dissonance

my mama said baby be careful

if anybody says i love you.

i warn you.

my papa says baby be careful

because i love you and i won't hurt you.

advice from an absent parent

baby talk. 1992. ana de la cruz.

Come my child

sit on my lap while i tell you a story

one of your future

a bedtime story, nothing more

don't be scared, the truth don't hurt.

you will grow up to be a beautiful young lady

smart, at times silly

your family will be proud and so should you

but you won't be smiling under your mask.

you will only do that when you're away from that place

not when you're in the freedom

but when you find that way out

with the special ones

the ones that make your smile radiate.

you're going to meet special people that enter your life

they'll slip in while the rest walk by

they'll manage to stay while the others will only linger

but there will come a time when they too leave.

you're going to feel like you are growing up all over again

as if you have to re-lose yourself all over again.

My child, there's more to life than people

but you're going to ignore that fact of life as you grow up

your beautiful memories will fuel you

the ones from when you more of a scribble than a perfected line.

And while you search my child, you will have lots of questions

and i beg of you to have patience with the unresolved

-the loose ends of your big heart and mind

i beg of you to love those questions

i beg of you to not search for the answers that cannot be given to you

you would not be able to live them in their entirety

and my child, the point of it all is to live everything.

Live the questions for days and years to come

and you will serially

someday far in the future,

not too soon, but not too late either

without even noticing

live your way into those answers.

And whether you learn that there's a bond between those you grew with

one that time cannot break

or another of life's hardships

you will see there is nothing as a real as your dream

This time your smile will burst into laughs.

And that is it my child

the ending of my story of you

don't get discouraged my dear

for it will all be okay,

if it wasn't that wouldn't be the end.

Bright Star

photograph: bright star. 2009 Ana De La Cruz.

Bright Star

by: John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

The Token Thief

Bystanders on the platform see it as just another spark, its noise making them flinch, its light making their eyes squint, but I know that there is more beyond its shine, that every time a blue spark is born from the merging of a train and a rail track, a story is shared, a special moment goes by. My spark was the train and The Thief was my blue.

I entered the Franklin Street train station on the 1 Train line at around 12:45 AM that evening. It was one of those cool “all you need is a sweater” night. The city was extra calm, the buildings extra tall, and the sidewalks slow as if there were no belt underneath my legs forcing my feet to follow the New Yorker way of walking. One out of the two MTA vending machines flashed a “No Bills” warning while the other continuously added zeros to my desired two dollar amount; so many zeroes, in fact, that at one point I was close to purchasing a two-hundred dollar Metro Card. The smell of construction and beer filled the platform as the train pulled in, sparks cushioning its halt.

I was sitting on the wooden bench of the platform-twirling the loose ends of my shirt, feeling the small gusts of winds that poured into the tunnel from the subway grates above, when the train slowly pulled up to the station. I waited for the couple that had shared the platform with me for that half hour to board the train, but they did not, so I squeezed by into the un-air conditioned subway car. Six people sat scattered throughout the subway car as I walked in playing with the flimsy Metro Card I had bought. The subway seat colors stretched to see past the body that rested on them. I began my ritual of asking myself “who should I sit next to” as I walked through the boxcar. “Boy do I hate using those,” said a man of about forty years old pertinaciously as I took a seat . “Great Ana,” I thought to myself, “way to pick up the crazy man as your train buddy.” He looked as if he was from a nineties music video dressed in grungy ripped jeans and a plaid shirt. His five o’ clock shadow blended in nicely with the expression that waited for a reply. “Well imagine having to lug around tokens enough to last you a month,” I answered as I thought of a quick escape plan. He rested his hand on my shoulder, and just like that I stayed. To this day, I ask myself what made me shift my body and speak to this man, what made me think this ride is going to be different instead of reacting to his strangerly touch. Perhaps it was the fact that I thought he could be reading my mind and therefore it would not be smart to let him catch onto my negative brain waves, or maybe most importantly, it was because it was not his hand that had that control but the message in his eyes; his eyes were wide open as if they were looking to tell a story. “I was one of those infamous token suckers actually,” he said earnestly.

“Token Sucking,” as he explained, was a scheme in which token slots located at entrance gates were jammed with paper so that later on in the day someone could illegally retrieve tokens. “Some guy or gal would come and drop a token into the slot and when the gate would refuse to open they would have to go and spend another of them tokens to enter at another gate. I’d come out of my hiding spot and press my mouth to that bad boy and suck the token right out. There’s a whole art to it,” he said in voice determined to convince us both of the fact. By this point, he was sketching a diagram of the scenario on a napkin, using a pen he borrowed from a woman sitting beside us. I sat in amazement as he went on to explain that booth attendants began covering slots with substances such as soap to dissuade such persons from token sucking. “One motherfucker put chili powder, but that only stopped me for about five days,” he said proudly.

I asked him if the rise of the crack trade in 1989 had anything to do with token sucking and he rubbed his hand on his neck. “We’d get $50 dollars worth of tokens a day, that was enough for us.” I caught his light eyes staring at the same trail of train trash that my eyes had wandered upon during the awkward silence. I wondered if he too was trying to decipher where each object had been before it got to its meandering position throughout the subway car. We were each like those pieces, our minds substituting the trash with people and our thoughts with stereotypes. We talked for a while longer as he told me the story of the first time he tried the technique and almost swallowed the token. I could just imagine a younger version of him: the grime and dirt of the token slits stuck on his white skin and the skin of his fellow suckers. The few others sitting next to us on the train had stopped their discreteness and now made no efforts to hide the fact that they were eavesdropping; one girl slapped her partner’s leg for whispering in her ear while the former token sucker was talking. “Things were good, but my buddies and I knew we’d have to think of other ways to make money once that Metro Card talk came around,” he said pointing to the Metro Card that was still in my hand. His body shuffled continuously in the seat, so often I was sure the seat’s orange shade would fade by end of the ride.

As the train began to pull into 50^th Street, he pulled out a tattered wallet and fumbled through its insides and with a smile, placed in my hand a small token. “I got this the day before they were discontinued. My last suck,” he said elegiacally. He stood up with a grunt and pulled his duffle bag from under his seat. “Keep it. I don’t need it any more.”

That is when it occurred to me: the purpose of the train. This man had told his story zealously for the past ten subway stops, rarely pausing to take breaths in between sentences. He told me that he had only told this story twice; once to a girl he dated who had a token collection-“she thought I was a god” he said proudly-and a second time to me. “You’re the only person that has spoken to me on the subway in years,” he said nostalgically, his mouth twitching as if it were trying to take advantage of the opportunity to speak all it could. I placed the token into his hands and asked for his name. He stood facing the doors thinking for a brief moment until he answered, “Write me down as The Token Thief.” The doors opened and as I looked through the small window he ran over to the entrance gate, leaned over the edge of the turnstile and placed his lips to the now bolted shut token slit. As the doors closed, his head emerged and waved the token I had placed in his hand, its reflection in the eyes of everyone on the train. Strangers smiled in one of those rare moments of unity.

I never bumped into The Token Thief again, even after the time I tried to take the train at the exact same time secretly hoping to hear more. As I sat alone inside the train that night, with no subway trash, commuters or characters to ride with me, I sat contemplating the notion behind the metal boxcars that ride along the four hundred and sixty one miles of subway rail track. Strangers meet on the subway, but had I known how it was almost certain that we would not see each other again perhaps I would have qualified that moment as being special. I still have not lost that sense of wonder about the subway forwhile the congestion might dominate individuality, the stories of those who look for interaction are the ones that make the up the spirit of this grand City of Anonymity. My link to my city is as simple as the transportation that gets me around, and it is the people riding the subway, sharing their stories, and shaping mine that define the place for me-the place where I can contemplate. I hear rail noise outside the train and stories on the inside. I see life moving past the doors that asks for them to stand clear, stories bustling to get out, like sparks in the air. Just like The Thief and just like me.

Into The Wild

"Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild." - Alexander Supertramp May 1992

“I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor-such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps-what more can the heart of man desire?”-tolstoy

"...you are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God's place is all around us, it is in everything and in anything we can experience. People just need to change the way they look at things."

"I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong... but to feel strong."

"Happiness only real when shared."

-Chris McCandless

Art

To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.

- Giorgio de Chirico

some of my favorites:

Blick uber die Themse bei Kew Gardens auf Syon House 1760/70

View of Syon House over the Thames near Kew Gardens

Richard Wilson 1714-1782

Dom uber einer Stadt, nach 1813

Cathedral above a Town

Karl Friedrich Schinkel 1781-1841

Landschaft bei Riva am Gardassee, 1835

Landscape near Riva, Lake of Garda

Jean-Baptise Camille Corot 1796-1875

Maanenschijn: sailing at night near Rotterdam

with the St. Laurenskerk beyond

Petrus van Schendel (Dutch, 1806-1870)

Johann Christian Clausen Dahl (1788-1857)

Morgen nach einer Sturnmnacht

Morning after a Stormy Night

Starry Night Over the Rhone 1888

Vincent van Gogh

Entre les Trous de la Memoire

Dominique Appia

The Kiss (1907)

Gustav Klimt

The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum (Cafe Terrace at Night)

Vincent van Gogh 1888

when walls talk

There are no particles for the filter to collect, because the grains never had a chance to develop. Today there are no pigments to sieve from the figure a black line has outlined on paper, no splashes of color to separate the image from all the others in the coloring book. The image had been delineated by pencil, perfected for so long that by now everyone else’s contains color.

She thinks it might have been your fault.

That perhaps it was all those years of protection that let nothing catalytic seep through. The solution just settled.

Motionless.

That is her.

If you wish to find her, she’ll be out finding colors.

The mind tightened or mistakenly loosened the screws of thought. What she thought, who she was, what she wasn’t, were reassured and disassembled time and time again in her thoughts. It was her mind that heard the complaints, helped her self diagnose and piece the fabricated fragments together in efforts to regain full function.

She knew it was against the rules to ignore but enough of it had been done to make her disregard no different.

Or so I heard.

Today she discovered the scar, the eraser markings on the outline you both had so carefully developed, and realized the entire image lacked color. And she told herself that with time and time away she will discover, the same way she found gifts in her room or because you found it distasteful handing her things.

Truth is, I wont find those hues so easily, I’ve never truly seen them before.

But if I do, I shall roll around and see which ones stick and form a pattern that’s absorbed beyond the surface.

Something real.

Something filterable and with color to shine.

She told me to tell you.