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.