mopkins

  i took this photo at lincoln center in new york city. tragedy does not pass us by -- it is static, it is a monument to our world, a statue, a stationary mirror. it is us who learn to walk away. and who is "us"? this woman, who was sleeping, who did not look up at me, as i was surprised to find myself looking down long enough to notice her. that is the angle of this city. that is the eye line of this mindless, careless passer-byer. and what does a photo do? or fail to do? 

LAST NIGHT I am sitting at the memorial of General Ulysses S. Grant.  Well, the park behind it. It is Ferra’s birthday, but the sun has set and only a few of us remain, with the last of the wine bottles. The ratio of people bringing alcohol to food was woefully imbalanced, but the feeling of hunger was more than that. Something kept us glued to this little patch of grass, talking about nothing too-important at all. I am trying to enact a new rule for myself, which I have learned too late in my time trying to assimilate here: always stay late, stay until the aftermath pizza, the fire escape cigarette, the second party that sounded fun when your chemical balance was different but now is not… Anyways. Lula is describing a man she sees playing the saxophone in Central Park. “He was playing across the lake from where I was sitting, sobbing the other day –”  “Oh no, why?” I interject.  Maybe I shouldn’t have asked.  “Oh… I…” She seems surprised to remember she even mention...

The face of death confronted her at 11:40am in a windowless lecture hall.  The History of the Modern Middle East met there bi-weekly under the command of a stout Palestinian scholar named Professor Qasim who delivered, with almost gleeful energy, seething invectives against Western exploitation to an Greek-style amphitheater of undergraduates.  There were no films, no music, no plays, not even a piece of art in the textbook. It was a numerical story of greed, corruption and human suffering, capitalism, neoliberalism, bombings, opium trades, untold casualties of endless wars, the erasure of culture, the loss of language, the attempt to reconcile modernity, the deliberate smashing of political autonomy; of hypocrisy, lethargy, and evil.   She sat in the fourth or fifth row, always behind three freinds who wedged themselves at the front. There was a couple and their third friend, all with matching iPads they took meticulous notes with, writing down everything the profes...

She worked at a cafe that was bad at being a cafe, and she was bad at working there. It was always out of either food or coffee, carried no espresso, which is what most everyone wanted, had no toaster, was in heinous violation of the health code, frequently mice would run across the counter and occasionally across the floor. There was no front or back room, just a stall with a metal counter and a metal door that got  rolled down at night. She kept a legal pad behind the desk, and every time a customer did something upsetting, she wrote it down on a list covered in water stains with the "lessons" scrawled across the top in a micro-point pen.  lessons  - don't talk about god  - don't make it obvious that you enjoy being served  - don't make it obvious that you really really like the attention of a young female service employee.   She stole a great deal of food and occasionally a carton of almond milk for home.  She was remarkably chatty and amicable...

 how is it you time have passed away?  how is it every day has flopped backwards and died?  I woke up and suddenly BAM the day was gone.  There are always lists and always things to be done.  I roll out of bed and YOU the floor has met me.  Slapped me on the back like a football coach.  I've coughed up a wad of anxious dreams and run into the morning with cold water.  This is how we are trying to live, feeling the wave hovering.

Today i was concerned not by the memory of being robbed on the subway the night before but the way i sat in a class and listened to students offer that in fact it would have been (probably) fine to kill the old woman because it would be useful to redistribute her money. they had missed the whole point of the book, which is that it is definitely not  okay to have killed the old woman, not even because murder is categorically bad or that there isn't merit to wealth re-distribution but because nobody has the right to play god. that any one human's sense of logic or utility is never enough to determine the constant breakdown of life. the book is a singular work of a singular mind and in that way a testament to it's own promise that each human being can work towards one striving thing that reaches out and tries to touch others -- all of us readers were supposed to be those permeable others -- but that each word and each action is a drop in a much larger bucket, so vast you are a...

  There is a downtown local one train approaching the station. Please stand clear.   Why don’t you sit?  We've been sitting all day.  But we’ll be walking all night.  N o one is ever trying to get hit by the train, she was wondering to herself. She always had this intruding thought on the platform, being told to stand clear, (maybe she wanted to not listen), of having a seizure suddenly (she was not epileptic) and falling into the tracks, her convulsing body magnified by the electric rails in a wild storm of color, light, and movement, a time lapse of her body’s whole life. Maybe she would stumble drunk, or somehow be running and trip, but the momentum of the trip would catapult her, and then boom. What would it feel like being down there? Knowing her fate is sealed, waiting?  What unsettled her most was the idea that the voice announcing  the arrival in a  few  minutes, like 2 or 3, and the moment where everyone freezes, unsure whether that...

i'd like there to be time,  and that the time is open  and soft for the hands  which like flowers take a few hours to open  and that exquisitely dark reproductions could be cast  of what was cast only moments ago.  modernity plays out on an open speaker from a bar which no longer speaks easy stuttering, muttering to themselves,  our idols cannot speak to us anymore.  you want to wade from point A to point B,  without the spaghetti strings in between  but rather the alphabet soup. what defines 'modernity' is readability, attractiveness, the freedom to say