The Brooklyn Hallelujah

 

I’d like to thank God and Long Island and the Dutch for giving me the

Hallelujah of naked sunbathing 300 feet above Red Hook with Russian dicks and rooftop fellatio atop century old abandoned warehouses with their apathetic dock workers, black netting condemning the building and freeing our nights to watch the sunrise, to camp out in this cement sanctuary closer to the precinct than our parents

Because who could sleep when there are empty airports at the end of Flatbush and forsaken sugar refineries in Williamsburg all calling my name Hannah Hannah Hannah

We, the forgotten hulks of Kings County!

And the Prospect Expressway sounds like the Atlantic if you close your eyes

And Ocean Parkway is all Sinatra in my grandfather’s Lexus, all Jay-Z in my dealer’s Hummer

And there is a freight line which runs from Canarsie to Bay Ridge, didn’t you know? I can take you there, it’s overgrown with weeds and needles and we’ll climb to the tops of locomotives and stare across the East River

And barefoot street races in Bensonhurst bring color to the midnight luminescence of the pre-dawn streets as lax mothers watch our drunken hula hooping from the porch

And college boys write me poetry in subway cars and I wink and tell them I’m 12

And Crown Heights bed and breakfasts where black boys kiss me till my lips crack

And I left my virginity in Kensington with a Turkish junkie

And every night ends tunneling through the Earth on the G train with nowhere to go but everywhere, my heart beating to the pennies in the bum’s paper cup “Stand clear of the closing doors please”.

This borough, this borough!

Oh I’ve climbed the Coney Island parachute jump in a white dress just to double check this planet is really round

Oh I’ve boiled rice with rainwater in a Gowanus squat where hands touch you in the dark and you don’t care because it’s love it’s love it must be love

Oh I’ve walked through the tunnels under Church Avenue and listened to the sounds of the rats and the soil and the F, and it was so beautiful I broke down and cried in an emergency exit

Oh won’t you have me Brooklyn?

Won’t you take me up and lay me down in Greenwood so I can decompose into your chest

Won’t you fly me over Vinegar Hill like human sky writing just once so I can scream out

Hallelujah!

 

 

Stoop Dreams

 

We used to lay together on days so hot the hydrants spewed water with firefighter’s blessings and I’d throw off all but my big girl’s panties and feel your holy brown stone on my bare stomach as you cooed the hum of air conditioning units into my soul

 

"Do you mind?" I'd ask, smothering you with chalk till you breathed pink dust and spoke in hopscotch
And the rain would wash it all away

                   

We sat together on the edge of the century and watched the millennia change in a sky high explosion of human life with the entire borough counting down from a billion like a never ending rocket ship of immemorial beginnings and I stood in the flower pot to get a better look at eternity and its infinite fireworks

 

And the day I realized Manhattan is an island and it was bleeding and I climbed on top of you to see if the Towers were really gone and it was so dusty up there you shooed me back down and I stayed in my room for four days willing everything to rise from the ground and you whispered in my ear “I’m still standing” and that made me feel sick but I forgave you

 

Brooklyn summers taste like you and your double dutch daydreaming with the Fifth Avenue Boys and free barbeque at block parties where old men bring out older telescopes to stop children from scootering across their toes and show them Neptune and show them Pluto and show them how to POP POP POP their thumb in their cheek like a water droplet, like the dew on your plants which dried up and blew away cause I could never remember to water them (sorry)

 

Those were the popsicle days but they melted into late night kisses and cigarette butts and all my boom box babies went off to college and then the other night I got so sad thinking about my place in time and space until I remembered you’re imprinted on my ass from when I fell down every single one of your stairs and onto my back so that the blood was at first like the Nile and then like the Atlantic and now like an ugly little scar, and I felt happy to be a part of something.

 

Oh you’ve given me bruises and slugs and painful cell phone pacing but you’re more my mother than my mother, cause it’s the cool of your 100 year old cement  that used to incubate my heart and now calms my bones. And I hope that the wash-off sidewalk paint I painted your first step blue with never does wash-off but stays there forever and ever like a mark of me your bastard daughter who loves you out of need out of compassion out of belonging, because I, I live in you, and you, you are my stoop.

 

 

 

Insomniac’s Soliloquy
 

In an effort to never be forgotten

I planned to shoot up my veins with life until it leaked out my fingertips and there could be no doubt I was alive

I made a promise not to go home until I’d so filled myself with existence the shadow of the tracks were embedded in my skin like a tattoo of ephemeral motion

I became convinced I’d been put here to wander and fill my addiction for human energy in a city where no one ever sleeps because we are all constantly dreaming  

And somewhere between the Bowery blues and the Harlem highs I ended up on top of the Brooklyn Bridge and there was a woman sitting on the northernmost turret and she smiled at me and said

 

“Everyone always forgets that this is an island

And that there is a certain loneliness in every human soul.

I know for fact that everyone in this city has cried

But the truth is

When you stuff 8 million people on an island

That island tends to explode with light and love and when you look up at night you don’t see stars because we are all star stuff in this oversaturated harbor town

And we brighten the sky from the ground

And your bones are made of the same material as skyscrapers

And I stand up here and watch this city that never sleeps

Always knowing that if I fell the smack of my body on the East River

Wouldn’t wake a soul but those who were already awake

But I don’t care

Because  one day, I know, the waters will rise and the waves will come down not in anger but in a hushhh and blanket this city, tuck us under their sea foam and give a goodnight kiss to the top of the last high rise as New York New York,

Filled with all my neon beauties and moon babies, who I watch every night,

Sink into a watery sleep, after being awake for so very long. ”

 

And then she tumbled off the bridge but I didn’t hear her hit the water and when I looked down there were fireworks dancing on the surface and a ship roared by

 

And then I went home and slept.