Matthew Putman: Poems

 
The Battery Tunnel is a fast drivefor such a long and deep holeas $6.50 drops drivers offonto the sea of stifling congestioncoughing in the winds of anxiety on the BQE East.We  count LEDS of bright blueso powerful that the toneoverhauls the loud horns andthe baby’s cry.We marvel in glint and glow of something more perfectthan we can explain.The world gets small in that momentbefore Manhattanpops with purposefulnessposing for us.A picture of the 1%,while we stop our songblink our eyesand wait for the next game of life.
 
 

 
In the state of Cobble Hill, the slopes lookravished, and vacant,as the poor poured from them20 years ago. When squirrels moved in, the sparrows out, and on timeI spent a million hours on bar-stools,watching as old men with cigarettes cross cutinto bearded gentleman of a one novel success,or perhaps a life long ago, last yearon Wall Street.Where songs are heard by birds, not bums,whose streets still cobblefor name only. Shadows and mists of men long past, whenhomo was horrible and hideous was hidden from all but the lime of a dark artist light. Violent memories made real. Multiplying babies,brats, bottles of Craft Brewreminiscences of jazz age sparksthe last gas light on Henry St..Where I walk faster for the goal of reachingmyself, when one outnumbers 3 in crowds of ego that only boroughs to the west could conquer, untilI am resting in the ground of the Local F trainor in Greenwood Cemetery.
 
 

Why do you all look like I look but yet I am alone?In Paris’s third I walk wordlessly througha threshold downfall of foreigncomfort form and contentas I reach the Rue de Turenne.Clothes of polyester line the streets, while children play in cotton coolnesson a warm fall day, while I wait for assignmentTo the trenches of a helpless, hopeful societytrapped in tea parties of today, and remindersof stupidities yesterday that wasn't lostbut never existed.We take a train,a bus or whatever moves uswith some lost song of that sorrowful groanwhich isn’tpain, but instead knowledgethat this isn’t it.It isnt’ shit.It remains locked between the oceans of hopewhose endless blue utopias take us home.

Not many tears fell over Wall Street tonight.
Where occupiers pitched softballs of flower with no power
In brick buildings
coveted, covered and revealed a glow of painted murals
from partners past.
Where poets never sang or signed deals.
No darts of pain now in moments dissent and laughter
all too soft.
In desserts far away, tweets light up kings
while news flashes debacles of debates.
Failed plans.
False hopelessness.
When today comes warmer than remembered 
Colder to the touch.
Nowhere to occupy
only the tiny space between apathy and sorrow.

In a subway I slept for 10 stops too manyon an F train waking at Ditmas to cramped, pungent,pinched panic, as transfer from dreams of fights, fanatics and funerals, nowknocked unturned neurons on with activation energy of Red Bull intensities.The stars were clouded, and 10 feet above to see anyway, as neutrinos tumbled past me, invisible, from the future, which I knew of only now.When the mind numbs in color at the bending of times arrow, Brooklyn seemslike a vision of tomorrow, not just yesterday.My baby boy cries out not for the last timefor me to pick him up from day careor take him to college,As together little Juliette and I skip through time, empty of now, containing only after and before.Crinkled in a warp Einstein could not construct, in an universemore likely holographic than hollow.When death was already a drag and life new and old.The subway stops now at Carroll Street, sometime later, and waking up, I see a turn-style, where I used to place tokens, in a time still to come for [...]