a pine tree above a frozen stubble field.    

Greenwich Village

NYC

She’s a friend to everyone who matters
and to one mongrel who does not. 

Greenwich Village

NYC

Reading alone.  The others small talking about the trials of the day, when we were killed with rubber bullets in the hostile cold.  One of them asking, “What’s wrong?”  I looked down saying, “Poetry.”    

Johnny's Bar

Greenwich Village

NYC

She said time means nothing to people around here, so he was surprised at the speed she walked in high heels.  He asked her to slow down so he could remember the sound of every step on the cobblestones. 

Johnny's Bar

Greenwich Village

NYC

O Greenwich Village!  The village of dreams.  And Chelsea.  But no.  Even the Chelsea Hotel is closed for remodeling by a large fancy chain hotel, antithetical to the spirit of every artist and wanderer calling that place home for a night or a year. 

Dear Leonard Cohen,

Everyone has a favorite story.  Mine is the one about Janis Joplin 

coming to the Chelsea Hotel to meet Kris Kristofferson for the first time.  

When she ran into you in the elevator and asked if you knew him, you 

replied I am he.  Then you both retired to your decrepit room for what

I assume was a taste of eternity in heaven.   

There’s the thought that Donald Trump is probably the new owner with the specific mission to kill the primary creative sanctuary for all those saints and artists and musicians and seekers . . . to butcher the artistic heart and soul of America.  I couldn’t take pictures of the Leonard Cohen or Dylan Thomas plaques out front due to vertiginous scaffolding.  I walked inside to the bowels of the former lobby, stripped to steel and rivets, where I was met by security saying, “does this place look closed to you?”  To which I replied, “Not necessarily, I’m from Oklahoma.” 

12/9/17

NYC