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“Minor Cut in Grand Central” was put together on the Metro North. At the time, I was big into 1980s NYC writing. Bright Lights, Big City; The Bonfires of Vanity; Angels in America. The city had to be gross & complicated. Without moderation. Extraordinarily smug & extraordinarily unsound. In extreme excess of culture, material, pleasure, politics. Life had to be precious but poorly preserved, always precarious. Selfish & faceless (the Vanity). Absolutely way worse than today’s New York. But I understood the place from which those texts were written (I think of Baldwin, his “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually”); the poem is staged through this kinship, though lacks the preceding content’s immediacy or necessity or craft. 

 

This is because “Minor Cut in Grand Central” was regurgitation. I am totally overloaded with garbage input; media, information, images, buzzwords, stories, posts, media, media, buzzwords, buzzword, buzzword (buzzwords); my brain is half bog (there is a very real part of my brain that is bog). I wanted to get it out. I want to get it out. I tried to get some out. 

 

This attempt developed very naturally into a city poem (“Hayes is close enough to haze” is an obvious reference to the writer, whose New York Poem is relevant); there is undoubtedly a late-stage connection between the Quantity of the city & the Quantity of the digital hellscape. The reason this poem sucks is because everything in the poem is true. 

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