Your damn recessions

I was shot twelve years
With my enemy
It proved nothing
Last accounting
I left acred blood
On your winter steps
I promise
This all keeps going
Until it doesn't

Amsterdam 2010, sketch ahead of something else

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The plane from Rome to New York leaked a vital fluid and turned around just past England. We overnighted in Amsterdam. The hotel makes a business in this kind of thing. There are hundreds of us and more keep coming. On the shuttle bus and train to the center there are a few army soldiers, off duty from Iraq and Afghanistan. They have southern accents and urban accents. They talk about injuries and benefits. One of them tells a girl about how he had to search road trash for dead babies. They are all looking to get wasted.

I visited Amsterdam the first time two decades ago. I didn’t realize how wealthy it was. Everything remains just so, clean and tidy, the paint varnish is shiny enough to see your reflection. The red light district still has women in lower floor windows, baked in bikinis, smoking and bored. Next to the window is a planter of marigolds. Upstairs are apartments that rent for thousands a month. At midnight there are gawkers and boys drinking soda from a straw. At the Old Sailor bar on Oudzejids Achterburg men fill a bench across the canal from a windowed woman. She’s endured a lot of surgery. She wears suspenders across her tits and knocks at the windows hard, like she has something to say.

There are coffee shops selling hashish. You can smell it as you walk past. There are still young pilgrims who come to release their shame in public.

There were bikes then but now it is altogether something else. There must be more bikes here than anyplace. Near the train station there’s a three level parking structure. Bikes only, no space between them, on and on they go, for a block. They are all plain black brown bikes with fenders, the kind that make you sit bolt upright. Ring a bell. A light on front, a light on back, safe for the night. The women are giants, especially sitting on their tall bikes, legs going everywhere, long hair drifting like a sail.

I hear English, I can’t tell the accent.

At the bars I stop at on the west side, near Prinsengract, people are meeting in groups. It’s Thursday night, the week is nearly over. Some bars are quite lively at eleven, the sun just departed. There are open windows and doors and they play real music. I’m having a beer at the Café de Barones. It’s tended by a young guy with girly curls pinched in a clip, a pierced lip, and, above the bar, a sign written on the mirror

No Credit, No Crisis

Phrases this week

Outrage industry

Fever swamp

Hot surface

Skin hunger

The ruin of an unbuilt building

Acquiring more and more sorrows

No work of art can ever really testify to the scale of its own impossibility

So then that happened

I met this woman

Something is not right

About her

She keeps pointing at parts of her body

Expecting

I understand what that means

This means

The whole undercarriage

Derived from a different set of principles

I didn’t expect

To speak that language yet

Instead

I wake up

Under warm weight

Being lost

I need a booth

Staffed with an explanation

A currency that converts

Something in a place

Where someone

Tells me things

I understand

Somewhat Handy

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I would wake up

Earlier

Haul you out

Under the dawn

This day

Wet underneath

Waits unsteady

You’ve been

Practicing

How to do this

Ankle chains

Porcelain such paint
Cut in close

We’re frightful amateurs

In careful housing

Our roof

Is barely sent

Round Trip

I’ll come to the street

In a cab

Pay

Bag

Door

Up the stairs

Lock one

Lock two

Shoes

Hat

Suitcase

Then the hollow

Heart of home

Stumbled Upon

What do we do with these ruins?

This black dream gives no clues

There’s a lot of stone,

it’s all over the place.

Does someone know?

Who should we tell?

Pour alcohol over it

Let it burn

In secret