We are in the air. I am not sure why I say it, but I say it: it looks like a motherboard. I speak the observation and it stops being real.
We can take the F. The twenty-four hour haunts close early now. My brother knows a place, the doorman knows a place, I heard about a place where eternal jazz outlasts the curfew.
We pass the dungeon-like bar where the girl lit a sparkler thinking it was incense. The place where I dressed like Frida Kahlo with a sexy Spider-Man crying on the sidewalk. I was a different person with a different laminated card.
Scanning the laminated card, the security guard welcomes me back to a place where I’ve never been. Extending the hand like a warranty. Picasso is downstairs, trapped in a box.
The open laptop is playing a movie about a satellite falling in love, like a Lou Reed song designed by committee while we soar.
Hart Crane and Biggie wrote poems to the steel. As long centuries float by, what is solid turns to air. Tomorrow’s poem is a ballad to dissociated post-everything.
Sondheim in the massive crowd, trains piston Hammerstein. When the curtains close you recognize your role in the guerilla theatre.
Crossing Madison at this hour is a gamble, but we double down. This is where they drank whiskey and taught us how to smoke.
Cathedrals are capacitors on the motherboard, Central and Prospect the heatsink. Situated on the lawn, spread out to maximum surface area, the fever dissipates.
The portrait is blue, like twelve bars of song or a Mets hat.
The gambler is addicted to a memory, not a risk. Either reach for the sky or double-down like you’re in deep until you roll seven. Don’t take the L. We can take the J.
For the swelling population who think life is a simulation, the city from orbit, with its circuitry and glowing nerves. A rigid box over serpentine chaos. Trapped in a cube.
Invisible hands run blades along the tether and my phone is dead or dying. We can take the J or walk from here.
The golden calf grew up vengeful on wall street, embossed. No one gets the joke.
The laminated card is unconvincing, but manages to be me. It has the state’s watermark, best seen slanting left.
This isn’t class critique or my first world burden: I never take the bus. It’s forty minutes by foot in the shade of sweetgum and elm. Spaces between us only escalate to distance once measured.
Blue like the pigment on the monochrome work, transcendence and spiritual freedom, subject to copyright. Like the old subway cards.
A father of three says, “this guy really hates America,” and means it in a negative way.
A woman in cropped cotton says, “this guy really hates America,” and it is a good thing.
The pigment matches her hair. Blue, like a diminuendo and crescendo. Blue, like kind of. There is a boy with a dove perched on his shoulder, smiling with buddha grace.
Slanting left from the window — airplane, gallery, dream — the skyline arranges itself.
Staring at the stationary camera of the security guard, I transition from an image without caption to a caption without image.
Aura is diminished by knowability. A coin trick you’ve witnessed a thousand times. The begrimed inner life of beauty threatens its allure. Uptown is that way.
One must initiate. A life of beauty begins with acknowledging how untrue, how ugly, how malign beauty can feel.
Each set of fingerprints is a unique constellation like a snowflake, like a protein spike, so every touch against the mosaic is a user experience that cannot be replicated. Connect at the junction.
For reasons never cohered, there were motherboards scattered around the house. Growing up we imagined cities, zoos and enclosures, flying cars and swimming pools. Monorails gliding high above transistors. Vaults opened to let the future free.
Whitman used to write here, ecstatic in the frontier language of an archaic time. Whitman rode the bus. Soldier on, love, we must access our Grand Pastoral on foot.
This is where we walked, mid-breakdown, until a spraypaint image of Nixon with the phrase ‘I LOVE DICK’ in block letters broke us from our erotic fugue.
She walks between the track lights and her shadow reaches first, the way instinct precedes reason. An interaction of the negative space. Holes cut in the universe.
It would not be the right time to phone a friend. Ignore the laminated card. I’m a different person and everything is fine, just a little blue.
Adirondack blue. Deep blue. A supercomputer against the grandmaster. Blue like a flame burning, a fraternal order, a simple sky.
The past is a little island off the western coast, suspended on concrete structures.
The anvil cloud overhead is the atmosphere speaking in velocity. We are under pressure literally and figuratively as the vapor heats with pitiless friction.
Foaming the fatty milk of another life. This is where I slung the chiaroscuro to the midwestern corn-fed, where the coffee raised the circulation.
Conquered first by men in britches, later by men in cufflinks, lastly conquered by electric light, blue like Matisse’s window.
Our trajectory intersected with a previous iteration of this sky, of this sidewalk, of this Egyptian tomb downtown, in a freshly tattooed era of hope and poverty. There has never been the same cloud twice, like fingerprints on tile.