It’s 1989 and you are walking on the platform. You are in a subway stop but you can’t remember which one and you are waiting for your memory of where it was that you were going
Before the cracks, in the subway platform, pointed out to you that things are falling apart and most do not notice. It is 1989 and you are noticing that there are cracks in a concrete platform that is a foot thick. And if you didn’t have to come down here you might not have noticed—But you can’t remember where you are going and you’re not sure you should be down here at all.
And a drop of something cold and stinging breaks on the crown of your fuzzy head and the sensors in your scalp tell you that it is, more or less, water and, more or less, salt water, urine, and saliva that has seeped through the ceiling from the street over-head. And you look down and you look up and there are stalagmites and stalactites and you are between them and another drop is falling. Logic tells you (from Who knows where) … “Do not let it hit you in the eye.” So you duck and you twist and it gets you,
on the neck,
quarter turn from the spine.
It is 1989. And you are on the subway platform. And for the first time in three years, something unmoving in New York City captures your eyes:
At-this-moment
On-this-platform
There-are-cracks
12-’’-thick.
When did it happen? Why: “No one has noticed”?
And you think that someone must have noticed, some structural engineer who gets paid to notice; a crack specialist, whose specialty is making him money in a blind trust.
But it is too big to be noticed. At least when it happens. So it must have happened during one of those whole numbers that we have yet to discover that stand, waiting to be counted, between where 1 ends and 2 begins.
You think that if you can just keep thinking at close to the speed of light your thoughts will have aged 50% less than those who were reading the Post and the Times while you were gone.
But the structural problem still exists. And the gap is getting wider. In order to understand this one you will have to measure your thoughts off of a beam of light on the other side of a star that is speeding away from you. A star that died before the dinosaurs crawled out of the mud.
And you see. It is only entropy.
It is 1989 and you cough to clear your throat and you singe your smell buds on something sharp and pungent: the smell of exotic cheese in the New York subway.
And he lives here. And he wants something for his cup. But you can’t understand, you’re moving too fast. So you give a quarter to a woman who doesn’t ask, and a guitar player—too proud to beg.
If you just had a duplex on the top of a tower with your own name on it, it would be much easier to look down on this. But you are here. And face-to-face with a line on a plane, a crack on a platform
(If you could only remember
your goilfriend’s name)
If you wanted sex. If you had the cash. If you weren’t afraid of them. If you hit the lotto… If the train would arrive or if you knew where you were going. If you could just get off this cracking platform.
Or it may be decay.
It is 1989 again and you see decay on the side of the square metal bin and painted over. And in whatever it is that lives in that moist gray whatever it is that was tracked in on your and everyone-else-who-has-no-place-to-wipe-their-feet’s feet. And decay is the sound of the train that you cannot see but is leaving:
The little monkey with the clashing cymbals.
Decay is the gingham dress of memory.
~
First published in Machine Bolt Press, NYC 1988
revised
