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MAY DAY
A COMPOSITION IN FOUR CANTOS
BY J.M. COLÓN AND OLIVER MARSH
there is light in his window gray awake he realizes alone gray and light rain the light
is gray and he is not quite alone for the city hums but it is gray waking comes slow
to this city.
are you awake asks the man he lives with.
no he lies.
the man laughs thinks it is a joke.
the light from the window is gray there is a futon a stove a hard wood floor with dust
that tracks on one's fingers a modernist lamp a laptop playing the radio a desk of unpaid
bills and unwritten novels a fat Siamese cat and its litterbox and the man he lives with
and they are gray from the light.
he groans the radio says
waiting for the President to speak to our men and women in uniform today in a speech
at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan our correspondent in Afghanistan bringing you live coverage
but first the day's headlines about 80,000 gallons spilled from rural Louisiana oil pipeline
over the weekend no injuries reported a woman left paralyzed from the waist down seven years
ago is walking again thanks to a new exoskeleton device called the Re-Walk Federal judge imposed
an injunction preventing the state of Texas from cutting state funding to Planned Parenthood
National childhood diabetes rate growing at an alarming rate --
do you want tofu
no he says he has a headache.
he goes to the medicine cabinet Advil Cold and Sinus he thinks but it is an empty box
the man he lives with is feeding the cat his forehead throbs it will kill him he thinks
one day soon it will kill him they will find him dead from it covered in pus his head exploded
it will have killed him after streaming in through the gray window and what will it have
mattered
the radio is talking about diabetes and autism.
still sick the man asks worried? curious? annoyed?
I'm always sick he wants to say but instead he says nothing.
On the way back he steps on a used ***.
He despises the man he lives with.
He despises the cat and the radio and the tofu.
He despises the books he reads self-help literature about sleep patterns and relationships and
how to keep the body gymfit and flexible and full of fluids and he tries to ask himself
why he hates these things but he doesn't quite know.
Did you eat yet --
No
You're going to be hungry
You don't even know what hunger is, he thinks.
Why are you looking at me like that
I'm not looking at you like anything
-- slashed open his right hand Monday after slamming it in frustration against a fire
extinguisher's glass case on the way to the locker room the acting inspector general of
the Department of Homeland Security has announced an investigation into the Secret Service following
the Colombian prostitution scandal --
The man he lives with puts down the pan with the tofu This has to stop
I'm not doing anything
You're not talking to me
I'm not doing anything
That's your problem is you don't do anything
-- and after reviewing his role in the phone hacking scandal the investigative panel said
he is not a fit and proper person --
You don't do anything you just lie there all day and all night in bed catatonic like you
have some disease or chained to your desk staring at the screen of your laptop in the
dark while I sleep while you think I sleep but I'm not sleeping I'm watching you and
you're doing nothing it's empty like a zombie like some kind of empty shell and I have tried
you cannot see it but I have tried to make this a home for you and for me I have tried
to break through but I could not there was never something there inside of you inside
your eyes which could have made it better don't you see that I have tried and it's unfair
to expect that I could have done it any other way but it's not good enough for you no matter
what I do it isn't good enough and every moment of every morning is a hell not because hell
is other people I tried telling myself that but hell is not other people hell is you you
carry it around inside you like everywhere it infects the floorboards and sometimes when
you aren't watching and you aren't there I have to go to the window and shout into the
gray of the city because everything that was ours was only mine and I want out out out
out
the man he lives with wants to say but all he lets out is a quiet sigh like a whimper
and he understands it is a quiet condemnation the judge had only to stare out his sentence
the lawcourt was absolute the verdict was death the crime was being born.
-- calling for a general strike across the country today in commemoration of International
Workers' Day here in New York City the usual May Day festivities are being supplemented
by the Occupy Wall Street movement which is planning to organize group events picket lines
and a march in a bid to regain momentum the movement lost after its expulsion --
I have to go out he says.
He walks out the door and leaves.
In the city in the rain there are people in the streets hot dog stand hawkers cars buses
taxis trucks joggers with iPods broadcasting digital cardiographs and he is alone sickening
sweet smell of unpicked Hell's Kitchen garbage light rain the forecast said but it is always
gray light it falls from the sky slides down the concrete gathers all things up in a swirl
and slips between your fingers before you can capture it and soon you realize you miss
what's gone down the drain
He ducks into the corner liquor store harsh lighting filthy floor smell of open containers
shoes make unpleasant noise on mudtracked tile it is a comfort to him like home at counter
a sadfaced Indian man and a bellowing Puerto Rican woman arguing he goes to the stacks
Indian man's children twelve sixteen and seventeen reshelving the Bacardi cursing playfully at
each other in Tamil
Where are the cold drinks he asks twelve
Ah...
Sixteen smacks twelve on the back of the head
Hey!
In the back sixteen answers
Twelve swears violently in Tamil prompts another smack.
Thank you he says wonders: Tamil an ancient language its profanities must be magnificent
medieval mystical
He gets to the fridge thinks What will kill me fastest it is his private joke a game he
plays there is beer beer light beer lager beer light beer malt liquor tempting caused
fatalities in New Jersey but no too college doesn't want to seem desperate decides against
the cold too gray a day for a cold drink he goes for *** instead buys a bottle
Down 10th Avenue the streets are emptier empty empyrean gray half-developed storefronts bodies
animated only by a vague sense that they are there because they happen to be there he fusses
to get the bottle open screws it loose spills only some on himself like some bum in a brown
bag so as to hide from cops who would come of course and only get him on an open container
charge if they had nothing better to do saw him in at a subway stop perhaps while they
gobbled snack food and weren't busy elsewise beating up a black person or a protestor (he
thought as he walked past Mr. Zhang's Grocery & 99¢ Store toward 42nd seeing a small picket
line of gray embittered union men all tired-eyed and half-spent chanting at the cold and the
spare cops sent to watch them across the street)
and this was a small eruption only the first there would be more not that he really cared
as the *** was having its numbing effect by the time he got (somehow) to Broadway and
then he came upon the park.
They did not call it the park they called it the Free University as they stood beneath
the Flatiron building in the light gray rain around small jury-rigged duct-taped tables
on a pedestrian island beside Madison Square Park with instruments and chants and signs
pointing within but everywhere there was the smell the sound of rain on the plastic of
their parkas their picnic tables and a hobo woman hawking imitation purses from Chinatown
and some cops arguing real estate theology with the protesters who called the place the
Free University though the officers disagreed
But we just moved in here --
I know, sir, and we're telling you you have to --
We have a permit to set up --
This crosswalk is owned by the Flatiron Authority and they don't --
That's some ***!
Hey, hey, watch it!
We have a permit, damnit!
I mean, we can move, we can move --
No we ain't --
-- asking us to move so we'll move just give us God just give us a second we have to move
the tables Jesus Christ
The cops leave satisfied return to their jobs as glorified bank security guards he assumes
a posture of indifference sipping *** beside the hobo woman
first she plays the peddler Hey hey check this out for two bits yeah picked it up off
a rummy drunk outside a rice shop
(the hell's a bit he thought)
Alligator skin look at this still got the price tag inside ha ha can you believe that
but she sees he isn't interested gets annoyed Hey you with them
Huh he says.
Total chickenshit that's what this is that's what all you are look at this course I was
born in the city a lot of you kids weren't even born here outta academic or academia
buncha chickenshit privateers well you're not going to camp here like those bums last
year in the park I know that you're gonna clean up after yourselves or the cops'll make
you like those campers saw em on Fox News buncha *** and punks --
By now he isn't listening he's drifted somewhere inside the park past the Shake Shack where
customer-consumers stare bemusedly over their burgers at the people sitting in little circular
configurations throughout the park which is musky damp overcast gray people on chairs
or on benches or standing in circles beneath an arch or a statue people in circles seminar-style
an instructor among them one of them really no one dressed up no one superior no one inferior
merely a circle of chat of intellectual? conversation
a CUNY professor talking about democracy beneath statue of Seward What we think of as participatory
democracy is made obsolete in a neoliberal environment in which capital can control the
flow of information not through Orwellian totalitarianism as such but rather through
the manufacture of consensus in the process realizing a society of absolute commodification
such that even the commodification of rebellion is absolute --
HEY LOUDA somebody in the back yells
and he talks louder about Noam Chomsky and Frederick Jameson voice straining in his little
collared shirt but nobody hears
an environmentalist undergrad or highschooler hard to tell punk girl in teal beanie talking
green Environmentalism is the canary in the mine warning us before it's too late
people nod people nod off one black hipster with a skateboard resting against his leg
adjusts his horn rims and criticizes Congress and cap-and-trade
Maybe one hundred two hundred people flow in and out take classes in Occupy This Occupy
That Occupy Algebra Radical Recess Protest Songwriting never more than a few dozen at
a time all bored curious into the park and out
He is disappointed a bit perhaps it was the weather perhaps it was the time but it smells
of a quiet kind of failure but he's tipsy so he doesn't care
He passes by an arch exiting the park beneath it two grizzled anarchists in black and red
smoke and talk about the old days shoot opaque glances at the park he hears one mutter
We're not in 1968 anymore Toto
the other sighs I try not to have expectations anymore.
Neither does he he thinks and he is satisfied at this.
Neither does he nor has he for years for ever maybe when did he stop caring it was a long
time coming he thought yes who was it who said Be Drunk Always Be Drunk no matter whether
on *** or *** or poetry be drunk but why why except the fact that there was nothing
else to be all other states were but the state of the deluded like the man he lived with
like the protestors who believed there was a cure for the illness that streamed in through
his window and would kill him was killing him already in the gray overcast early afternoon
after the light rain but there is not a cure there is no outside the illness it is all
consuming all encompassing a pain within him that can only be numbed for a while before
it overcomes him and that is after all what the *** does is numb him.
He isn't sure how long he's been standing there looking at the anarchists looking at
him he looks at his little hobo brownbag *** halfway through he thinks good and he continues
on.
New York is red for once in places certain shades of it pierce through the gray and the
sun follows follows him down Broadway and he is blissfully unaware of the way the colors
pop now so dangerously a new electricity in the air the threat of a general spring violence
sees none of it through his *** haze but senses if only through proprioception a change
in the bloodflow of this the city's artery for the mass of people is flowing down down
like a human stream in which he is a pebble carried along down to Union Square.
On the way he grabs a hot dog he is drunk out of his wits he eats it with joy.
On the way he is pushed aside by a Latino kid with a bandana on a scooter chased by
cops they corner him at the end of the street knock him off his scooter smash his face into
the ground.
On the way there is an impromptu concert of a legion of guitars led by a shaggyheaded
celebrity he dimly recognizes from a music magazine he subscribed to once.
Union Square unfurls before him a mystery of human flesh part protest part carnival
part Million Man March though not quite a million what then thousands at least perhaps
ten thousand screaming cheering listening to political speeches on a podium with kiosks
set up hawking revolution red and black banners and streamers and flags and movements movements
galore postcolonialists feminists LGBTQIA immigrant rights advocate New Leftists Maoists
Marxist-Leninists anarchists left-libertarian syndicalists trade-unionist community organizers
all colors all ages all together dancing cheering booing laughing listening bored to the pontifications
amplified by speakers carrying the roar up and down the great New York avenues past the
high rises into the afternoon sky a whole plaza shut down by the masses traffic recirculated
a legion of cops but not enough an effervescence of flesh joyous strangely liberated and he
is moved seeing this though he is drunk and he does not understand and he listens and
what he hears is
a librarian giving away old leftist hardcovers from twentieth century his personal collection
Ten Days That Shook the World What Is To Be Done To the Finland Station Homage to Catalonia
The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany East of Eden books he found himself in Upper West
Side sidewalk book sales and smuggled out of Zuccotti during the night raid asking only
that they be loved and read in return looking at people with an earnest teary face saying
There's a special place in hell for bookburners like Bloomberg they'll stick him somewhere
with the Mongols and the Caliph that burned down Alexandria.
an idiot woman with a tray of sweets Revolution Muffins get your Revolution Muffins here who
wants Revolution Muffins!
Earnest graduate students from various city comparative literature departments at a booth
entitled WHAT WOULD A WORLD WITHOUT AMERICA LOOK LIKE a map of American atrocities throughout
the world a curious Japanese tourist with a camera around his neck takes a photo
Hipster kid taking stock of a booth labeled Revolutionary Communist Front
Revolutionary Communist Front spokesman looking at him narrowly
Hipster kid asks Hey are you guys with CPUSA
Spokesman growls at him We're the RCF kid the CPUSA guys aren't real socialists hands
him a little red book written by RCF's founder an obscure Maoist from North Dakota who writes
about a New Synthesis in a massive font with bigger margins
Venerable antique of city trade unions standing on the pavement adjacent to the park picketing
for wage increases summarily ignored by everyone
Young friendly punk guy named Spike picketing outside Bank of America with a sign reading
DON'T GIVE INTO CORPORATE OLIGARCHY the employees evacuate some in fear most in laziness one
comes out
says Yeah I kind of just wanted the day off anyway
and Spike the bank-blocking punk says Cool Happy May Day want a cupcake while a Dominican
woman tries the locked bank door and curses loudly in Spanglish
and finally a magnificent ridiculous old man gathering a crowd about him decked out in
full anarchist regalia military cargoes boots brown coat beret with a something beautiful
in his gentle senile eyes like grease that catches the light in a street puddle and he
cries that he remembers the finest moment of the Left he remembers the Anarchist anthems
of the Spanish Civil War that they sang when they went to fight the fascists and he will
sing them today and he sings them horribly off-key translated inadequately from Spanish
and Catalan and the crowd sings too in an awful cacophony that together gives it the
harmonious camaraderie of drunks at a bar (which naturally moves him as he watches with
his *** in his hand and he even joins in on the final verse which goes)
Let us raise the banner of the Revolution For it will surely lead us to freedom at last!
Let us raise the banner of the Revolution For it will surely lead us to freedom at last!
So come all ye workers, onward to battle, the forces of reaction shall fall to our might.
To the barricades, men! To the barricades, men!
For all our futures and the future of mankind! To the barricades, men!
To the barricades, men! For all our futures and the future of mankind!
only for the Revolutionary Communist Front people to yell profanities at the old man
*** anarchist class traitors go to hell go back to where you came from you piece of
*** whereupon the crowd disperses and the old man slinks away
All this he sees not in pieces but at once a single movement a single sound in a cluster
of moments that pass in quick succession forever irretrievable and he feels he has come to
an understanding of something it is an emptiness a sense in which something has been lost in
this place among the carnivalesques and the cheers a duplicity a fraud in all of this
that dooms it from the start and it angers him and it saddens him and it causes him to
finish his *** and throw the bottle drunkenly into an alley and stumble aimlessly within
the ocean of the ten thousand people and then
the march to Wall Street begins.
It is massive miraculous martial the police try to stop it by cutting it in half but they
cannot first the unions then the Occupiers then the carnival in tight succession a massive
conga line parade protest festival of people thousands of bodies moving marching writhing
filling Broadway from end to end colors and banners and emblems screams and shouts and
songs and there he is amidst it dazzled drunk stumbling along staring at everything wide
eyed and open mouthed not in awe but in drunkenness for he has finished the *** and is beyond
comprehending what has happened
and there is a prissy middle class woman with her poodle trying to cross the street yelling
at a cop I'm just trying to get through for a second let me through
I can't let you do that madam he says sternly officially while beside him three New Yorkers
pass him and cut quickly across the street
And there are drums and there are snares and there are horn sections and there are vuvuzuelas
like some kind of European football riot and the roar of police helicopters overhead but
most of all there are chants chants that echo up through the skyscrapers and ring in his
head like a headache
ALL DAY, ALL WEEK, OCCUPY WALL STREET ALL DAY, ALL WEEK, OCCUPY WALL STREET
HEY HEY HO HO POLICE BRUTALITY'S GOT TO GO
HEY HEY HO HO POLICE BRUTALITY'S GOT TO GO
WE GOT SOLD OUT BANKS GOT BAILOUTS
WE GOT SOLD OUT BANKS GOT BAILOUTS
THE PEOPLE -- UNITED -- WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED THE PEOPLE -- UNITED -- WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED
and on and on they chant down the streets of Manhattan while at their heels and on the
sidewalks an army of cops on motorcycles in gray and black vans stand in formation a massive
phalanx of riot gear and metal and only then does he realize dimly that really this is
a funeral march a procession toward Golgotha and he wants none of it for he knows what
is to come.
It happens by Canal Street a man who throws something at a cop a shoe perhaps or a brick
no one is quite sure and they pour out like water through a break in a levee from both
sides into the street with truncheons and a van and tear gas and the massive column
of marchers is split in half and he screams drunkenly and a man in a hoodie is beaten
to a pulp and thrown into the back of a van and there are limbs flailing and bodies crashing
into each other and he has to get out
and he stumbles unseeing into the mass of bodies shoving a college girl out of the way
and pushes past a distracted cop onto Canal Street and the march goes on and on into the
dimming afternoon and he cries and howls like a wounded animal shambling into Chinatown
lost and afraid.
He is beginning to sober up about things in the dimming light of Canal Street Chinatown
practically empty for Chinatown only a few lost souls and then just one the sounds of the march fade to nothing and the
last few store owners have given into their frustration at the police blockade and closed
shop and at last there is only him alone as he belongs.
It's just as well he says aloud to no one in particular for there is no one around to
listen Canal Street is a wilderness desolate uncaring a bare edifice upon which to act
out the play of existence he can see himself getting lost here forever perhaps he already
has perhaps the man he lives with will be worried about him he laughs bitterly to himself
perhaps he will send a search party yes he thought how he looks for me they will ask
the protestors whether they saw a man of his appearance they will look for him in this
absurd postapocalyptic Chinatown of the empty storefronts and the dead echoes and they will
say where has he gone and where will he be he will have died yes died and they will have
to perform an autopsy split open the chest and the skull and take a look at the innards
and say what is it that killed him was it suicide was it a mugging perhaps a political
assassination no no he cackles bitterly they are fools they are worse than fools they could
never understand that it is the disease the mortal wound the world inflicted upon him
that flitted through the gray window one gray morning and was killing him the whole gray
day the thing that would kill him had killed everything in him already and makes him only
want to die in practice as well as in theory and
no not just in him not just in him at all he stops laughing all of a sudden falls against
a concrete wall and vomits with such violence his entire body shakes
no not him at all he is selfish he is a fool a solipsist it is something he should have
seen before the thing in the old man's face the sound beneath the roar of the march of
course he should have known as if he were the only one stupid stupid stupid not alone
at all everyone was dying everyone was dying from the inside out and goddamnit it isn't
his fault that he is the only one who seems to care.
He thinks suddenly of the Occupy people.
He pities them absurdly he of all people pitying them as if he were not himself worthy of pity
but he was tired of self-pity and anyway was pity most powerful when directed outward and
mingled with fear that's what they taught him in theater class after all.
He is too sober he is no longer numb to it and in a single blow all his empathy comes
back to him and he hates himself for it for being able to be vulnerable to this sensation
what as if he has never heard of a failed revolution before but it is not merely a concept
after all it is the mass of bodies off to Wall Street now to picket awhile and be dispersed
like atoms across the universe inconsequential miniscule only it is an atom isn't it that
has the potential to destroy the world through its splitting and perhaps this is what will
happen and what does he care only he does of course and it was all a ruse this nonchalance
this apathy or not a ruse as such but a phase he wants to grow out of or a symptom of his
disease but is there a cure.
He will write a novel about them he thinks and he would of course being a writer and
though he is a failed writer he will do it he will prove the man he lives with wrong
he will write a sad and compelling character study it will involve the lives of multiple
revolutionaries a gay man a Latina woman and a black man because he has to be politically
correct after all and he will be sensitive and authentic and limn the lives and aspirations
of his sympathetic characters and crush them because of course they will start out idealistic
only to be confronted by the terror of reality and the sham nature of their rebellion and
they will fall into despair and kill themselves and then he will publish it and become famous
and give interviews on Charlie Rose and BookTV and win major literary prizes perhaps even
the Nobel after all once he has a career the sky is the limit
and what will it have meant.
Nothing.
Not that he could do it anyway but what was even the point of imagining just another way
of waiting for the disease to run its course and anyway he knows he is just a hack.
The world becomes purple at this hour with the sun sinking beneath the sky and in the
empty alleyways of Chinatown it seems almost a dream.
He does not know where he is or where he has gone he isn't on Canal Street anymore there
are high rises but they are not too high and they are clearing out the purple is overwhelming.
He steps out into an open area and there are people.
He walks a block and there is a park.
Something twitches inside of him at the sudden presence of people but he is attracted as
if by gravity to them for he realizes for the first time today how lonesome he has been
wandering these long streets of the city and how he longs for some company even the man
he lives with how he longs for someone to talk to to sit down and half a talk about
these things about the wound and the hole in the center of his life where feeling should
be.
So he starts walking and breaks into a jog and the jog turns to a run as he runs literally
runs tongue wagging out like some kind of puppy toward the park in the purple light
of the evening with the hope of finding someone and he finds he finds
Columbus Park
Which is not really Columbus Park in the sense of a public park no larger than any public
park tucked between various high rises unexceptional replaceable not that kind of Columbus Park
for it was a kind of miracle the kind of place one finds every lifetime or so that is only
ever itself but also stands for something outside itself irascible inimitable unforgettable
it is China it is Chongqing in Manhattan beneath the Mulberry trees where all of Chinatown
goes on days off in the calm spring breeze of the purple evening
it is a place of smokers and dancers and talkers none of it in English and erhu bands competing
in loudness playing old folk songs and God Bless America and singers singing in Mandarin
and Cantonese impromptu dancing old women gambling furiously at the mahjong tables with
cigarettes in their fingers yelling at each other throwing money down with a violent intensity
and statues of Chinese Republican heroes and babies crying in strollers and the smell of
Beijing kao ya dumplings pork and fried rice wafting in from area restaurants with open
doors and a big black man conspicuously smiling to himself in a park bench adjacent to it
all either a hobo or an undercover cop yet strangely serene for it is a universe contained
and distilled a beating heart that takes the place of his own as he walks through it
only he is no longer walking through no longer a passerby for they have seen him and they
smile the little ones that is a few girls and boys and a band of erhu players who are
like girls and boys and they grab him for the novelty of his appearance and form a circle
around him and begin to play
and they dance they dance until he dances
and he dances
and they dance frantically orgiastically with purpose with resolve with abandon until their
limbs ache with pleasure and the darkness of the universe becomes acceptable and the
spring has had its fill of their dancing and the purple light of the evening dissipates
into the eternity of night.
Later after the park has cleared he is alone again awake and the city seems gray but he
does not mind.
What has changed.
What ever changes.
In the end the thing he heard in the silence of his bedroom that crawled through the crack
of his gray window will end him will leave him spent what of it.
In the end there will be a time for everything as an old book once said time to do everything
under the sun for the sun is always setting but it also rises again and even if it doesn't
what of it.
If only he could learn to love better that is his flaw he wants to love so much.
What now he wonders standing in the empty park at midnight somewhere he hears the toll
of a bell what now.
Perhaps now he will write his Occupy novel it will be a sad smile of a novel wistful
gentle with the revolutionaries for one has to be gentle when everything changes everything
fades he loves them he realizes in a way he loves everything he will not let it fade he
will take the noblest bits of it of everything and save it forever in the shadowy gap between
his words he will sing and the song will last forever and even if it does not last forever
it will be heard and even if it will not be heard it will have been sung and a song is
in the singing
and that will be enough.