The library at night wasn’t so bad. Drunk kids would stumble in packs past the windows on their way back to the dorms from the Elmwood Avenue bars, yelling and carrying on. My coworker, Carl, the son of a longtime librarian, and the victim of some unnamed learning disability, was always standing in the doorway of my office and talking my ear off about some inappropriate topic. Students chatted away pretty freely. The computer lab was treated as much as a late-night lounge as a library. When Carl was fired I had to train a series of university policemen to run the ID-swiping software. They were usually interesting guys. And they got pretty bored and talkative overnight. One night a stout Irish-looking guy about my age told me the “real” story behind the removal of the iconic, 30 year-old Winter Ice Sculpture from the Buffalo State quad. And the campus cops also knew the lowdown on real city cop stuff: where the worst parts of the city were, which parts the cops had given up on, where you wouldn’t expect drug activity, the “shit” the mayor’s son gets away with, &c. I guess the campus and city police coordinate activities and just gossip away. But one of the guys I trained was a huge burly quiet guy with pocked skin and bulldog cheeks, Officer Richard McKeon. Didn’t say a peep as I showed him the series of computer screens he had to bring up to authenticate the student IDs; never tried to do it himself; just said “Nah” when I asked if he had any questions, and then for the next three months proceeded to ignore the computer, checking IDs by hand, and eyeballing the students closely, as if he could see their fines.

Reasons not to pack it in

Because these are these words exactly,
and nothing else;
Because each new word is a new flag in a new country,
that we must abandon immediately, or die;
Because my heart mingles with night airs,
and communes in silent joy with the white spray of stars;
Because the way out is truly the way in;
Because the wisdom of a trillion unrecorded lives
is awake inside me, and will speak;
Because the sky has portals enough;
Because the afterlife is loaded with darkness,
but light is only one kind of tangibility;
Because no fact nor whim nor apprehension is
without its own little life, its own holy vector;
Because the mystic accent is what is required here, and
will be required again, and will not be required;
Because songs must end, but a miracle is a timeless commodity;
Because the crows of time have grown fat on our breadcrumbs;
Because we are capable of throwing hoops around “Time” and “Nature,”
and of framing the shifting mists;
Because the workaday world melts into the long night of prayers;
Because we must push and pull at a thing
in order to discover its true shape;
Because prophecy is, happily, inevitable;
Because everything at our feet may be fashioned into a conveyance;
Because those are ropes, hanging from the stars;
Because our sorrows are as seasons in the mountains;
Because reverence is the better part of reverie;
Because my poem wanders to find its theme.

I’m sorry

I thought you were someone else.

Morning scene from a motel parking lot

Husband and wife pushed and pulled the battered silver cart across the parking lot. Their faces were dark, lost among the riotous colors of their clothes.

Every hill, every crack on the asphalt, seemed too much for the ancient device, as its faded bottles of cleaning solutions rattled together in protest. The cart’s saucer-like wheels dug in against each new direction the couple tried. They brayed flat-sounding instructions to each other in their language: it could not be told if these words were angry or loving or what. Maybe they were neither: just communicating the essence of what had to be done to gain the next incline, or to traverse the next precipice.

In spite of the difficulty, the couple dealt tenderly with the old cart. They treated it like a beloved but reluctant family nag, and seemed at times to be pleading with it. For somewhere among the tiny soaps and toilet ribbons, the stale coffee packets and Dixie cups, dwelt the most precious thing they had.

A Little Bit Left Over

I am just a simple man, you wouldn’t call me well-to-do
I got enough for me and mine, we can always make it through.
And no matter how hard things get I always try to…

Leave a little bit left over (over) – at the end of the month.
Maybe get a pair of sneakers, maybe have a nice lunch.

Got a keep an eye on things: keep your money in your shoe.
From Park Ave. to Washington, they all got their sights on you.
And you know they won’t be satisfied while you…

Still have a little bit left over (over) – at the end of the month.
They won’t get a wink of sleep, now, ’til your money’s all used up.

Maybe I’ll take a walk – just listen to my thoughts
They used to be my closest friends.
But there’s no way to go
Real life just moves to slow
And we already know how it’s gonna end.

The water bill is drowning me – the gas bill burned me, too.
The armies of the money-changing madmen have broke through
Might be a year before I manage to…

Have a little bit left over (over) – at the end of the month.
They won’t get a wink of sleep, now, ’til your money’s all used up.

Fun-Ful Fire Slide – 1917 ad

The American City By Arthur Hastings Grant, Harold Sinley Buttenheim

READ JOHN RUSKIN T-Shirt

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Speak, river!
Or groan if you must.
Somewhere among your gray waters
flit the dreams of our city.

Chicken Wings and Snow

GIRL: What is it with people? “Chicken wings and snow, chicken wings and snow.” That’s all they ever talk about in the national media when it comes to Buffalo. You know? What about our cultural institutions? Our business heritage? Our historic role as the western terminus of the Erie Canal? Will you ever hear about these? Hell, no! Instead, this once-proud city, the Queen City of the Lake, is subjected to indignity after indignity on the national stage. All our pioneering visionaries, our art and our architecture, violently reduced to a grubby token, with mangled animal limbs soaked in hot sauce on one side, and foul, freakish weather on the other.

BOY: Philadelphia has the same problem.

GIRL: Yeah, but all they have there is cheese steak and the Liberty Bell!

The Curse of the Gab

“You are undoubtedly provided with what in your case can only be called the curse of the gab.”

Life with Jesus (the sitcom that saved the network)

Dwelling on my eventual diseases, certain of the central role of the cell phone.

It is weird that my wife was murdered behind a garage with a five iron.  Especially after I had posted that piece to an online writing forum about my wife being murdered behind a garage with a five iron.  Of course in the story, the garage belonged to a Mr. Fitzpatrick, while in the actual incident occurred behind the garage of a Mr. O’Malley.