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Matthew Abuelo Poem
Hate is a geography
A floating continent really.
It spends most of its time
In the Far East (the Orient)
And moves west with the sun
To nourish its flowers and vines.
Its beasts will forever feed on your indignities
Catholic and otherwise.
Like every continent
Its got its rat eat rat cities.
These cities
The legal apparatuses
are always unhinged
And points towards
The punishment of the sleepless.
Punishment
That is
After all
the Catholic way
The endless sport
With no true winners
In the mind of the guilty.
Only you have declared
The residents of this town
As sexless
Unwashed
And uncultured.
A city of peasants
Who spend their time in church
Or behind a typewriter,
Computer and spewing
All vile and forgotten things
From the outdated theater of
Black and white ideas.
All with the grace of apes.
A city of apes
Whose lone desire
Is to break the backs of their youth
And be forgiven in a Sunday confessional.
Their backs were to be broken forward so
they can always bend at the foot of the cross
Of the holy
And rotting corpse.
As one great writer put it
“Does Christ ever get tired of bleeding?”
Though you have declared the rock n’ roll soul can heal anything
A dubious claim if you ask me,
As long as you can escape this city
And find a natural home
In another town where depravity
And sex flourishes.
But sooner or later
This continent will sink below the waterline
Until the next great
Betrayal.
Copyright © Matthew Abuelo | Year Posted 2016
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Matthew Abuelo Poem
Oh to vacation behind the heavy metal door
To escape another election year.
All news is stopped at the door by the guards
Whoever sit in the same place
Waiting
Always
Waiting to retrieve all banned goods
And outside time.
Between med time and bed time is empty time
Where those evicted from their bodies
Are stuck staring at their feet.
But all have the midnight carousal
Under their tongues
“If that bitch doesn’t give me my meds
I’m going to kick that door down.
Either that door will break or my leg will.”
The one mercy in the sexless hotel
Memories fall way, sooner or later.
Memories of what building was torn down.
What now empty store front housed
The latest failure
Now lays in the darkened reminder of memory.
And constant reminder of becoming
what is left behind in the
this is the city o
Of the buried
and forgotten.
In their place every mind
Is fixed
With a retread with no memories at all
And setoff to the outside and the vacation ends.
But retreads always fall off and litter the roads
Before they re-enter to antiseptic air.
Only letters are allowed past the guards
I can’t remember the last time a received
A letter.
Its all emails
And telephone calls these days.
Perhaps this is how I lost my sense
Of anticipation.
When was the last time
I sent a letter?
Inside
we all can sleep the sleep of the forgotten
Some of us have gotten our fill of the stars
and prefer a ceiling to an indifferent sky
and the empty heavens.
All others from these ranks who never returned
have wandered beyond
the light of day
into the trainless subway tunnels
and into the fold
of the disconnected brotherhood/sisterhood
of the mole people.
The mole people
This is the real lost tribe of America
living beyond the reach of landlords
and their thugs for hire.
For each there is no need to peer into the shadows
of yet another condo.
Their hidden jungle
is not of the Amazon
but the Subway system
where no natural light ever penetrates.
The soul is the first
and cheapest thing
to leave behind.
I’ve heard the tribe will let you in
as long as you mind
Your own business.
There are no eviction notices at these depths
Yet.
Their moon comes
with the thunder overhead
from passing cars.
Those who wish to be forgotten,
stay forgotten
and are certain to replace
the hopes for a headstone with that of a serial number
marked for a pauper’s grave.
This is the wish of the shut in
to die nameless in their SROs
or over priced
one bed room pad
in Washington Heights.
(Hiding from who?)
Hiding from those they wish to forget.
A psychotic lover
whose love is serrated
and cuts too deep
till it reaches bone.
Their own home town
which they attempted to cut the tether to
in a desperate escape.
Or death.
Death is what comes too cheap for most
and too soon for some
or too late for all others.
But if you dance forever you will never die.
The Clocks
Here clocks talk to each other
Of all the collected hours
by those who live by the clock
or all who can exist in confined rooms
as a natural environment
with a waiting bathroom down the hall
and one foot on the third rail
The shut in turns a blind eye to the amateurs
who fear being forgotten
several stories down.
2
After all the deals are made
and all the SROs torn down
and those of us who grow tired of waiting for the eviction
notice to be handed down by a judge on the take
have moved on
or held our ground
and after all New York
becomes “open for business”
every street becomes just another bizarre,
and when those who have been out to sea for far too long
and wish to return home
are met by closed port cities
with indifferent silence
(Even the circus of your life has moved on
long ago.
Do you care?
The noise of the carousals have become muted)
you can peer closely through the crowds
to see the better ghosts
among us
the last of the American Tribe
forever flailing in the
last light of late evening
fading.
Copyright © Matthew Abuelo | Year Posted 2016
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Matthew Abuelo Poem
To All Mothers Everywhere
To all mothers
everywhere
Why do you part your legs
toward
the 21st Centaury
Didn’t you know
That the future is our final station
Where the monkey sits and waits
To collect
For a debt that has long been owed?
And he will never be denied
payment.
That fateful stop is close now.
Didn’t you know that this train will never be slowed?
Maybe we should have planned our escape
Before the monkey smiled
Instead of wandering like dumb beasts
That serve as an exhibit on some distant safari
Under the burning glow of industry.
Yes
it gave us the TV and black lung.
And
Yes
we should be grateful
What other system allows you to own a Statesman?
Or
Pay for the right to soil your water
Or
Blacken someone else’s?
How else can you explain the water’s
And this century’s
Taste of curdled milk
That sits in some hoarder’s fridge
Waiting for the next great war.
Why do you offer your babes the fire?
Everything that blooms
In the forest where we once played
Is consumed
Immediately
Now a days.
On America
Which is the land of the disposable hero
And disposable victim
Where do you think your babes will land?
The hoarder?
The fool with a loser’s dream?
The second storey man
Or the industrialist who wallows in his moneyed slop
Or grows fat feeding on the blue collar?
Maybe the hero
Who will be torn apart for touching the wrong ass?
Only to fade into the gutter?
And did you think you could
Swim in this ocean of equations?
This is elemental my dear.
The only end is the shore of a negative.
The only outcome when you try to defy these waters
Is a riptide that will pull you under?
What role do you really think you have?
2
Finally
Under the sour winds
That blow in the coming shadow
Of the kakocracy
Nothing grows
But the desert
That brings
dry dreams of your children.
But at least their sheets are clean.
Copyright © Matthew Abuelo | Year Posted 2018
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Matthew Abuelo Poem
Do you still wonder
now that you’ve been washed out
into fate’s unforgiving seas
why you were sentenced to a life
you swore was in the wrong body?
Living in the wrong body is a natural crime
The price
To live with a heart pressed against
The third rail.
This is caring too much
for
Anyone who sends all your true loves reeling
Into the winter of the wards
where each morning sets off tiny detonators
causing explosions
Of your fit
And fury
Casting off the last burning ambers
Of your brilliant hatred
Where you swore
you no longer would play
The role of the fool following a loser’s dream.
You should have built a dividing wall
Of pills
Between your east and west
Between the morning that owns us all
And the movie
The one in your head
Where you were always going to cast yourself
In a supporting role.
After all
Your life was never your own.
It belonged to the demons
Born of desperation’s final curse.
You should have realized that we all
Have the plans of dull and frightened apes
Who live with debt of drudgery of carrying a name of the cheated
Like a cross down Willis Avenue.
We have never truly left the lonely forest
Hunting for coffee and music
while believing there is a home
beyond those gray seas of your plans
beyond the music
beyond your name which you successfully stripped away
at last
and the cats who still wait for you at Jeannine’s.
Did you really think
That all that was going to be left behind
Was consolatory confinement
Where white roses bloom in the garden
At your feet?
In the Orient
White is the color of death
After all.
Was your plans of escape
To sink into this ocean’s
Desperate floors
Or be carried away
To nowhere at all?
For these waters
Will never carry you back home
Now that you made sure
That your escape was not
Left to chance.
For here there are no shores
Or docks
Or port cities with their rat eat rat spirit
Or disjointed legal apparatuses
which
always points towards punishment of
The sleepless
Only,
The eternal dream of Paris
With someone you loved,
And with no need for a passport
At all.
Even Ulysses grew tired of being out to sea
Where all rumors
Became ghosts of what
Once
Was.
And once you’ve been gone for far too long
Then all old lovers will cease looking for
You
From over the horizon
Sooner
Or later.
You should have realized
We are all beginners in the game of the cheated
Its,
After all the loser’s dance
In an effort to finding the right
Step
to navigate
through
the latest
undertow.
2
My own confession
I wish there was life that far out
Then perhaps you could reach me by phone.
Never collect.
Could you imagine the bill?
Still
AT&T would send a collector to settle that debt.
Maybe you could send a letter
Or smoke signals.
Copyright © Matthew Abuelo | Year Posted 2018
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Matthew Abuelo Poem
Goodnight to our Rome with all your garrisons
and your streets that have become
as loveless as empty barracks.
For you I will never weep.
After all,
your Senators
Who made the deals
To keep the last
Last
And the first bored
and lost in ennui,
govern the burning ruins
of the human city which evicted the cobbler
and used the electorate as a weapon
With unforgiving recoil
Which guarantees
that
the bottom will stay at the bottom
and dance to the music of the
midnight carousel.
2
Now that the middleman has been cast
To the prairie grass
With his own middle cut away
His fate was decided over lunch
The legal apparatus has fallen from its hinge
Leaving only the greatest felony
Unnamed.
And who are our neighbors
When we’re sentenced to the
Four year winter hotel?
Will they be the nameless ghosts
Evicted from their bodies by those
Who are afforded the right to escape the tombs
With kept wives in cheap furs
And Upper eastside penthouses.
And in all those apartments
All the beautiful people
Wash down oxycodone with fine wine
While bitching about the junkie below.
“Send the cops to clean up the drug
Problem,” they cry.
“All addictions should come with a ‘scrip.”
It takes a truly trained country
with few alternatives
to put a knife to its own throat
or hand it over
to an orange buffoon
with a poor hair cut
in a loveless room.
He always
lines up his bets
on what con will turn the American heart
into just another dead
theater
where it was all the show of shows.
And when the decision is made
The worst one is chosen.
The decision has certainly been made.
For what other country
Choses a landlord so crooked
All self-respecting cons
Walk past him
Never stopping at all
For fear he will pick their pockets clean
For he is the biggest con of all,
Who now has to do a sometimes honest man’s job.
Those he loved the least
Ignored all the papers
Who for once
Didn’t celebrate
The game of chance
But cried out
With the urgency of a siren
During an air raid
to pick the other.
While he spoke as one of the mob
His heart was that of a landlord
Looking to evict
All his useful idiots
From their lots.
For now he can expect nothing in the end
But to stand on the stairs
Or escalator
When all your Senators approach
smiling
with drawn knives.
“Et tu Sessions?”
Copyright © Matthew Abuelo | Year Posted 2016
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Matthew Abuelo Poem
Am I just another antiquity
An artist who finds a natural home
Among the paupers whose graves are marked with serial numbers
Instead of headstones?
I hate gimmicks and dismiss them
Like any other moment of mediocrity.
The truth is
that I have no problem
With standing among broken things
(Which have lost their lacquer
Along with most of the pigment
Born of memory.)
Memories
And the past are bombed out cities
With many blind allies
And dead ends
Along with the hustlers of our wishful thinking
Who makes everything we recall as unreliable as the New York Post.
So why do we rely on this memory
Or anything else which is expedient with its answers?
You should know
I live
Just on the outskirts of any post war city of memory.
For that’s the last place I can find you
Still smiling in rare moments of being among
Friends without pretense
And those who you feel no need to hide the fits
And fury which you breath
has the recoil of a gun.
And you use that wind to start another
Devastating inner storm,
Fragile as a little girl on moment
Then
Fierce as the wards the next.
I would like to take the gun that has been pressed against your heart
since you were 16
and turn it onto the demons that you hunted to escape
with pills
and boy finds
and expedited answers from Long Island gurus
so perhaps we can live ordinary lives
with ordinary fears of everyday things.
Perhaps we can write letters of discontent to the New York Times
Or find a home in banality.
You should have known that I’ve
Grown tired of keeping company with artists.
Their conversations
And their letters have become fatally urgent
Crying about the end of this long running party
We know as civilization.
Oh how I would love to spend one more afternoon in bed with you
Watching TV or listening to music.
I could hold you again
And you could think of my arms as a beach
Emptied of all the people
So you could skinny dip the in welcoming waters freely.
And the waves could wash away
South Oaks
and Pilgrim
into a feverish dream of
straps on the bed
and clocks that announce med time.
Kept you around I’d always keep a pot on for you.
I’d love to have taken a candle
To burn away that mark
That no x ray would ever find.
Who knew that its roots
Could reach so far beyond your years
Keeping your most vile anxieties
Alive
And well.
Or intertwine
Your words
Your phrases
which
you have sculpted into tiny ships
To sail you
Away from here.
Did those roots
Drag you into those
Mornings which came too soon
While waiting for the promises of a midnight
Which never came at all.
If only you didn’t follow those demons to the rope’s end
Then perhaps the candle I’ll light for you tomorrow wouldn’t burn all night
Your breath could have taken care of that.
But what remains guaranteed the last turn of the morning carousel
And forever turns the midnight carousel.
Copyright © Matthew Abuelo | Year Posted 2016
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Matthew Abuelo Poem
Will the angels sing
When the old matador
stares down his final bull?
Knowing that his dance
Of death’s fine procession
Grows ever more still?
And sooner or later the sword
Will miss its mark?
And will those angels know their song is for no one at all?
Or will they put down a 50 spot on the bull?
2
Those angels know there is no score keeper
What is this any way,
A goddam baseball game
After all only silence echoes through the empty stadium
Where there was never a ticket punched
And the Dodgers never received
The Brooklyn cheer.
And the angels?
They are cheap subway preachers
Who have learned to live on their knee.
3
I know you pine
for
an anxious city that haunts every song
you stole,
without its ghosts.
They (the ghosts) are why radio exists.
Of course New York no longer thinks like Paris
and only the roaches
now cheer for all the empty units.
What is left for these ghosts to do
but to place their bets at the OTB
on races that have already run,
and waving tickets already punched and expired?
You will never learn how to shift the way you walk
in a city that no longer has its own gravity.
I've learned to let my body dissolve into the darkness
of the movie theater
as a means of leaving this place
to escape when everyone around gets
too close
like blind cave fish unware of distance.
Its a trick taught by Hindus when the blood runs dry
according to the tv.
Copyright © Matthew Abuelo | Year Posted 2017
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Matthew Abuelo Poem
Mothers everywhere
Listen
The grinder box is growing louder
In the voice of antiquity.
Don’t you hear it over the gears of the midnight carousel.
The monkey won’t be moving from window ceil
To window ceil collecting change
So, you better teach your babes to dance
And dance well
And forget their names
Or perish by them.
The role of the new grinder monkeys
Is for those born into an already spent life.
Didn’t you know things tend to unravel at the worst time?
But when is there a good time?
After all
All the celebrations have ended.
The holidays have been cancelled this year
According to the 12 O’ clock news.
The president claims we can’t afford them
And he suggests flagellation
As a replacement to a day off.
After all we have to save for the war effort.
What war effort?
Sorry
I mean
The war swindle.
This is what happens when the doors to
Bellevue swing open
The lunatics claim this a Christian nation.
Even Christ would cringe
from such serrated adoration.
And this is why the birth you now endure
Is a celebration itself
Of turning
Your sacrifice to the mad hour
To a generation of martyrs.
Copyright © Matthew Abuelo | Year Posted 2019
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Matthew Abuelo Poem
Take off your pants
This is no romance.
It’s a stick up.
As Woodie said
They can rob you with a fountain pen
But I don’t your money
And I don’t take prisoners.
What I want to take from you
Is your turn to talk.
You see
This gun which I use in my trade
Is always pressed against my brain.
Its fatal touch
Doesn’t come with bullets
But with my words
That always it their mark
But drift into a deaf wind.
If all my friends learn to listen they’d
Hear
"Je suis avec les paysans car je suis l'un d'entre eux.
Et laisser ma langue devenir une guillotine
Donc je peux couper à travers les absurdités
De tous les courtiers immobiliers
Dont les lignes viennent comme théâtre bon marché.
I want you to
Bury my heart on the Upper West Side.
I want the beat
to
Sing the SRO tenants’
War song.
To drive all landlords back across the Hudson or the L.I.E
And ebb the flow of
Those who are just visiting
And who speak the tongue of their nameless towns."
Copyright © Matthew Abuelo | Year Posted 2017
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Matthew Abuelo Poem
The greatest hustler we will ever know
Is wishful thinking
For something holy.
The deal on the table never really changes.
It has long grown old
And curdled.
But we all take it as new.
And
How can I find my balance on the legal apparatuses
Of a rat eat rat city
Which will always take the form’
Of a moneyed home.
Those of us who honed our craft
Have become exhibits in
museums of all our spent years
isolated
while the moneyed children
beautiful in their designer skin
and expensive shoes.
But their souls were left behind
On the cutting floor somewhere
Where the rats
The ones mentioned before
are free to collect all scattered things
For their unseen nests.
That is the price of advertising:
To
plant your heart under the floor boards
Like just another roach
Another lost
Or discarded thing
all
To avoid the pain
Knowing what it is
To turn into just another house cat
Peering out the same window
As yesterday
Knowing you will never
truly be part of the world below
Only living just behind
Drawn shades and
Dark clubs.
And me?
I continue to wait for you
To return from desperation’s
unforgiving sea.
Copyright © Matthew Abuelo | Year Posted 2017
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