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pick the big bitch: the chick who look like she chew screwdrivers. hunched at the lunch table copying homework, shredding syllables with a mouthful of metal. shush the rebel in your throat, that ghost of punk funking dark circles in the pits of your polo. resist the impulse to shittalk your way through ranch dressing and lunchroom throng. bumrush: snatch song from her ears, tangle of headphone wires and tracks of mangled weave. nevermind uglying her face with nails or an armful of bangles. she already a jigsaw puzzle of scratch and scar, every exposed part caked in vaseline. every fold of fat fortified with that free-free — french fries, chickenshit shaped like tenders, cheese sticks. she will slip’n slide you if you don’t come correct. pick you up by your bookbag till you feel fly, camera phone red eyes winking your punkass almost famous. but that ain’t your fame to claim. pitbull her ankles till she drop, till ketchup and corn splatter, scatter abstract like technique from our 5th period art class. as she knuckles herself up from chickenfeed, ain’t no need to run. instead smile for the video, that soul-clap in your chest is your heart.

PRECEPT I. In Things of moment, on thy self depend, Nor trust too far thy Servant or thy Friend: With private Views, thy Friend may promise fair, And Servants very seldom prove sincere. PRECEPT II. What can be done, with Care perform to Day, Dangers unthought-of will attend Delay; Your distant Prospects all precarious are, And Fortune is as fickle as she’s fair. PRECEPT III. Nor trivial Loss, nor trivial Gain despise; Molehills, if often heap’d, to Mountains rise: Weigh every small Expence, and nothing waste, Farthings long sav’d, amount to Pounds at last.

Turn left off Henry onto Middagh Street to see our famous firehouse, home of Engine 205 and Hook & Ladder 118 and home also to the mythic painting “Fire under the Bridge” decorating the corrugated sliding door. The painting depicts a giant American flag wrinkled by wind and dwarfing the famous Brooklyn Bridge as it stretches as best it can to get a purchase on Manhattan. In the distance a few dismal towers and beyond the towers still another river. A little deal table holds a tiny American flag—like the one Foreman held as he bowed to receive gold at the ’68 Olympics in Mexico City—; this actual flag is rooted in a can of hothouse roses going brown at the edges and beginning to shed. There’s a metal collection box bearing the names of those lost during the recent burnings. Should you stop to shake the box— which is none of your business—you’ll hear only a whisper. Perhaps the donations are all hush money, ones, fives, tens, twenties, or more likely there are IOUs and the heart of Brooklyn has gone cold from so much asking. Down the block and across the street, a man sleeps on the sidewalk, an ordinary man, somehow utterly spent, he sleeps through all the usual sounds of a Brooklyn noon. Beside him a dog, a terrier, its muzzle resting on crossed paws, its brown eyes wide and intelligent. Between man and dog sits a take-out coffee cup meant to receive, next to it a picture of Jesus— actually a digital, color photograph of the Lord in his prime, robed and though bearded impossibly young and athletic, and— as always—alone. “Give what you can,” says a hand-lettered cardboard sign to all who pass. If you stand there long enough without giving or receiving the shabby, little terrier will close his eyes. If you stand there long enough the air will thicken with dusk and dust and exhaust and finally with a starless dark. The day will become something it’s never been before, something for which I have no name.

Everyone in the room is cheering. This is what you do for a painting you love! We climb up on one another’s shoulders, wave pom-poms that match the palette. We want to buy the season tickets to the train that huffs through this landscape. We want to climb the towers of this steely sculpture and hang the flag. Victory is ours! We have seen something to love here. Outside the gallery, there is an alley full of garbage. Beauty stops at the door. A scraggly tree is coming out of the pavement where the people are lined up, cigarettes and cell phones, waiting for a chance to look. They keep their giant fingers in their bags. Wear T-shirts of their favorite teams of artist assistants. On the alley wall, someone has drawn a hillside and a horse. A young man sits on a crate and peels the glue from under his nails. He nods. And looks. And soon, pulls out the chalk and adds a saddle and a man, who looks back and shouts as if he has found his enemy again.

1. You are not going anywhere. 1.1. No one is waiting for you. 1.2. In case someone is waiting for you, you can always explain the delay later. 1.3. Blame it on the traffic, no one else knows that you chose to walk. 2. Don’t look at the pavement, look at the things that you don’t see when you’re indoors. 2.1. Water towers. 2.2. Cables. 2.2.1. Cables bringing other people’s voices and faces onto TV monitors. 2.2.2. Cables bringing electricity to light bulbs and refrigerators. 2.3. Laundry on clotheslines. 2.4. Empty cans of food. 2.4.1. With flowers growing out of them. 2.4.2. With cactuses growing out of them. 3. Feel the waves surrounding you. 3.1. Waves bringing other people’s voices to the speakers of your sound system. 3.2. Waves of street sounds. 4. Measure how fast you can run up and down staircases; compare that to the speed of the cars driving by. 5. When you tire, stand in the middle of the overpass. 5.1. Look down. 5.2. Try to look ahead, attempt to delineate the city’s skyline. 5.2.1. If there’s too much pollution, look down again. 5.2.2. Hold on tighter to the rail. 5.2.3. Stay there a bit longer; remember no one is waiting for you. 5.2.4. You’re not going anywhere. 6. Through the rails you will see stories unfolding on the street. 6.1. Pay attention. 6.2. You are not they. 6.3. They are not they. 6.3.1. They are one plus one plus one, indefinitely. 7. You’re surrounded by monads going somewhere. 8. There is a purpose to their movement. 9. Desire is a Federacy.

title after Robert Clermont Witt, 1906 Refuse to make eye contact with the subject. He has been following you around the gallery. You are certain that he can see down your shirt. Look at other subjects, but know that they, too, are not of primary interest. Even when they watch you. Try not to consider what happened to the small girl staring furiously, the thin-faced woman wanly looking away. Do not think about what they had for breakfast, if the bread was hard. Certainly do not consider the odors underneath their arms and skirts. Do not allow a breeze into the room they sit in. Do not assume I am talking about any painting: step away from the subject. All subject. Was the painter in love? Do not ask the question. Imagine you are the painter, blocking out everything you don’t want to see. Everything is out of the picture. Stop looking. Stop seeking what isn’t there. Tuck your narratives back in your pocket. Look for perspective, light, shade. Let your eyes wander back to the girl. She is trying to say something but her mouth has been painted deliberately shut. Her lips, thin.

Begin in a cave. Listen to the floor boil with rodents, insects. Weep for the pups that have fallen. Later, you’ll fly the narrow passages of those bones, but for now — open your mouth, out will fly names like Pipistrelle, Desmodus, Tadarida. Then, listen for a frequency lower than the seep of water, higher than an ice planet hibernating beyond a glacier of Time. Visit op shops. Hide in their closets. Breathe in the scales and dust of clothes left hanging. To the underwear and to the crumbled black silks — well, give them your imagination and plenty of line, also a night of gentle wind. By now your fingers should have touched petals open. You should have been dreaming each night of anthers and of giving to their furred beauty your nectar-loving tongue. But also, your tongue should have been practising the cold of a slippery, frog-filled pond. Go down on your elbows and knees. You’ll need a spieliologist’s desire for rebirth and a miner’s paranoia of gases — but try to find within yourself the scent of a bat-loving flower. Read books on pogroms. Never trust an owl. Its face is the biography of propaganda. Never trust a hawk. See its solutions in the fur and bones of regurgitated pellets. And have you considered the smoke yet from a moving train? You can start half an hour before sunset, but make sure the journey is long, uninterrupted and that you never discover the faces of those Trans-Siberian exiles. Spend time in the folds of curtains. Seek out boarding-school cloakrooms. Practise the gymnastics of web umbrellas. Are you floating yet, thought-light, without a keel on your breastbone? Then, meditate on your bones as piccolos, on mastering the thermals beyond the tremolo; reverberations beyond the lexical. Become adept at describing the spectacles of the echo — but don’t watch dark clouds passing across the moon. This may lead you to fetishes and cults that worship false gods by lapping up bowls of blood from a tomb. Practise echo-locating aerodromes, stamens. Send out rippling octaves into the fossils of dank caves — then edit these soundtracks with a metronome of dripping rocks, heartbeats and with a continuous, high-scaled wondering about the evolution of your own mind. But look, I must tell you — these instructions are no manual. Months of practice may still only win you appreciation of the acoustical moth, hatred of the hawk and owl. You may need to observe further the floating black host through the hills.

It's best to wake early, four, five a.m., while the neighbors sleep and the moon floats like a pearl in a pool of ink. In half-light the empty house is less familiar, less sad—the walls with their nail holes, the carpet—its patterns of wear, curtains with no job to do. I sit on my suitcase, eat powdered donuts; a napkin for a plate, juice out of a paper cup. Make one last check of the cupboards, the drawers. Run my hand along the countertops, the stair rail, trace the walls with my fingertips, each scar proof of my childhood, my initials carved into the tree of this, our sixth house. My family could write a Handbook for Leaving— the way we pack up during summer solstice, disconnect from people and places like an abrupt shutting off of electricity. My father's convinced himself that the unknown is always better, the way the retina sees images upside down and the brain corrects. Here I smoked candy cigarettes, my breath in winter passing for smoke, pale green of my bedroom. I counted the number of intersections on the way to school (four). I bundle memories together, weight them with stones like unwanted kittens drowned in a creek. What kind of animal constantly moves? The point of migration is the return. We're nomads without the base knowledge of where to find water. These moves are like arranged marriages; economics now, love later. Maybe it's not against nature to move. Most of the body is no more than ten years old and blood renews itself every 90 days. But leaving disturbs the fabric of a place. I'd rather stay and witness change. My mother always wanting to plant perennials that we never stay to see. I pour some water on the marigolds clattering around the mailbox, Aztec flowers of death, their strong scent a beacon to lost souls. Then we drive away, the blank windows like the blank eyes of the dead, waiting for someone to seal the past with a penny.

That woman’s husband works the graveyard shift in a warehouse someplace. He’s a big man, and sleeps all day. I bet he drinks. But what do I know? Dark clouds are stealing in. Well, no they aren't. That's poetry, and bad at that. She’s a headstone color: gray hair, gray face. Her hooded sweatshirt’s dull, like a sheet of old tin. It’s as though she doesn’t look forward to much but passing away. Her eyes are gray too, though it's too easy to call them empty. Their tears might so easily—flow. Oh no. I’m fussing around for eloquence here and coming up empty. The woman and I just nod at each other as we wait by the post office window. Though I’m a rather old man now, I go on looking toward some sort of future. I’m a big man too, which may be why that woman shrinks. Or I think she does. We all like the postmistress, who’s old herself but spry, and despite her losses still cheerful and bright. Her hairdo’s new. I recall her husband, who was a person people here always called Big Mike. Some old folks claim the man could lift a barrel brimful of hard cider right over his head. I’d like to imagine some tribute to Mike. I’d write it, if that were feasible. A character, Mike. He drove a truck that he’d brush-painted pink. He lived with his wife and children and a bunch of critters and mixed-breed hunting dogs far back in the woods. In time the kids grew up and moved from here, but the family, we remember, seemed always so decent and gentle with one another. The postmistress wears that shirt she loves. It’s a pretty shirt. Now what shall I name it? Purple? Fuschia? Puce? And how might I sort them, good and evil? How portray them? Let the clouds above, the God-damned clouds, steal in. No, let them hurtle.

Light a match. Watch the blue part flare like a shocked piñata from the beating into the sky, watch how fast thin wood burns & turns toward the skin, the olive-orange skin of your thumb & let it burn, too. Light a fire. Drown out the singing cats. Let the drunken mariachis blaze their way, streaking like crazed hyenas over a brown hill, just underneath a perfect birthday moon.