This one, by Dorothy Parker, that embodies our desire for recklessness even though we recognize its sheer inefficacy.
Observation
If I don’t drive around the park,
I’m pretty sure to make my mark.
If I’m in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again,
If I abstain from fun and such,
I’ll probably amount to much,
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.
Dorothy Parker
This heartbreakingly simple description of the complicacy of relationships in this city; the magic of its onset, the despair of its ending, and the dull pain that remains.
Rain
Yesterday was the last day of summer
and it makes sense
you weren’t with me
then. Or even
on this rainy afternoon –
you’re teaching me to live
apart from you, which has reduced to
breakfast dishes crowding the nightstand,
the TV droning with some Julie Christie drama,
My black hair unwashed for a fifth day.
After all what’s grief to someone
Who never tires of longing
Except a manner of existing
In the present, where nothing is derivative.
Strange. It’s much easier now to reconcile
The scene of when I first saw you –
Crossing a city street on a busy September afternoon
The one perfect moment before language.
David Semanki
I got lost in this dark, raw account of thoughts you have trapped in an office in New York.
Visiting Chaos
No matter how awful it is to be sitting in this
Terrible magazine office, and talking to this
Circular-saw-voiced West side girl in a dirt-
Stiff Marimekko and lavender glasses, and this
Cake-bearded boy in short-rise Levi’s, and hearing
The drip and rasp of their tones on the softening
Stone of my brain, and losing
The thread of their circular words, and looking
Out through their faces and soot on the window to
Winter in University Place, where a blue-
Faced man, made of rags and old newspapers, faces
A horrible grill, looking in at the food and the faces
It disappears into, and feeling,
Perhaps, for the first time in days, a hunger instead
Of a thirst; where two young girls in peacoats and hair
As long as your arm and snow-sanded sandals
Proceed to their hideout, a festering cold-water flat
Animated by roaches, where their lovers, loafing in wait
To warm and be warmed by brainless caresses,
Stake out a state
Of suspension; and where a black Cadillac 75
Stands by the curb to collect a collector of rents,
Its owner, the owner of numberless tenement flats;
And swivelling back
To the editorial pad
Of Chaos, a quarter-old quarterly of the arts,
And its brotherly, sisterly staff, told hardly apart
In their listlessly colored sackcloth, their ash-colored skins,
Their resisterly sullenness, I suddenly think
That no matter how awful it is, it’s better than it
Would be to be dead. But who can be sure about that?
L.E.Sissman
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