DOESTOYEVSKY. the quote that started it all.
They sometimes talk about man’s bestial cruelties, but that is being totally unfair and unjust to the beast. For a beast can never be as cruel as a man, so artistically so picturesquely cruel.
Author: @michaelvitaly
Theatre Maker. Teaching Artist. Student of Life.
Poet from way back.
The Door to the General Store.
This door once swung between childhood and sweaty nights,
Soda shop fountains and cigarette kisses.
Touching on dreams on a rooftop in Brooklyn
seemed so far away on this porch in your arms.
For dreams seemed as far as the stars
and now I have everything I need.
This door once swung between my fingertips like the sands of time.
And now the time between my fingertips have sagged for years.
Like the kite we flew in Prospect Park that Memorial Day Picnic
when we first met.
Skin on tethered bone.
Cole Porter
I love his music.
I had the pleasure of coming across a lot of Cole Porter my senior year in college when I did their production of “Kiss Me, Kate.” I played Fred Graham and he played Petruchio, but when I auditioned I just wanted to be one of the hoods who approaches him, threatens him, and ends up stealing the show with a little soft shoe. I did however get to sing some beautiful material, one of them being “So in Love” after my ex-wife just leaves me up center and I stayed relatively still and sing this ridiculously painful song. I’ll never forget that song. The moment on stage was gone as it was happening, but I remember feeling invigorated. Alive.
So then comes a few years and many miles from those boards, and I’m barefoot on the cooler hardwood (vinyl tile) boards of Brooklyn on the first floor hearing the S train go by, opening up my little book of songs and coming across this one in the still of the night.
In The Still of The Night By Cole Porter
soundcloud.com/michael-vitaly/in-the-still-of-the-night-cole
Lines on Richter
Washed aside and blown asunder,
In between the rolls of thunder
And the cries of languid heaven,
You stand there lashing at my heart.Smoke and ash and bitten memory,
Bitten off more than I could chew,
Bitten by the love we once knew,
Your face and heart, like smoke and ash depart,
Linger for a time and then become sweet rhyme.Etched into my memory,
Like a simple melody
Fiery, pure, and fleeting,
Like constellations unconnected,
You stand there washed away
From the future unprotected
Though safely locked inside my heart.I’ll hide you there for God knows how long,
And then one day Time will take you,
Wrestling my heart to the ground
Setting you free little by little,
Washed away though etched for always
Inside this tender heart of mine.
God
Once in a while you need to not listen to anything else. You’ll find him.
Time.
“Only time can stop time…” I think, beneath the guise of rich green treetop canopies softened and sweetened by recent rain. A long needle nosed tower stands above the brick and green lined horizon like a flag pole to a bygone era. I sit and wait for a bus on Massachusetts Avenue watching cars and people and Robins go by. Most notably, the robin whose brushed brown red and orange belly was a perfect sphere under its grey and black streak of a body as it swooped across the scene crying out, “Me! Don’t forget about me!” Only time can stop time. Only time can interject itself into your life at moments when it so chooses. “Take a look at me,” it says like a grandfather clock in the hall every hour. “Look over here.” glares the neon green from your desktop shelf the night we stayed up till dawn talking about our stuff. “Come on,” cajoles your conscience as you know this is wrong but you know it will be over soon so get on with it already. Time. Slows down to a hilt always at your side. Ready to fly away at times delightful and stay, steady and slow, during those times quite painful. It’s an amazing thing that only purveys the forefront of your thought how it wants, and whenever it wants as well.
Swallows on a Sunday Afternoon
I found this in an old book of mine.
I had written it one morning while in DC .
The swallows overtake the sky
Like bees out of the hive,
flying this way and that
among puff-white mine fields
that hang quietly in the blue,
they swoop and flutter like fighter pilots
on a friendly flying mission.
“I wonder if somebody died,” I say aloud
as I watch a yellow monarch flutter past my window.
The two emergency vehicles were cause enough for concern.
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” I think to myself,
“that somebody dies on a clear and sunny Sunday afternoon.”
Mandla Reuter. Lines on The Gate.
Caught between you and your memory
And now caught on the other side
of what once was a threshold
you slip now from seen and unseen,
in and out of focus,
here and then not.
Like the long heavy closed eyed yawn,
now here and now gone.
You, always there,
never coming or going,
standing still but separate
the both of you
not facing each other
not wanting to connect any longer.
You, old and new,
Did you one night,
with Lorca’s dying Orange Tree,
cut the shade you used to cast?
No more in life if no more with her?
Is that the end you choose for you?
To welcome interruptions
but never anyone home,
To welcome interruptions
but never anyone home?
There you stand ready and waiting,
and yet I walk through you
and through you, and through you.
——————–
Grown apart
older now
both have bled
both are rusty,
one seems closed off.
One seems empty.
Both led home,
Now they stand apart like
grandparents
but not quite
themselves.
Mozart and the MTA
Something in the truth stirs the sound receptor in my mind and I only hear the sound of mumbled marbles through choking mouths — like when I rushed to my Harlem bedroom window after hearing a plane passing really low, hand to mouth, rushed and stood pressed to glass — I could only hear the rumble of plane and whir of my imagination. And this only a month ago. I suppose it was nothing. Or at least no one ever heard about it. So whether violins or groans from underground brought me there it was something about the truth that stirred in me on this train headed to lots of places.
But now all I hear is the “routine” from a man in the subway. He parked himself in the middle of this uptown 4 and immediately took to two children on the laps of their parents. Now those kids are gone, scared off at Bowling Green with its orange painted brick stretch of walls, but the man continues, he’s moved up and down the train after apologizing for interrupting the day, the passage, the read, the concert etc. and has proceeded to entertain the train with imitation train noises for starters… This was actually met with delightful curiosity by the sister in a pair of children, whose haircuts were almost the same save a distinguishable few curls that sort of went through her head precociously, making her a cute but muppet-looking little rascal. And as the doors closed they “chimed” together, the man and the kid, and the ultimate showman exclaims proudly but still in his gruff tone, “she’s my partner, ladies and gentlemen. One more time…” and she never repeated the sound. Even I entertained the notion to help the faltering show. But he was fine, he was obviously some sort of falsetto genius and man about town — the underground town. Now he’s on to jokes and has quite a few people laughing or at least smiling. Even me through my Mozart, through it all.
I enjoy listening to Mozart underground because it seems to add a sense of driven purpose or at least justification for things I’ve seen down here. I like when the tender lush swells match a starting train before it catches hold of higher speeds. And twinkling piano trills ringing against the sea of squeals and even now the train runs smooth and these strings rage onward through the dark layered forest. The soot is a stream of midnight water and we go forth into the nothingness until the mechanics gives way to the logistics and the MTA fails Mozart. But here again the flight of keys black and white, up and down, a confluence of birds like people, perched or running, never flying. Reaching stretching all within Mozart’s grasp, it’s all within my grasp until even Mozart has to stop. And the steady mechanics of the track click track click track click takes hold of my heart and steadies the chaos once more.
But whether it be truth or chaos. The subway and Mozart are great antidotes.
Games lost, by the Philosopher Fisherman
“most games are lost, not won.”
So I immediately approached the truck and a man dressed like a fisherman greeted me with a smile and open palm. “How are you?” I said quite jovially as if I’d known him for years. “Good, good,” he responds and then I look over to the water where he sits, see he sort of presides over this little tugboat being rained upon by clear blood looking water from the shower hose rigged above. He was a carney.
And so we chatted about things here and there near and far, for just a few moments, as the rest of the bus, the very happy yellow school bus from the outside, but whose innards seemed strangely unimpressed by their surroundings, almost unhappy.
But on they walked and there I stood about to play a carnival game. For free. For the mere enjoyment.
The tugboat’s top stood out like Abraham Lincoln’s black stack high above a basin not so proud and long as his face; the boat was short and stout, like a kettle out the oven that’s been flattened near a crepe. A filled one.
And so I readied myself, like a golfer or a weightlifter, grounding myself and trying to counter balance with my one shoulder messenger bag to get the best throwing stance possible to try and get these rings around the tugboat’s top. And one: whew, right over the top. “At least I got it close,” I thought for a quick second before I shifted my weight back and forth. And I grabbed the second ring, this one bright orange. Clang! –“Woah!” from the fisherman, kindly and warm — “Nice,” I thought but just for a second, and I was readying my feet again. As I lifted the third ring I thought of nothing else but the ring and the tugboat. Getting the ring to the tugboat.
And I lost. I hit it again though, but it seemed merely a consolation prize, getting to knock it twice but never landing it through. “No matter,” I thought and smiled at the kindly artist, as we chatted some more. He was in fact an artist as was the designer of this entire game who was working the ski ball around the back of the truck. Joel Kyack.
I could’ve won a mirror painted by him. If I had only won that tugboat toss. And I shook the fisherman’s hand and was greeted around the corner by another man who was dressed in a yellow rubber rain suit complete with heavy duty suspenders. A fisherman.
After getting to see some of his other work in the Frieze Art Festival, I could tell he was certainly a fisher of men. Philosopher Fisherman.
Michael Vitaly Sazonov 