Nine Inch Nails - Every Day Is Exactly The Same

Neighborhood Watch

2/3/91

It looks so much different
than it feels.

Down the hall a man is banging with a club.

Somewhere else, there’s a corpse of an angel rotting on a pedestal. I’m responsible. It’s not a crime. Down the hall that smells frantically like Lysol - or ammonia - a fresh coat everyday. And every day down the drain, drowning the roots of things up from the soil and growing in the sun and wetted with rain. We can’t see, but they've been through it all down there - been touched, effected - they shine for a time --may end up in dumps or sewers under the city again - because of us. It’s not a crime.

Something simple and good, still is that. Even if it’s covered in shit. Right? Under the city, along with the black ammonia water that’s left to make this hall smell yellow and harsh - too clean to be clean at all. It’s a cover up - and besides, I can feel the grubs in the walls.

Freshly scrubbed, I leave this place and go and go away from here - I think: I live in a Spark. Funny - it doesn’t always filter down. Above the art gallery, that’s where I live. Above the catered parties. I am going now - to unpack books or stand for artists - and the trains listen to me while they pass and

I am ok .

He’s been at it for a long time now. Down the hall … banging. I didn’t know anyone lived behind that old door. 4 big locks on it. The fragile staircase leading to it doesn‘t even look safe to walk on. It may be what holds this building up though.

He’s been at it for a long time. Whatever he’s trapped in has us both. Minutes and minutes and he‘s fallen into a steady harmless deadly rhythm - it seems to have forgotten why or doesn’t care anymore. He will never stop because he isn‘t even doing it. It’s just become part of the architecture. Sound waves - a continuum - you do not stop the thing: Habit. It’s lifeless, so it can not get tired. I wait after every bang for it to be the last. It is always just the first and there will be another. I hold my breath and open my door just a little. Shut it again, shaking. I’ll wait. He’ll quit. But he doesn’t. Someone else will do something. No one will. So I find him.

Locked in an apartment down the dark part of the hall - not even Lysol down here: “I’m not flipping out they were here 4 of them I had to get your attention somehow this our home sweetie I just want to protect it couldn’t quit til someone heard me they been out there I seen um through my peephole I been watchin I ain’t freakin I work all day I make 50 dollars an hour I ain’t freakin.”

There was no one there. No one had been there. But I knew what he meant and still believed him. I knew what he meant and I knew what he did. And, after the police came and left upon deciding he was a strung out nut (within less than 5 minutes), I knew why he went back to his apartment, locked the door, stared out his peephole, and picked up the club again.

Meg, Onions and Snow

[Poetry rises from weakness. Poets are flawed and weak and those who lack these particular shortcomings are punished. Shunned by beauty or god for lacking vision. Those who most need compassion are disallowed - due to their need. Can this be so?]


1/21/91

She has a picture of Jack Kerouac on her wall. I didn’t know that’s who it was or that she took it down here -- mural on the outside of an abandoned building -- which is where we are now but we can’t get in because they fenced it off. Meg comes down here (or she used to ... not so much any more) to take pictures. It was beautiful when it was new to her but now it’s old industrial garbage. Not the same and they are going to turn this into an amusement park with stores and astro turf. Steve told her, "Hell. If we have a Holocaust there will be a lot of ruins to walk around in." He makes art out of found objects but says he’ll never get rich doing it unless he finds a Picasso.

I know people live under the bridges. I’ve seen their beds and carts and world’s made out of boards and twisted rust and things that have forgotten what they were originally. Can something be found if it continues to reek of loss even as you possess it?

Once Meg’s friend found two bags of onions. She found one of them hanging on her door when she got home from work. They’d fallen off a freight train. Chris. That’s his name - Meg’s friend. Another poet who spends a lot of time under the bridges and he looks always a bit grubby but his wife is very rich. He loves Meg but can’t leave his wife. I knew better than to ask why - so he gives Meg found onions.

People sleep in the abandoned buildings. When it's winter, I suppose they could build small fires. Mostly all cement - fireproof, but they’re ugly - things that won’t burn are ugly. Kundera said ugly can be beautiful, but pretty never can.

And we have found that here. Please don’t ever tell me that I look pretty.

One night Meg and someone else went into one of the buildings. She said it was so dark she actually stepped on someone sleeping in there, "...but I don’t even think it woke them up.”

After snow, it’s different. The signs of the world below bridges are more subtle - or more pronounced - but with softer tones. You can see footprints - so many of them - travel logs, a symphony of dark commutes - staggered, pointless, turning back on themselves, driven on and protected by inane purpose, a fortress built by madness in a human mind. Networking. Lines from cart wheels meet and cross. A stand off, a missed appointment. A quiet odyssey that won’t fit in the words for a book to retell but I feel it.

An artist I know who makes bronze monuments for museums, and statues for wealthy people’s backyards told me that gypsies live beneath the streets in tunnels. The smoke that rises around manhole covers is from their opium dens. At first I liked that story. But walking under the bridge later looking at the tracks - I thought about it. I found it too pretty - his story - too pretty to ever be ugly - and then fireproof - and then, beautiful.