Samuel Amadon

You can do the work just by starting it. You can do whatever you want. A bill is drafted on a train to Albany, or in a black limousine. Like how one day I walked the entire length of Manhattan, except I didn’t. I didn’t finish. Not nearly. How could I? Stopped as I was by the boat basin. These credit cards fill with gin and tonic. They pool with the stuff. Maybe I get a little lost sometimes, start thinking I went to Yale. Once I swam to Governors Island, between the ferries and freighters. It was like a job you should’ve seen me quit. Maybe they looked for me. Maybe it wasn’t someone else’s shift, and then it was. Sometimes people are just turnstiles. You have to tell them to keep turning, keep turning into someone else. The rain crashes across a cab, and the road has filled. We’re waterborne. Or whatever the word is for that little moment when the heart lifts. Why don’t you devote yourself the way you once did? It’s an old answer, and an early one. The alarm goes off for a while after it stops. In your face in the bathroom mirror. You play that little song to look at your teeth. My teeth. They haven’t been cared for. The class giggles at my age. This is my hearing. The chances taken on a new face.

Ever since I was a boy, I’ve found names, personalities as brittle, excuse me, as braille hints of interest, latched to the slightest meaning. Not parlance. Let me say power. The days rotate on their hinges. I can say I had friends. Sizable numbers, without delay, we were like, I don’t know, an absence. A civilization. Prompt and unlike ourselves at all times: it was as if we could stand to burst, to rapidly be our own engines, rules, buildings, steel columns, iron beams. This is when I said I had a foundry. I had a scale, a summary and reflection, not the desire, but the capacity to be greater in titles and official things. Then I gave it up. I sunk hillsides and fields and ash dumps. I ran the concrete forth and I became the swarm, the throng, corporate in absurdity. Most people in opposition would say these are the words I’ve prepared, while I am a speaker without my text, let the day surprise me. If it falls, it’s me who gathers from idiosyncrasies sentences to shape a state and city.

You might make a choice between what descends with these tiles lined before you, or arcing forward through a history that is constant against us. A bridge to block out the dawn. Or monoxide that passes like breath. My breath. I know all about what’s underground, and I keep my searches for the invisible there. In the park above, you’ve got your bike locked and the chain cut. The stubborn part doesn’t say anything, doesn’t need to to start marching home, ugly block, block of shouting, block syrupy with flies. I would like to hear about it, but I am backed into an argument myself on a coil of cool fall breeze, backed through seasons into the past, home or near it, in the moment when I’m as right as I’ll ever be bled into I’ll be this right forever. There’s no out available for this character, just a decade producing the present, warm, and then warmer around him. It was as if I hadn’t seen the harbor, didn’t want to admit it by doing so now. Something like a pile of books falls over inside me or the room I’m in breaks off from the house, slides almost out of view. All things didn’t happen or did. You might’ve routed a highway so it crashes through the seventh floor of a skyscraper, and the moment for that passes by us still. You can live like a column of light pours over you, but that’s not all you’ll see.