I think it's an interesting attempt, Kenneth. I live in a very mixed
social environment myself and I find increasingly that the only way I
can write about it is in very small glimpses.
Good on ya!
2008/5/29 Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]>:
> 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
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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