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Book of Spells

by The Cradle

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1.
1 While taking care of your dad's birds, find one of them upside down in a tall glass, its wings pinned to its body. Take it out and find its left eye- there’s blood on the neck and around the eye. Run all around the neighborhood with the bird in your dad's hat until you find a veterinarian who fixes birds. See someone from high school there who you never would have thought of again in your life. Affix your own relevance to greeting them or not. Later that day you see a group of kids hanging around in a circle on the sidewalk. They’re looking down at a large injured bird on the ground. The bird is colorful and has a long thin beak, and it is breathing very slowly. Talk to the kids for a while. 2 Drive down the backroad with only your true love beside you and stop at Revelation Rock- it will be on the right. There will be little kids climbing all over it. Scramble up yourself and sit there with your true love. Go to the high point and wait. When you leave and are going back the way you came, a ways down the road you will see a sign on the right that reads, Future site of Revelation Rock. Now turn on the radio and drive until you hear the static. 3 Hillside Facility is the first station east of Sutphin on the Huntington line. There are high reeds and rusty things around. There’s no one around. MTA Employees Only says the conductor’s voice over the intercom. 4 Between the Manitou and Garrison stops, on the east side of the tracks, with no one around, in the patchy brown and grey woods with the dry brown leaves and the yellow dry stalks, an old decaying brick building, the roof gone entirely, just the brick walls still standing, dull red and empty. 5 Ride your bike up Throop to meet up with your sister but on the way, when you’re almost to the big church on Flushing, notice two cops talking to someone by a stopped car. The civilian has their back to the trunk of the car and they’re leaning back a little. The situation feels familiar, so stop and watch. One by one, the civilian and the two cops will report to one another that they feel scared. Watch more police cars arrive. Later, riding west on Myrtle, turning the wrong way onto Kent, notice someone leaning over another person and talking to them and another person standing next to them and talking away from the situation, to no one. That person is talking about his car. Go close and listen. I just got the thing yesterday, he is saying, to no one. Talk to me, can you talk to me? The man leaning over is saying. The delivery boy in the motorbike helmet, prostrate beside the curb, has his eyes wide open and isn’t saying anything. He is trying to move his arm. He’ll be ok, a little sore tomorrow, the man standing up is still saying. 6 Go to Jenny #2 on Kingston and sit with me there. We hadn’t noticed the lighting fixture here before. It’s very complex, a corrugated square cut into the ceiling with the letters JJY on the side, stamped- inexplicably- twice on the metal housing. Layers of pearly glass frames diffuse the light from a bunch of oblong bulbs. In the middle are hanging ornaments arranged in a circle. Around the outside of the cutout square, hidden bulbs mildly shift from blue to purple, from red to green. The same guy in the green slacks who’s always here in the mornings is here. I like his sad eyes. We say hello to each other today. 7 Wake up and turn towards the guilt- this is the spell where you exhale. Find the dense point in your torso and bow. Watch it as you leave and get on the 46 at Utica and Eastern Parkway southbound. It’s raining and unseasonably warm. Talk to your parents on your cell phone on the way and forgive them right now! When you get to king’s plaza the rain will pick up but walk the couple of miles on Flatbush anyway- that’s important. Helpers always appear at this point. Notice the rusty springs and washers and spark plugs strew around. Notice the overgrown unused corner of the marina. When you get to the beach, walk across a great black flow of tar that covers the sand from the reedy dunes to the water for a hundred feet. In the tar you’ll find an old car tire with bamboo stalks growing through the holes in the rubber. Above the shoreline there’ll be a seagull sustained in one spot in the air, the headwind perfectly balancing the effort of it’s wings. Watch it drift parallel with the shoreline. Keep walking along the beach, which, now that we’re around the bend and out of sight of the bridge, is strewn with broken glass and porcelain. If you want, you could put some water on your face. There’s a large glass bottle up by the dunes embedded deep in the sand lengthwise, full of briny water. The water captured inside is held still by the pressure of the dense wet sand. Wake up and watch the dense point in your torso, the feeling held still. Your legs are wet and cold, the rain soaked through everything. 8 Get home now and go into the quiet. There’s only the ring of the appliances and the vague whoosh of cars outside and things aren’t moving anywhere at all. Go to the sink and fill a quart plastic take-out container with water from the tap and drink it fast. As you start thinking the inside thoughts an awful crack of sound erupts from the other room. The radio’s turned on by itself. This has happened a couple times before. Go unplug the radio blaring slick aspirational dance music and then stop. 9 Open up one of the doors to an MTA employee break room and take a moment out of schedule. These are the rooms where they’ll sometimes store a cadaver- a train-victim- for a while during rush hour if it’s too busy to go carting a dead body around above ground. It was a scandal when people found out about this, but not such a big one. 10 Go to a high-brow experimental music show with your uncle and your father and sit behind a girl with thin, hyper-expressive lips that she constantly chews, and small dark eyes. Sit there and be unable to not look at her and try to remember what her face reminds you of. Months later, take the F train from Long Island City to sixth ave and walk through the tunnel to get to the 3 train. See that the man playing twist and shout is losing his voice, and bow. On the 3 train platform, notice the girl’s face on a much older woman with long black hair and expensive tacky clothes. See her chew her thin lips, and her dark eyes darting here and there. 11 You’ve been texting back and forth about hanging out. Today, you’re going to go up to the MET to meet them. When you get there though, you’ll find it was someone else you’d been texting the whole time. Roll with it. Walk around the museum and catch up with them. Tell them how you’ve been doing. Look for the painting of the seven Bodhisattvas, if you find it, please tell me. 12 Ride your bike down to the office of the dentist that takes medicaid in East Flatbush at the appointed time, but find it abandoned. The wallpaper is peeling and the paneled fire retardant ceiling, is sagging in spots. A creeping stillness is wandering over the dust forever on the linoleum floors. 13 Plug in left and right wires to the stereo but don’t pay attention to which is left or right. Hold onto it’s being either way it could be for a minute- Plug the other ends into speakers, again choosing left and right arbitrarily. Now listen to music,and think of what you don’t know. Left or right? Which decision was the mistake? 14 Walk out of your house and begin walking. You’re going to meet your old friend, but they’re going to cancel on you. That’s ok-It’s not really what you left for anyway. Once you get their text message saying “too tired, let’s try tomorrow” stop and see the night around you. It’s March and it’s warming. Walk to wide lonely Atlantic avenue, where the buildings recede in the dark on each side, giving the space to those who need it. Everyone here needs it. The quiet tones of solitary figures ring a slow visual doppler as they pass you and go behind forever. Stop to glance at the starless purple sky and give thanks for your holy anonymity. Let the thought of death come in and walk west on Atlantic. Imagining your best friends boarding a plane together and that plane crashing into the ocean, make sure you’re on the north side of the street, going with traffic. When the thought departs, don’t chase it. Walk to Brooklyn avenue, past the gas station and the 7-11. Directly across the avenue from the sleazy Hotel Lynx, between Brooklyn and New York avenues, there will be a furniture retailer. The sign will say “tables, chairs, stools” and below that, “Factory Depot”. Between the grates of the roll down you can see into the warehouse, where the chairs are stacked in innumerable perfect rows and the long fluorescent bulbs hang on chains high above light the stillness in there. Nothing moves except you, and you are outside. Move from window to window until you think you’ve found it. If you can’t, don’t worry, this place will always be here. Turn around and walk back to the corner with the 7-11 and make a right onto Brooklyn, which is called Anna Marie Blinn Ave on this block. Don’t stop walking now. 15 Decrepit attractive old men looking like the spiritual vigilantes of the new dystopia take tiny spoonfuls of Baskin-Robins ice cream here, at the combined Dunkin’ Donuts-Baskin Robins here On Northern Boulevard in Bayside. Wait at the little table alone and drink a creamy coffee and eat a plain donut and wait for someone who isn’t showing up. You’ve arrived late- maybe they’ve been here and left already. 16 Go down onto Fulton avenue and walk west. Remember a friend telling you of a people who don’t talk of left and right, only east and west, north and south. As you’re crossing Nostrand ave and checking to see if there’s really a no left turn sign (a no south turn sign) because you recently got a ticket for making that turn, your eyes lock with the eyes of a man sitting on his bike at the northeast corner of the intersection, caddy corner to the busy dollar pizza spot that actually recently raised it’s price to a dollar twenty five. His dreads are up under a white hat and his exact facial features draw you to him. What day is the sabbath, he asks? When you squint, he says “The day of the sabbath is within” and looks into you. If you know what he really means, then you don’t need to cast this spell. 17 It begins when a woman on the opposite platform adjusts her scarf and crosses herself. You sit in the train and pray for the memories to come back. Scabies are an insect that burrow under your skin and live in there. You rub your body with a thick layer of special lotion and suffocate the bugs that way. You sleep and kill them in a dream and they fall out of your skin when you wake up and wash off the lotion. 18 Get the first Hudson Line train in the morning up to Yonkers. When you get there, face away from the river and walk up Main street. Take a left onto North Broadway and meet up with the trail where it hits Ashburton. Take the trail out of Yonkers into the sparser places between the river towns, moving north with the river on your left. You will come to a place where there is a fence on the right side of the trail and behind it will lie the stone walls of an old building. There will be no roof and the sun will shine down through the building and out of the windows and there will be grasses and reeds growing all around and inside of it. There will be a faded no trespassing sign screwed into one of the big cleanly hewn rocks the building is made out of. In front of the new fence, there will be an old stone outer-wall, with steps that would have led up to the building. Built into the wall are two lion statues, one on each side of the steps, and one’s head has been knocked off. The head of the other will be warn to a smooth white everywhere except its eyes.

about

New short collection of poetry about inevitable wizardry and those places prone to the humble magic of accident.
Written 2018/19
in New York City

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released April 3, 2019

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The Cradle Brooklyn, New York

music of paco cathcart. brooklyn, NY.

for booking/whatever: pkcathcart@yahoo.com or
646 220 3328

i also engineer for other people/bands. hit me up for that analog natural jank.

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