Descent (Yellow White Brown and Black)

West 4th Street, where you can sometimes get cell phone reception on the downtown bound F/C trains...while I was waiting here at the gate, a man ascended behind me and grabbed my bag screaming "YOU DON'T STAND HERE!!!!"...Clearly I was. AS IF I was posted there - oblivious and still - in the middle of a wave of rush hour salmon trying to go upstream, just standing there like a yold, texting some sweet young thing my ETA or what color underwear I was wearing.

Diamonds / Emeralds

How Emerald was holding her hand while laying down in the park, and the rock that will go on it should someone pick up what she's puttin' down...I highly recommend you do.

Langosta : For Pablo Antonio Borja

On the day that I was invited to replace my good friend's no-show little sister at dinner at one of the most renowned French restaurants in New York City (tribeca, serious waiters pushing in chairs, wall paper borrowed from Henry the XIII's chateau, I don't know...) I received an email from my Aunt in Cali sending me her love and reaching out as best she could from the instability of her relatively in-shambles piecemeal of a life that has been, as such, since she was about 19. She knew I was in New York studying. That phrase sounds like a luxury. It is. I know that even though I'm $__,000 in debt, that whatever I have on a daily basis is more than she has on a daily basis. I sent her money a year or so ago, and sent Pablo clothes from Oakland once, but this year, I literally, literally, literally, had nothing to send her. The shout-out from Cali on this day remains with me still because she never asked for money but via our Swiss friend Fabi living in Colombia now, I knew the details of the situation, and they were dire. She attached a photo of Pablo, now 7, taken with a run of the mill digi cam against a typically colorful but devolving piece of architecture somewhere outside of Cali. When I left Cali in 2006 Pablo still carried around some baby weight...he was / always will be / is a beautiful boy, something divine, diviner than the rest of the Borjas. He still had cheeks, he had energy, he looked like a happy baby boy...what do we know at 3 or 4? At the time I thought that he needed to be put into a school like Juilliard IMMEDIATELY, or yes, taken to Cuba with his Mom and Father's family and enroll him in a school for the arts...he was that passionate, mad, natural, talented, special. I even thought that a modeling agency would scoop him up (The Gap and places of that ilk love a tan baby with refined features and light eyes...), but that never went anywhere either...So nothing ever changed, then. It is like he is about to fulfill my Father's prophecy slash fear that at 13 he turns wild and turns his back on being a good kid and a good son as much as he knows how to be in response to ...his good mom...finally sick of the poverty and disorganization of his life that was always kind of on the road, kind of in a house, kind of stabile, kind of manic, kind of tragic, kind of...In the photo she attached he is skinny, holding a flea-infested dog, smiling through grime and busted tennis shoes. For the first time I saw Pablito not as my baby cousin but as a child from a part of the world where children are painfully skinny and people take photos of them because they are skinny and slightly grimy. I am not saying that he isn't fed or that he doesn't shower or that right now perhaps they aren't ok, living with friends in Santa Marta, but that this photo erred a little too much on the side of unrecognizable...I stared at the photo and felt like a piece of shit. If I learned anything in Colombia it was that there was no I, no individual in the house. It was us.

That night I sat at Cafe Bulud / Bouley (?) (grateful...thank you Ms. Garvey! sincerely...!), after having ordered the lobster because I had never had lobster before and I've heard from....well, the collective conscience (excluding Jews) that the shit is fine, tasty, juicy...wealthy, rare, top of the pops! I forced most of it down having a similar reaction to the time I tried oysters...(thank you Ms. Golden!--GIANT oysters) and attempted to finish it out of politeness...I could not. Felt terrible. We know why. The indecency of me sitting there...while the picture of Pablo sits on my plate.

Wealthy, Bronzed, Beautiful Women...(how they shine)

And they were all in one room. It was almost too much color for ME...AL-Most...What was beautiful about the women was their physical singularity. Granted, the veils and the language, the food and the body language united them for perfunctory purposes, but their faces liberated them a bit and allowed them to be unique beings in the presence of each other. For a culture / religion as uniform as Pakistani-Muslims, this strikes me as a secrete or inadvertent genetic resistance...In a sea of veils, how can I shine? Some looked like boriquas, some looked Indian, some looked Persian, some looked Siberian, ONE looked like she belonged on the cover of a book of fairy tales from 1234 AD...plump beige cheeks with a timeless hair quaffe, berry lips and cucumber green eyes. Ridiculous. She gave me face for a few seconds because she knew that in that sea of veils, she was...This was not that woman, nor are there veils visible here...I'm keeping the cucumber eyes to myself until further notice.

Last Photo (Standing) / Jelly Legs

I still don't understand how a woman who is paralyzed from the waist down can stand up...She explained it to me...it has to do with the locking of ones' legs...how she feels that they are locked I don't know...isn't it a question of the brain sending messages to the various extremities? Regardless, it feels like to stand up, one must unlock everything...I'm trying this right now.

Space Prince / El Barranquillero (All In the Pretty Past)

A most beautiful thing floated into San Francisco last spring...but I think that was it. Me? Who delves into the meat? Was blinded?! So much pink and sun and brown and red and beating beating beating how did that happen? He is innocent. Is a Pope Innocent. Is a Clueless Prince. Here, he looks unamused/disgusted/nervous...in general, he looks insecure, sweet, happy...In retrospect, who wouldn't want the affection I am wont to give? In retrospect, have you SEEN the women in Spain, Ibiza, Germany?...where he moves through life wondering why his loves don't last...In retrospect, born three days apart in the same year, we are both beating hearts with roots in the same country... but he has wings and I have heavy feet...he acknowledges his flights of fancy and considers them real...dreams / life are the same for him...!!! He does not consider that he must eventually wake up!!! I dance heavily, firmly planted to where I am because rent is due...because I want to make real things really happen, and really kiss real faces, not because I am not an escapist by nature / in spirit, whatever...This tall, fancy prince loves me, he does, but he mistook my letters for just more saharaisms...you know the type...I forgive him because I was always only ONE way with him, from the minute I saw him that Thursday dangling about in our living room...So nothing could grow...would never have...it just slapped me in the face and barreled its way forward, towards nothing...I understand...In retrospect, I needed Beni to come through my solar system...to stand in as a representation of something akin to a conch, or an amphitheatre, a back board...I needed to see myself act like this: affected / blind / off kilter / faithful---not in him or me but in IT...that the world sometimes delivers...sometimes...it's a beautiful thing...to realize that my sensors can and will be on...when the next thief is delivered...cash on delivery...

Molly... (La Petite / The Monkey)

Molly was my father's first long term 'girlfriend' after Madukes moved out of our apartment at 1314 Fulton Street in San Francisco...Perhaps because she was so young, and artistic, and wild and insane and nurturing and exposed...did I love her so much. She actually was my big sister. Hmm. She was a perfect 5 foot 100 lb specimen. By perfect I mean tortured, alcoholic, detrimentally honest, verbose. Yes - perfect. I used to paint tennis shoes and faces on t-shirts with her. She had that box of 100+ Pentel colored markers. She ate Hawaiian bread mostly and was a bartender in Union Square, before the commercial bullshit took over. She wore tight Levis and leather jackets. Her hair was a cascade of dirty blonde waves. She cackled. She cut it up. She had transparent, knobby hands and fingers; funny fingernails...She offered me sips of Moosehead...She wore rings on her thumbs...One painfully memorable New Year's Eve wherein my Father steamrolled over to her house late at night, she put me to bed, sobering up as necessary in the presence of a 10 year old...And this winter, while visiting Pop in England, he recounted a beautiful story that took place that one summer he decided to bail out on life over to Barcelona/Morocco in the vain pursuit of a very vain woman...La Petite Molly emerges from that story as a champion...a lioness...a confident marvel of a now grown woman who was moved to leave one continent for another at the drop of a hat to essentially say just three things...after all, delivering the message in person...planting your feet in front of someone...on a train...bound for Paris...that trip propelled her into the stuff of novels!....maybe it marked the end, or the beginning...it's all the same sometimes...Anyway, as their relationship dissolved, so did ours. I wrote her 15 years later from college, maybe my junior year...2002? She had moved to North Carolina and was trying to progress from the bar to the kitchen. I never heard from her.

Her last name is Fitzgibbon...The Monkey.