"1,428 Things to Do in & Around Harlem" (excerpt)

19.  Hear faintly car alarm grind a spot of fear into snow, distance enarmored
        by dominant honky culture.

92.  Reflect with awe on the thought the life you live may be your own.

96.  Surprise yourself when she asks why you like the smell of sex by saying
        it reminds you of where we come from.

77.  Drink a Corona at the Kamaka on 8th amid its Christmas lights and Bob
        Marley music with the sculptor Richter preparing to return in four days to
        Hamburg, relishing his perfect wise journeyed profile pinioned between
        hope and regret at leaving Manhattan.

24.  Awake to see the gray day gathered around hexagonal granite tower and
        wonder if this were war would one emplace there a gun turret?

79.  Mull if all your inroads and plies of thought and feeling regarding your
        current sojourn could usefully be massed into a Q&A-based work entitled
        "A Man's Christmas in Harlem."

25.  Feel the calluses on the palms of thought and know them as words—but
        then wonder, "What are they holding?"

13.  Note as a herald of succor and coming good a sign on Amsterdam
        reading: "Cold beer. Smoke shop. Twenty-four hours."

49.  Watch the vales of shifting purple twilit clouds out her window as she
        relates the story of her father's "second letter."

6.   Spend a half hour with Ramon—maybe just 50 years old with a
       handsome rugged face and implacable air of kindness—in Costa Rican
       Harlem hardware shop basement precisely cutting seven corners out of
       a ¾-inch plywood slab to ride into your wall and thus form a broad and
       frankly superlative writing surface over which you are now, data entering.

81.  Sense bats peen and knife through the ruined rafters of your mind.

23.  Linger over the knowledge that anytime you feel the grease in your body
        glow is good.

39.  Hold for a time looped through the mind the phrase, "All we here passing
        through."

42.  Spend the second day of the New Year reading the whole of Jack
        Black's You Can't Win.

88.  Meet Flo at the Hog Pit before showing at Stackhouse's gallery series to
        read Senator Byrd's speech that begins "Today I weep for my country."

148. Note that each moment is like a flower with a center and petals in
         various degrees of opening—has scent, texture and color—but see
         farther too you are its root and the longer and deeper you are still the
         more vivid it is rendered.

88.  Have the elevator door open on you onto her onto candlelight onto an
        evening lolling together and together and together watching her watch
        you and all the gladness having time in the exigencies of human rhyme.

127. Remember three drops of red in the snow.

140. Feel at the apogee of spring fall tug a branch of withered leaves out of
          your abdomen.

21.  Hold yourself in place to be bisected.

131. Feel the dirt under your vest as you poke at a hole in your sweat.

84.  Swallow emptiness and despair.

58.  Plan a poem entitled "Seducing Private Ryan" with the first line, "Mister,
        everything you told me was a lie."

119. Slam in the love of fragrant boulders ziggurats.

71.  Catch at the Metropolitan Leonardo's show to know again that singular
        brutality (ruthlessness) and humility (wisdom) and that might does not
        make right—it doesn't even make wrong—but they cancel each other
        and what's left's the trace of the unerring flight of a cannon ball.

99.  Think to drop to the basement to check on your books and between an
        unauthorized move and the spring floods discover one-tenth of your
        collection as well as various unique prints and memorabilia, irrevocably
        ruined, will be added—a sodden gray heavy mass—to the weight of your
        conscience.

76.  Note the drinking fountain in the top-floor men's room of the New York
        Public Library is so cold you burn your lips, those shrinking violets.

2.   Step into the summer evening and right off remember West 109th—but
       not the one you lived on in '99 but its '85 incarnation as known on a visit
       to Tommy and Sag—and so touch old, semi-hard-scrabble New York,
       passing into a bodega to get a Presidente in a sack to sit on a bench,
       reflect and die a little.

30.  Dangle a crime light into your mind to watch the air show.

8.   Feel sweat run in a rivulet from your armpit down your arm to your elbow,
       bent over words that sometimes need water to dissolve into breath.

36.  Contemplate writing an extended political tract starting with a line Ruby
        spoke on the way home from Columbia County: "Patriotism keeps the
        people from having a complete crack-up."

36.  Flow in the heart hole.

65.  Glimpse changing traffic signals reflected in pool at the base of a melting
        snow bank blackening into the sulfurous toenails of death.

68.  Hit the Brooklyn Public House to hear Aaron singing his Lomax-laced
        licks, the uncharacteristic snarl of his mouth as he croons "white booty."

87.  Discover there is something in you that's smarter than you because it
         doesn't think.

1.   Shoulder heavy bags up from the subway at St. Nick to meet,
       happenstantially, Nelson, who used to assistant manage Petland on
       23rd, and talk shaking hands several times, exultant to be met, arriving,
       by a familiar face.

37.  Troop with her through rain to St. Nick's Pub to hear Bill Saxton's
        quartet, colored lights blinking overhead and sprinkled among gathered
        hopheads staring into bowl of sax to know that as much comes out of
        there as goes in.

45.  Feel in the lapidary and dark rock of your thought her brightness bind
        what's good in you.

46.  Find in my notebook left lying around, "Thank you Sam. So sweet so nice
        so good. Almost like life again. XXX OOO"

4.   Arrange books, clothes, computer infrastructure and doodads into your
       new 9-by-13—or 117-square-foot—furnished room and so, also, your
       current, immediate, effectual domestic circle, reminding yourself that the
       mind is infinite as you seek to cap with resignation arising of fallen
       expectation.

100. Realize at the intersection of Convent Ave. and 145th that even on a
         cloudy day you can see clear into the electric side-of-beef profile of The
         Bronx.

72.  Measure the space between your head and heart, trail of shadows
        among whispers.

122.              Write "Harlem Song," viz.

                      In my copper town
                      love mackle shine shimmy
                      home trove bunny bower

                      no hunger, baby

                      Come tickle your
                      sun shoulder

                      tangle with the tower

                      two thongs at night