Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

207. ALONG WASHINGTON STREET - (NYC, 1969):

It seemed like every factory-level streetface-outlet door and window was facing my way as I walked along the long edge of Washington Street athwart right there with trucks and carriages wagons and wheels – and every so often a few guys would be milling about smoking and talking and a few trucks would slide by picking up or dropping off whatever it was these trucks had to carry : freezer lockers of meat or freezer lockers of furs refrigerated truck-boxes or ancient old railcars with bad paint and peeling rust which made their way back and forth the slowly over the elevated work-tracks right there all weeded and dirty and cluttered with junk and a few guys up above would be looking down and the street-level unloaders in turn were looking up and by this passage progress somehow was made and things exchanged and the slow steady work of a shift’s labor would get done – ‘there’s a fuckin’ city to feed and looks like we gotta’ feed it’ – some guy said that while messing around one day with the lockers and cabinets of the meat-plant he worked at and anyway the entire street was infused with this weird energy of that sort of thinking - men who’d come in from other places and almost begrudgingly do their work and the sawdust and smell and the drains of blood and carnage made it all seem as if the very slabs of beef on the hooks and hangers were somehow still crying out in death for help and solace but it wasn’t really ever that – instead just cold and ice and frozen or near-frozen slabs of meat being carted off and the very same slabs – fresh now – being carved and chunked off right on the sidewalks and hanging from hooks while swift and silent butchers carved their ancient craft – cuts chops ribs and the rest and you’d think it was a paradise for dogs though I never saw one and anyway whatever animal was here was usually here for selling and even though the nearby waterfront did have its wild dogs and mangy curs running free along marsh and dock they never came here and the two pieces of separate business never seemed to meet so that each was in its own way its own cycle of activity : no one could think of it differently the cops and crimelords and criminals beggars and thieves all knew the situation so that everything down here was pretty well circumscribed and if one had any business in this fashion it was done in a manner both sly and efficient – deals made money changed goods exchanged as well as the usual array of beatings slashings and body-dumpings and I’d seen them all over the time I wandered here but as mum as I remained was as silent as I slept and – as I was also once told – ‘around here buddy the less said the better.'

206. SOME MEMORY OF SAD UPON AWAKENING:

“As William Fishbait Miller I played a hell of a game and as the white LOVE van in your driveway I entered into another aspect of romantic playfulness but all we ever wound up doing was getting horribly drunk and leaving piles of empties around which no one ever wanted to clean up or collect and seeing as to how we were (our motto) ‘Dedicated To Mobility’ we just moved along and on to the next starry atmosphere or crazy drunken endeavor and sometimes – although we were sad upon awakening – we just moved out and were STARTLED maybe into submission maybe into nothing but anyway THAT was all so long ago and like an enormous bevy of bees swarming wild those old cinching memories still tighten my soul but running away causes nothing to change and as I walked along just this morning past the old Clement Moore place I watched the people entering the old cemetery gates and wondered why and I came upon the enormous vines which someone had cut brutally in half and thus ENDED right there a seventy-year life of growth and beauty intertwined with the old black high metal fence the secret language of the Gods even that was not enough to stop the cutter to cease the destroyer and I watched the three skinny girls over at one side as they in turn watched me but the broad lawn stretched between us and nothing was said between us as we all realized at the moment of death that something miraculous had been destroyed but what the modern world relegates to nothing the modern world also kills and so it is and so it was and the charmed nature of the woman on my elbow graced that thought and made the idea play right backwards until we reached the next climactic street and in the silence of the dread what more was there to say and why and if we motioned for one moment to STOP something we nonetheless kept right on going out under the trestle past the old railroad along the cobbled set-back walk into the glass-fronted apartment building and up up on up to the simple 6th floor gallery where something WE THOUGHT waited but it was only two other men hands entwined bonded together dangling love like serpents’ teeth over the balcony and glass and though I couldn’t even understand him he kept talking to me about the photographs and the artists and the Hudson River’s ripply sheen which played color off our dead dark faces and as we talked the nearby open window allowed in street noise from below and suddenly someone shattered glass and the tinkling high enormous shatter broke our conversation solidly apart and words like waves of sound departed” and this went on you see like dissembling or avoidance has a way of doing for it was already mid-afternoon and we’d yet so much left to do.