NYC Street Invitational

A brief hiatus from Tango de la Materia to entertain a poetic rendering of the NYC Street Invitational, a rollerblading competition held on August 20, 2011 in the heart of Williamsburg, Brooklyn beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Please take a moment to imbibe. 



A gunshot sounded in Brooklyn, beneath the monolith of freeway shining through the dust in a rising August heat. The angels from their roosts rose to the call and took to the heavens, convening flocks for a stormy, symphonic moment in the industrial afterthought now postmodern haven of the glass apple, a figurine of a city so driven by immediacy in its mad dealings as to appear, and merely then to be, quite natural.

These angels, elegant wisps of passion, and for this moment pupils of materialism, danced scattered, daring lines through the temporary ruins of a free market, broaching irrationally circular motions beneath that suspended monument of linear thought, the freeway standing tall. Endlessly smooth in their moments of grace, terribly brief in their moments of falling from. Freedom does not exist in the marketplace, but it does in dust storms.

Like lions of percept savoring viciously these short moments as pupils, as rather than those endless stretches of pawning, and indulging the imaginary immediacy as a higher plane of consciousness, in harmonic opposition to the linear ethic echoing from the concrete, they lunged, leaped, bound. Smoke filled the air, carved the skyline, as rounds of guns blazed into the setting sun, the flocks of crowd stifled in the clouds yet vibrating in a collective consciousness.

Swift feet galloping on the film of sooty air as if untouchable, without boundaries, as if the angels themselves were nothing more than a feast of ineffable concept. Pure and empty they dusted the symbolism as if life after death were here and now, material. Mind over matter incarnate. The angels the conquistadors of the mind/body gap in real moments. Wielding blades these martial dancers convened this august day, skating dark, chaotic etchings, in raw immediacy, the imaginary point, into the linear ethic aforementioned.

And we the people listened to the scraping, the howling of the dust of moments wherein angels take flight. Scatter to the streets. Love is in the air in this New York City heat. Ciao ciao!

Please see The Apple Juice on the Philosophie tab of this site for a book of poetry regarding this manner of rollerblading. Enjoy!


Jason Greendyk, www.jasongreendyk.com

Tango de la Materia, No. 34

To betray the heart
Is not the same no
As to betray the reason
The revelation Corazón
To overcome the deities of sense
In essence retracted as weakness
At the limit of (sanity/
World dependence/
The child of the spheres)
A reasoned thievery
Having reasoned well
The stead of the heart
A fragile thing
Invisible razón
To reap the rational waste
Of hopeless romance
Savouring the emotional taste
Of a love not one's own
Having reasoned it there
As off some undulating song

Tango de la Materia, No. 33, Epitome No. 3

August New York
She came in waves
Her contractions rose
In a crystal rain
A façade of corporate personhood
Lucifer fell from grace
To save dear God aesthetically
His icy taste an ornamental apple
An orbit of divinities
The angels flew to New York
At the shot of a Brooklyn gun
And by fields of sugar cane
Coming on
Leaving fires in their august city
The gardens of remembrance
Ghosts kissing on the water
Falls sunrise in the grassy desert
Catch the industry felling grace aforementioned
The industrial desert calls
To a stormy old soul
A weathered storm
A ripened fruit at last breath withal
As time insufficient
To bear flower to reality
'Tis just a moment comes and goes
Is all in all
Won't you watch me?
I want to disappear into the life like ochre
The existent non entity
A gentleman of cordial depth
In his glass taste the humanity leaving
Tumbling silent and digital
An Arabian night
Full moon gap kissing the air in her lips
Don't force it
It's too subtle
The former absence
Glows now in the metered echo
Canons gouging memories
Beneath tall ceilings
Elevating consciousness
And modulating cordialities
In receding openness
Less current to speak of minds
Just contemplating
Disseminating
All the room free of conversation
The great American opera
A toss of hair turn of a page
In the fading summer breeze
Rising to trust in the ambient ideology of the spheres
Recluse persistent and silent in the gaps the music breathes
Willing to stand empty of posture
A figurine ineffable
I stared him dead silent in the eye
'Midst the cultural rain
And we met so soon
A façade crystallized
The repetition a fresh dream to imagine
To realize
A carrier pigeon
A trapeze artist
Flying over the river
Though a free bird never flies
He just rides the current
That's all
An eagle scouring the bald heights of industry at sunrise
Scheming his thievery
Drunk off the moon night 'fore
A wolf on the American prairie
The industrial desert sprinkled with grass
Porcelain rain to nourish the sweetest parting sorrow
A scowling meditation
Howls our souls into past disintegrations
Of the steady meet
The glitching hue
A ghost of routine
In newly lightened netherworlds
Like moths to ambiance
We flock to gods
Infatuate or contrived
Those stormy lovers
Flying circles 'round our weathered eyes
We're by some hope then mesmerized
My love was a naked downward spiral
Eyes wide shut in the dark
Groping for whomever with gusto
Left in tattered hearts
A current swift to coax a waking motion
After her abyss was stilled
She came coagulated
A summer wine
Lightly chilled
A shiver down the spine
At the peak a violin
Déjà vu
Watched the hood of darkness
Breathe embroiderings of black stilts
Above the pointed rooftops
Harboring the olden souls' gentle arrogance
In the eagles' eye I was poverty
In the wolves' I was crying abandon
A panic so rapid as to still
Distill serenity remarks
The dark is mere the light
Where yet to point us home
Where the heart is scattered wide
A gestural dance of love upon a prairie
The cemetery loosens us so deft
That the horseman lost his head
Chasing the tales of birds that sing the sun
It's dusty in the empty rooms of soul
And we've no doors to close behind
Rather the foam of sea
Coming so close to home we die
Sipping merlot with the blackbirds
A dash of blood beneath the wing
Twirling sparkling water with the bluebirds
A ray of sun in flight to sing
All through the thickets' swamp
Where thieving masters capture things of grace
And rape their souls that came too far
Falling irreversible without a trace
The tails of wives of old
Goodnight my lover
I've lit a candle for you too soon
The savannah is a golden flame
Where we imagine we came true
Though even all in all
A moment came and went
Then late one stormy night
By that same candle had been lit
I felt our shadows had been drift
Up from foamy sea
Ghosts kissing in the august fall
The New York symphony
And on the prairie where the rabbits play
Their holes of darkened shame
In American persistence
We can simply turn the page
Toss our hair upon the wind
And meet so soon again
Carry on another day
For after all and all
Love is just a whisper woke
That we must proper cultivate

Tango de la Materia, No. 32

The mouse ate the fox
Silent in her cunning
Her clever drawing out
Unforgiving like cold
At the landing of the waterfall
Life or death
Roots (entrenched/flooded)
Still visions comprising
Sparkling airs of rise
The mist
Profound condensation
Arrivee
The (drowned/muted) symphony
Elicits tango of the birds of prey
Dark waltz of prayer leaves
Sharp on threesome gusts
And many claws'
Talons clenched
To (intimate/imitate/advise)
Under wings may stare
A soldier in arms in eyes
Not beg to shiver please
'Tween lines' white light breeze
A silent spiral incessant
Breaks apart
And leaves scatter to the winds'
Some tropic gusts some colder gales
Some force of pollen in slumbers'
Sweet ambrosia
Le Alouette a golden eagle
And a bald
The ravens in concert jest
As in great coward
Doth read in between
Just one step late
Always
Hesitation
Repetition
Silence the bellow fair
Lightning gliding back to shore
Pray pity the parted air
Spoken
Colliding open d'imaginer
A fantasmer happiness

Tango de la Materia, No. 31

Leaving
At the reiteration of trust
Watching the valleys of a corporate personhood
Fold in the silence
Jittering to admit a truth
Will fall on ears deaf
And swipe in tears
Only wept in self dissolution
As the time is clinging
To timing flights immediate
The rushing summer
Was so brief a romance
It might have faded faster
If only he'd danced
His old soul to stay
The ghost will have to walk miles
Imagining the European rain of doubts
Falls in Brooklyn too
The industry deserts
Instead grassy nights
Lush like passing flames we plume

Tango de la Materia, No. 30

After eight the light is scarce
Crimson haloed like night
'S snowfall leans the branches
Pure concept in arc
Might be played an air
A shadow strewn of substance
Other flame shivering
Le coeur de feu
(In-sincere) jest
Hath (a pair/appeared)
Batting lashes tamed
Comme pour le changement
Comme pour laisser

Tango de la Materia, No. 29

One moment he called
And another he was gone
Did she sit still
Because she could taste
The wind that carried him?
The level arch of her tongue
Impressing moist upon her pointed finger
A cold sensitivity to direction
To intentions farther
Than an eye to mention could tell
One moment calling it perpetual
He raked a garden of his chains
'Til his roots did sever
So that the gusto might plant him
On some higher plain
Some perception culpable
Of categorizing sense
On a palette of emotion
Nothing more
A neigh mere in the late light of field
A missing bore