insomniac diary

Gratitude

Cornelius Eady

I’m here

to tell you

an old story.

This

Appears to be

my work

I live

in the world,

Walk

the streets

of New York

this

Dear city.

I want

To tell you

I’m 36

Years old,

I have lived

In and against

My blood.

I want to tell you

I am grateful

because,

(after all),

I am a black

American poet

I’m 36

And no one

Has to tell me

About luck

I mean:

After a reading

Someone once me

once;

If

you weren’t

Doing this,

what

(if anything)

would you be doing

And I didn’t say

what we both

understood.

I’m

A black, American male.

I own

This particular story

On this particular street

At this particular moment.

This appears

To be

My work.

I’m 36 years old,

and all I have to do

is repeat

what I notice

Over

And over

all I have to do

is remember.

And to the famous poet

who thinks

literature holds

no small musics:

Love.

And to the publishers

who believe

in their marrow

There’s no profit

on the fringes:

Love.

And to those

Who need

the promise of wind,

the sound of branches

stirring

Beneath the line:

Here’s

another environment

poised

To open.

Everyone reminds me

what an amazing

Odyssey

I’m undertaking,

As well they should.

After all,

I’m a black,

American poet,

And my greatest weakness

is an inability

to sustain rage.

Who knows

What’ll happen next?

This appears to be one

for the books,

If you

train your ears

for what’s

i should mention...

we don't fall back till November... why?

the new Charlie's Angels is so bad it isn't even funny.

i felt i should have thrown some stuff out but my inner electronics hoarder refused.

4am and i can't sleep. just googled daylight savings time. watched an episode of the new charlie's angels and re-organized my electronic accessory box. 

sleepless in brooklyn. how about you?

Woke up this morning, the kind of sick I don' want to discss on the internest. I spent about an hour trying to get out of bed. I decided I just needed another hour then I curled up in a ball.Thank God my boss understands sick when it's flat out, feel like you're dying sick. Then I curled up on the floor, the bed in the back room, the couch, the big comfy chair... you get my drift. Finally I played on Facebook, Tumblr- whatever. It's amazing how much pleasure there is in lying on your side with your arm stretched out to the computer or your ipad or your blackberry, gazing half blind at the thin slivers of other people's lives when you'd gladly end yours cause you're in pain. Ok, that's sounding way too dramatic but it's what it feels like sometimes when I'm this kind of sick. It also feels like the universe is conspiring against you since these are the specific days when you make dinner plans with someone new, brunch plans with your girls, art plans with the City and then your body conspires with the universe to reintroduce you to all those back episodes of Supernatural that you can't remember dvr'ing.  Now after napping on and off all day, i'm wide awake and looking at the last five months of photos, editing poems, watching Supernatural (not my best idea), wishing for some Tylenol PM, reading submissions, thinking about business plans, listening to the massive, highly repetitive and unimaginative fight going on between my neighbor, his girlfriend and his other girlfriend and eathing random things from my fridge which I think I'm gonna clean on pure principle in a couple of hours. Plus if I take out the garbage I might get a lot at the menage that's conducting this battle royale under my window. *le grand sigh* *le grand sigh of sleeplessness*

hmm... so I like watermelon. Ok, I like to look at it. I think it's pretty, photographically so.  I posted a picture of watermelon slices on my facebook page and someone commented that they were a symbol of racism. An african american friend whom I tagged in the pic untagged himself. I was really taken aback. Watermelon is not a symbol of racism. I think it's ironic that 20 years ago it might have been something that you could get away with claiming that only black folk liked and you would have been racist for it. But I'm thinking that nowadays when I eat my fried chicken at Perry St, a Jean Georges restaurant, now that watermelon is what some folks in the best bars like in their martinis, tho not me... eeeew... there's a ton of stuff that you could throw at black folk and particularly at black men as being stuff they stereotypically dig. You'd be just as wrong as those folks 20 or 70 years ago.

I felt/feel that watermelon has lost it's sting. Kids growing up today don't know anything about the old stereotype. They do know that we regularly call each other the n-word in public and on the airwaves. We embrace the n-word publicly, but watermelon? That's a big race issue? We can re-claim the n-word, call people jigger, play at post racialism and I, as a black woman, can't tag a black friend who speaks out on issues of race on a picture of watermelon slices that I took on a boiling hot day at a hipster reading in Gowanus? Nuff. Just enough.

There is a peculiar magic about the slam we run at louderARTS. Tonight at the Grand Slam Finals, Jon Sands, Sean Conlon, Angel Nafis and our new Slam Champ, Jared Singer, killed it. But the truth is we were moved so deeply by the people who didn't make it onto the team that you almost couldn't tell who'd won, watching the audience, the judges, the slammers and the day to day, non slamming poets in the house.  There was such tension and excitement, not so much for the scores but for the poems.  The question of what poems would Jeanann Verlee do? Would James Merenda throw down his Norton poem or something softer and easily more vulnerable? Would Thomas Fucaloro surprise everyone with his choices in every round? Would Elliot Smith be satisfied with breaking our hearts or would he have to take them when he left the building.  And Adam Falkner, that old fashioned bard of a young man, what strang magic could he wreck on your heart tonight? You couldn't walk in thinking you might know how you felt about any single poem or poet and you couldn't leave tonight unsatisfied.  louderARTS  is often like the best lover, the one who knows you, the one who surprises you anyway, the one who only ever wants to fill you up with so much pleasure, so much joy, so many great slashing cracks in your window that you're exposed and desperate and so much more undone than you even knew you wanted to be...

It's 4:14am and I'm wide awake, for the 2nd night in a row.  The crazy insomnia ebola hasn't hit me in a long while.  I forgot how terrifying it feels to think you'll never ever sleep again.  I console myself with being productive.  There are probably folks in Shanghai and Hong Kong who are very confused to be hearing from me at this hour and my neighbor downstairs is probably wondering what the heck I was doing for the last hour when I mopped the hallway from the front door to the kitchen.  Now I'm thinking a snowy pre-dawn walk in the park could be awesome.  That probably means I'm delirious.  Instead I think I'm gonna listen to our new playlist over at The Platform.  Let me see if I can figure out how to link it here... http://unionstationmag.com/platform/ ... yeah, that's it.  Check out our 21st Century Schizoid Gang playlist.  Bet you can't guess which tunes are mine.  Hey! If you're awake too, holler back!

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