Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

50.NOTHING LIVES WHERE NOTHING IS:

‘Cultural disenfranchisement’ that’s what I call it when the people around you mean nothing and you very seldom know what anyone is talking about and most importantly no one seems to be reacting to anything you’ve just said so in that vein I find myself alone at most every midnight slaving away writing words in closets like a closeted queen afraid of the dark but generating darkness nonetheless but ‘darkness visible’ as has been said Milton or Golding or somebody said that and instead I’m relaxing on air thinking of William Saroyan and trying to understand the snippets of integrity his cultural bias means but what do you use to look up key phrases that would identify things WHATEVER am I talking about I’ll not know but brave the coming fierce storm I will and ready for anything I am -circumvent the obvious obsolete the nefarious don’t mess with Mr. In B. Tween in the wine-hot summer at the white hot summer in the wine-dark sea ‘once you’ve been beaten what will remain ? hunger and sleet and driving rain’ and you know (it’s already been said) how trees drop their leafs in the dryness and effect by that a recoup of their losses through the lack of moisture - it’s a kind of retrenchment that turns out in the end to be successful because in the long run the rains return and no matter what else the tree blossoms again and makes up for lost time - and so I think of that as I walk the edges of this colorful old town the stink of the fish market the cry of the bodegas the insufferable lines of people at every attraction and the foreign tourists hanging on the rope line wherever they go - SO EARNEST - their faces so intent on experiencing themselves all that is and I think ‘what the hell will I recoup?’ for what can I ever get back with so much being gone and if I live in the past in the days of yore then what good am I anyway missing as I am everything new (the nurses the lawyers the students) everything passing thru and out of Pace University and the noisy but sadly derelict harbor streets below and alongside the Brooklyn Bridge once the center of oh so much activity and beauty and anger and movement and yet now a pale sadly undone ghost of itself and ‘I WALK below arches I look beneath shells’ and there’s nothing there valued ‘but a collection of Hells’ and that’s where everyman’s memory comes in and I watch them again over and over the family of dentists just in from Queens to eat at the Harbor Café and the daughters they’ve married and the sons they’ve brought in and gray fathers and mothers dressed for business in the tropical heat and the children ready to boast and ready to burst prideful with energy and excitement but do they see the sad and lonely men walking past hunched and broken solid and lost beaten and finished at the very ends of a long New York life and I bet if they do it’s only in passing for ‘Nothing Lives Where Nothing Is' and there’s no refutation of that on these streets.