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.

Round

s** is a ball, curled.

drops falling keep rolling on

the circuitous edge.

Inscriptions

Inscriptions

They were laying on the concrete roof peering over the edge, the town siren ringing as they looked into my bedroom window and spoke into their walkie talkies-an unnecessary act given the fact that all three of them were just inches from each other. Any stranger, not familiar with their daily routine, would have thought the boys were trying to save my cousins and I from sort of impending danger. But they were not, so every morning that summer we would kick them off the property-our nine, ten and thirteen year old voices floating smoothly behind us through the hot humid air as we chased them from our roof onto theirs.

Every day was pretty much the same in San Francisco de Macoris, a small town in the Dominican Republic. Had I known where I’d be now then, perhaps I would have treasured the island, the leaves that swayed in the timeless air, the walks down the worn out curves, the drives up and down mountains.

In the town, motorcycles hum through the roads, honking as they dodge the people that spill over and onto the streets because the sidewalks are so narrow. Women sell pastries and fruits from large wick baskets that sit perfectly on their heads. Conchos crowd up to nine passengers at once, the ones at the end holding the doors that hangs on a few wires, while the rest of the passengers fan themselves or sing along to the radios of passing cars. A young boy shines shoes in Duarte Park in front of the municipal building, carefully resting the older man’s feet on his tin coffee can, his hands, smothered in shoe shinning grease, quickly yet carefully tracing every curve of the shoe. Little old ladies, children and families pour in and out of the Santa Ana Church, the large cathedral that towers above all else. And amongst its shadow rests a house, its small gallery decorated with poinsettia trees and marble tiles.

On one day the neighborhood kids gather and play in an inflatable pool. Splashing a mixture of euphoria and water onto the people walking on the sidewalk. One small girl, her skin whiter than the rest, had her mother pulling up her blue one piece bathing suit. Had an outsider been looking the would have seen the mother trying to plead with the four year-old to wait longer for the swimming suit to fit-they would seen the mother chase the child throughout the room, past another, down a hall, across a living room and out to the gallery, all with a bottle of sunscreen in her hand. A grandfather sits as still as the mango tree that stands planted out back, watching the actions of the world around him. The tree has stood there for years, providing smiles to generations of a family, a shade for the kids that play on the roof of the home. A tree that once gave off a distinct sweet mango smell that traveled through the carved out holes of a living room wall and into the nose of the grandfather that sat on a wooden rocking chair-a smell that stuck to the mouth that politely asked his family for favors.

A picture of Mozart still hangs above his chair, the chair that used to rock to the sounds of classical music, a chair that only the once a conductor, father, grandfather and husband sat in. A chair whose wood probably smells as much like mangos as the bark of the tree that rests in the backyard. He doesn’t call the little girl anymore, the granddaughter who ran in front of him leaving drops of sunscreen on the floor, the teen he tried to impress with his English, the young woman who wishes she could tell him all. He doesn’t yell at the boys that use to bother his nieces and granddaughter, nor at beggars who walked by so that he can give them money. He never carved the letters of his granddaughter’s name into the tiles of the home for her to see when she came back. Instead all she sees when she runs after her neighbors or every time the town siren ring and she runs past the hole filled wall is the rocking chair, all she hears are the sounds of the vehicles, all she smells is the sweet mango scent, all she tastes is the humid air and all she feels is the touch of the hot ground on her feet.

In the small town people came and went. In the small town she came and went, but the coming part hasn’t been the same. The town, the palms, and farms haven’t changed. Neither have the fragments of the childhood she looks back on. But the carefree wonder has, because now its all about the preservation and remembering. Its all about the carving, the place, and the details that left the mark. Her grandfather knew that much. But I guess he never found a way to inscribe it all for me.