saturday excursion

what a beautiful weekend here in the northeast...instead of barbecue, beers, and baseball on the a.m. transistor radio i spent the day traveling to jfk [airport]...i know it is not the greatest of ways to spend an eighty degree memorial day saturday...driving through the outer boroughs...the forgotten wasteland...but i enjoyed it...you see i hadn't taken that trek in awhile...always to the easier ports i go...newark...which i passed today, jet engines rumbling over the pike...and the grand cargo lifters sprouting from the swampy reeds...as my friend commented quietly..."the port of hong kong is ten times bigger and goes on for miles"...i sat back and could only dream of that industrial beauty...the romance of of the east...the magic of the contact and mystery...we rolled over the ugly bridges...the goethals, a great name for a sad bridge...traversing the arthur kill...shouldn't all rivers be referred to as kills...the dutch really had something...crossing the rusted out verazano narrows...it looks so majestic from afar, but much like the barroom whore, a closer look reveals the decrepit nature of its soul...i love bridges and while crossing this one, i wondered what ole varazano thought sailing into the narrows for the first time...before the crystal towers, before the lower east side, before the bungalows of sheepshead bay, before the bridge that bears his name...it all is moot and all is shadow...and the kill van kull keeps flowing...oblivious to all existence...even its own...

wasted time

today was another slow day...i went through the motions certain that at some point everything would work itself out or i would simply drop dead...everyday people just drop like flies...forty-something joggers, big fat artery-clogged souls, fragile newborns, and the head through the windshield crowd...meanwhile the rest of us live another day...i waste most, if not all of my life...i wonder what exactly it is not to waste my time...is that not all that we are doing...wasting, biding, doing our time...until something else comes along, whether it be as soft and subtle as the summer breeze on an eastern shore, or as abrupt as a sacred lightening bolt...time is simply a myth, an excuse, something worthy of wasting...after all "a stitch in time saves nine," "time is money", "it is time to be loved," and " the time has come" for this or that...yes indeed the time has come and time is money...so i've wasted money, so i've wasted time...and so i am wasted...ashes in the ganges, silt in the sea...i walk the hill in peace, trying to hold on...

a simple day

i drove across the g.w. yesterday for the first time in awhile...i saw the wide hudson expanse...saw the projects clinging to its banks...saw the slinking autos on blacktop-ed hi-ways...saw the distant crystalline spires of the city in the drizzle of an evening haze...i had no response...no thought...simply an unwilling observer to the figment of something's imagination...reflected by the meandering river...reflected in the the half-light...for once everything stopped and i jumped in...