New York’s Last Gleanings
by Matthew Abuelo
New York used to be a squatters town
and
a misfits town
and a union town.
This is where you could
find a cheap room at the Chelsea
or the Dexter House
with a bathroom down the hall.
Or at the Commander.
Many SROs vanished into the
remains of burnt out
warehouses once run by
“who wants to know industries”
only to succumb to the midnight storms
“of Jewish lightning”.
This was the town
where the truly strange
and burned out radicals sat at diners with
coffee stained napkins
sitting under coffee stained cups
screaming about the price of rent
or the loss of tenements under the weight of Lincoln Center.
Here punks
Rabbis
The smiling hustler
And the honest con men
and the artist
were the lower East Side
and where one could always find a cheap meal of well-cooked dumplings across from CBGB
or at the Wohop in China Town
where the cops and locals gathered
but where out-a-towners passed without notice.
Our Liberal mayor Koch
Declared that it was official policy
that City Hall would no longer worry about
The poor or the homeless
And forced them to the outter boroughs
With one stroke of a pen.
And when more cardboard communities
Sprung up like cat tails in a polluted heart
Than bodies removed from Manhattan
Or placed in Potter’s Field
The gun was handed over
To a whiney crossdressing ex-prosecutor
Who was placed in the Mayor’s chair
Turning the homeless into outlaws under the lights of Broadway
And the theaters were vacated
For the price of the SRO heartbeat.
City Hall unleased the Clorox tide at last
Washing away the pimps
The artists
The squeegee men
The graffiti
The honest pan handler
And the grinning hustler
And the avenue corner whores
While keeping those on the Wall Street pay roll
In place
Even New York was washed away
Turning everything clean as Chinese marble.
For those who
Never saw morning
or for those who morning came too soon
subway diving onto the third rail
Under the graffiti walls
Of midtown became just another past time.
You could always tell what borough you were in by the local baseball fans.
The Mets would find no home in the Bronx
While the Yankees received the Bronx cheer in Queens.
In Brooklyn
The Dodgers will be forever hated
Or dead
The last ticket has been punched at Ebbets Field
This is the great indignity that came by way of
Learning the true game of sports
And is passed down as a birthright
For all native Brooklynites
Even those not yet born.
This indignity of a team moving from the borough
Of loyal saints
To the city for fair-weather angels
which sits as a scar on the soul
Of everyone who must now look up
Just to find another past time.
While Manhattan has no face for any of the teams
Unless it’s the playoffs.
It is still a town of Dutch oven summers
Where the concrete is hotter than the 85 degree air.
The heat keeps everyone in the subways on edge
With the fear of an undefined but always present threat.
Now this where the truly cheated out run their debts
only to be taken by another deal
from those who make a living
through 1962 World Fair promises
of a clean future only afforded
to those whose wallets are as thick as the
Sunday edition of the New York Times
While all others dream of escaping
the old processing plant
of the tombs
which delivers another gone tenant
to another landlord
like room service
churning out the nameless assholes
to the yearless avenues.
The only con greater than the subway sermons
are the real estate deals
Which turn judges
Into executors
Tenants into the condemned
And the landlords into judges.
This has become the town
Where events and places are named after artists
Who could no longer live here
Were they still alive.
There is Ginsberg’s Howl Festival
The Mozart café
And Poe’s restaurant.
This has never been a town
Of permanence.
Each bar
Each diner and each building
Vanishes as quick as the subway conductor’s face
into the forward tunnel
and faster than a breath
but with the sound of passing thunder.
Nothing is ever left behind
Not the memory of what was where
Or the names of those swept
Out to the suburbs
Or even those
who
Fell out of time and onto
The subway platforms
This city has never been a morning town
New York has always been an insomniac’s town.
All of its true professionals
its night workers
have become nothing more
than just another comity
for the wealthy squares who vanish on the other side
of the George Washington Bridge
or across the L.I.E
or
the exit to White Plains.
And from across the mid-town tunnel
from the Long Island of the cheated
the bored children of the Exodus have escaped their garrisons known as villages
and have decided to return
to the city
as if coming back
to a holy land.
The only price is their souls
which become tainted meat
for landlords
to lay their gospel of the rented truth
of the tenements.
2
What is the labor pool
but a discount bin which is rummaged through by only
the truly wealthiest fingers
looking to cheat the hopelessly cheated.
On all the professional walls
all the clocks no longer keep track of the minutes or even the hours of each day.
Instead, they measure the drudgery of the grocery cashier and the convenience store clerk alike. What ticks away on these clocks
is no longer time but the overtime hours robbed from each worker by each manager.
But despite their position,
both clerk and boss know that they will forever live on shut in hours,
where all fantasies are teenage dreams of something better
and have replaced the reality that years no longer matter in the land of the cheated;
one always flows into another and they all seem the same.
This is the town where Stone Wall blew up
in the face of the NYPD
where night sticks were replaced
by high heeled shoes
that came down on the skulls
of blood thirsty cops
like the Congo rain.
Traffic,
that is the only consistency
In the cheated heart of an indifferent city.
Here in each
of these rooms
dirt and steam heat are neither friend
nor enemy
but the last things we can trust
until the next rent demand
or visit to housing court.
and all good fortune ends
when you are reduced to walking through
the street light and neon store front parade
like a moth through a flame
with no thought of coming out alive.
The power brokers
the Wall Street boys
the real estate boards
the college boards of NYU
and Columbia
and advertisement boards
are the true gods of New York
basking with their inflated egos
made of junk bonds
but sooner or later they all
get dragged down to the street level
and torn apart like so many toys
which outstayed their welcome
when the payoff becomes too great a price
or when they are recalled when the sales run dry.
But Catholic guilt
and Albany
will reflate these holy egos
“while Jewish lightning burns down”
the tenements and SROs built before the gods were born.
This is the season of crime.
3
This is the town where all its squatters
Knew the good deal of the warehoused apartment building
And the art of tapping the city’s power lines
Where rents meant nothing
And communities began to flower
In the squatter’s victory garden
While those in Saint Luke’s saw their fortunes run dry.
Sooner or later all the state’s
And the country’s radicals
Found themselves pressed against
The gilded walls of Madison Ave.
And whose fists splintered the closed doors
Of Park Avenue
Where the true crimes take place
Where the truly wealthy rig the game
For all Wall Street players
On the back of the longshoreman
Long ago.
This is the town under the wary gaze from the eyes
of the suburbs of those
Who always wait for the last crackhead
To die in the silent room of the wards
Or the unfeeling streets.
This is where the punk rockers
Flowered along the Bowery
Like ragweed
In the furious winds of two minute songs.
They were the last of those whose souls would never be for sale
Only to be worn out on the black snow sidewalks
And along the tattooed walls.
But the tide of the No Wave
Washed over the lower east side
As Lydia Lunch’s load gun pointed at every
Square heart ripe to be crushed under the weight of true poetry.
End of the poem
15 random poems
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