Where has our love gone???

 
                                                         (Oh)
                                               To be young again
                                          and wallow in the squalor
                                             of my lost New York.

I know, I've said it a thousand times before, but my love/hate relationship with NYC remains unresolved, in spite of my continued efforts to reconcile our irreconcilable differences.  I loved it the way it was, damaged, slutty, piss stained, obscene, broken, dangerous, abandoned and hungry, but its changed.    Cleaned up its act,  gone legit,  left me for some younger guys.  And I keep coming back for more, and leaving unhappy and unsatisfied swearing I'm finished and I'll never be back, but how do you ever get over your first love.  The danger, the thrill, the mystery of unspeakably warm,  rain soaked summer nights of riding the subways to Washington Heights,  Chinatown,  the Village, Coney Island full of promise, dark eyed Puerto Rican girls and teenage possibility.  Vito, Hannah, Dolly, Irma???

Now, you've had work done,  you're all cute and safe, sterile and predictable, and Rudy Giuliani and the Disney people have conspired to turn you into some neutered unrecognizable monster!!!  An urban amusement park full of (east) Indians selling American icons made in China to polyglot busloads of gawking tourists.  I hate you...

                                                                               

But your beauty still lures me with false promise that things will be different this time, but they're not!!#%&@@

The battle for Manhattan has been lost.  I don't live here anymore and you won't let me forget it.  I search in vain for memories of from the past, but you've trashed them and still you tempt me with the hope that things will be different. 

And all that's left are dreams, and the long lonely bus ride home far away from the home that is no longer mine.  By the way, I hate the new wallpaper, paint job and window treatments, and the crown molding, the art work, all of it!!##@$&>  Saw the Cindy Sherman retrospective exhibit at MOMA and left wondering what people meant when they said she might be the most important artist of our generation.  375 pictures of herself in drag and masquerading as someone else.  If that makes her so important, then egocentric self denial is the new black (and white).  What more can I say????

                                           It's all been said

                                           a hundred times before,

                                           by some literary basket case

                                           or reminiscent whore,

                                           who's bled beneath a hundred men

                                           and bled until she died,

                                           its all been said a thousand times

                                           so now just say good bye. 

                                                       Pablo