First one through was typed into MSWord, software-as-embezzlement. When
it went to plain text, it fell apart.
I can't do details in here because the poem is a deliberate and furious
cartoon. It's how I do Daumier or Hogarth. It's not realism. In Jersey
you'd call it "The Man With The Ho." I ride the trains every day. They
smell like farts, cologne, overcrowded bodies, heat, and air
conditioning that over-functions in December. I have taken them after
midnight and even so have not encountered anyone fornicating on a train:
this is not *Risky Business*. Or I just haven't been lucky:-). The train
names are an economic and racial slur. I do not apologize anymore if
people take umbrage. Jacob Riis missed New Jersey, with its Other
Halves. Hotshit financial types coming in from the far reaches of
Western NJ sleep through the East Orange and Newark, slums of
indescribable filth, criminality, and despair that remind me of Gin Lane
and/or the opening fish market scene in *Perfume*. After having lived
here a bit more than half my life (4/10/1976), my concept of Socially
Redeeming Value does not include most of the residents, black or white.
I might be one of them myself. Janet is right about needing some meat on
"repellent," I'm just not up to that this week. Maybe next.
ken
THE SOCIAL REALISM OF NEW JERSEY TRANSIT
The commuter trains travel in from Short Hills, Bedminster, Gladstone,
and by the time they near New York, the onboard brokers and traders
make the trains an Al Qaeda bomb-boy’s sticky dream,
72 virgins circling beds in a Busby Berkeley choreograph.
Oblivious travelers, sleep-deprived, doze past cities along the route.
The New Jersey they don’t see is the Gin Lane of their *Star-Ledger*
nightmare:
Abbott schools and drive-bys and witnesses who di’n’ see nu'n’.
The railway management is more depressed than its passengers
because they are awake to see the ruin—
you can’t fix a State but you can spray perfume on shit.
So New Jersey Transit, to boost its image, decides
to emulate the best of railroading’s past,
the days when trains ran on time without Mussolini,
the days when railways named their flagship trains
(for who can forget the folklore of The City of New Orleans,
even before Steve Goodman wrote its epitaph,
or of the famous Empire State Express and Broadway Limited,
sterling silverware, china, and the 60-year-old "colored boy"
in his white linen there to serve you
with a secret contemptuous smile).
There are limits nowadays, so instead of linen
and your personal Negroid, they've even taken out the bar car,
left us with repellent trains with butt-busting bench seats,
but with names that reflect through the beam of blazing darkness
the life of a State that dwells in dust.
So Train 3248 from Gladstone hereafter is named The Arbitrageur,
while closer to the common life, Train 1140 from Port Jervis becomes
La Puta Madre, and the flagship Train 2134 from Whitehouse Station
now renamed The Negress.
And of course there are protests, appearances on the radio
by Revs. Jesse and Al, a howl of threats to shut down Newark,
called off because nobody would bother to watch.
The publicity backfires like a jammed Glok or Mach 10
fired by a 40-year-old high school kid who was last in class in 1989.
Nevertheless, plans are tabled for any more namings or renamings.
New Jersey Transit shoves into a drawer some other names that included
The Sex Worker, The Copper Thief, and the White Collar Drunk--
the last an out-of-work half-a-mil broker cast adrift in the Burbs,
who like Stevie Winwood can't find his way home, either—
but he's still out there and he’s purloined your name.
KW/5-28-08
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