Ken L. Walker still has a Kentucky driver’s license and sadly completed leading a poetry workshop at the Riker’s Island Correctional Facility. He received his MFA degree from Brooklyn College and has published criticism and poetry in the Boxcar, the Poetry Project Newsletter, The New Yorker on-line, Lumberyard, The Wolf, Crab Orchard Review. He is the features editor for Coldfront magazine and curates the semi-annual Letter Home Reading Series.
After This Second Season
for Freddie’s, no longer at 6 Ave. & Dean St.
Katie called them “giraffes” because at night, on a few, well, that’s what they look like. Electronic long necks out somewhere toward Sandy Hook persuading the backlights on our rooftops. But, we couldn’t quite figure what the “giraffes” ate, never knew you murdered the grain pier.
Assume: cocaine has to hover in a price range, that Hungarian women have to be stretched out like lamb on some hotel bed for some senator, that none of this can halt the bigger rotation, that your yachts need a safe place to dock and drink what laps beneath them. And the hunt’s not over. Who killed you? In fact, the free ferries, sober enjoyment, or the interviews we never had—ask me any question and I’ll lie to you for the lack of this state check—the promise that we’ll wear our backs on our shirts and speak some other language but you won’t recognize the words. Like anyone else, we’d rather be at the bar you knocked down so your professional basketball game could be that much cheaper.
A Self Actualizing Contextual Analysis of The Poem
“After This Second Season”
Dear Catch Up,
Robbery displays itself through figures and bodies; its content and its form are different. One is not an extension or prefix of the other. However, the near-archetypal happenstance that robbery always seems to offer is an interaction between thief and thieved. When I first moved to Brooklyn four years ago, this became incredibly prevalent in the forms of actual burglary, petty theft, overpopulated jails (as in the rest of the United States), eminent domain, the difficulty in finding a job, and gentrification. These are not the only forms of robbery but they top the list.
In 2010, I agreed to co-write a chapbook with my friend Tim Carroll—a misplaced New Yorker now poeticizing in Minneapolis—which we later entitled We’ve Decided to Go with Somebody Else. The premise of this chapbook was to write a poem every day until either one of us found a “real job.” In the process of writing these poems (as it was a daily project), I forced myself every day to look deeper into the myriad forms of robbery. One micro-veracity that struck me was how the famous Brooklyn bar, Freddie’s, was diagnosed with the slow cancerous death of eminent domain. Freddie’s is now demolished and flattened into a pile of bricks covered by a fence and watched by an underpaid black security guard. In its place will be parking or a TGIFriday’s or a Best Buy or something much more useless than a commonality, a cornerstone, something more human, more meaningful for the persistent-temporary inhabitants. I was lucky to meet some of Freddie’s mega-devotees (folks that had been poisoning their livers for over ten or fifteen years, I a mere two-year poisoner) who would chain themselves to construction machines and fences. It was a ten year losing battle that made way for Jay-fuckin-Z and some Russian billionaire to bring in the Brooklyn Nets’s new arena. In the meantime, the Fort Greene/Prospect Heights/Flatbush Ave/Park Slope no-person’s-zone suffers a hagiographical PTSD. On one of the last night’s Freddie’s was open to the public, a couple of great poet-friends—who may as well be damn near brothers—told me that I was the only one in our small group that could write a sort of obit poem for Freddie’s. They claimed they weren’t capable. I disagreed but nevertheless took the advice and tapped into my dormant revolutionary anger and made a product that now exists in a space outside of the normal wage-labor/salaried space—the aesthetic space. It ain’t much but it’s an artifact all the same.
Louis Althusser writes that occupations are the least real material of reality and that the material made is the most material. Bob Black writes that work consumes one’s reality and thus consumes one’s one. Herbert Marcuse claims that the falsely conscious laborer does not possess his or her own mind. That something or someone else does. Lewis Hyde writes that only half of the reality of a piece of art can be oppressed by capital domain. If we were to all become more conscious of the forms and content that concepts take, we’d be able to figure more out about our chaotically-revolving reality and make things that reflect that conscousness. Robbery doesn’t happen on one level (gun in your face, brutal request for wallet, etc.). It happened to Freddie’s. It happens inside an interest rate. It happens when a highly qualified person is relegated to serving espresso or steak or radishes. It happens when a mosquito gets lodged inside a pant leg and goes to town. The basic scaffolding to robbery is when one random force collides with an unconscious Othered arbitrary cogency. Both these parties are compulsorily invited to figure out how to react. But the robbery remains. And the only way the victim is going to be able to hold steady to the important part of reality is to create, to make, to allow a making that can exist outside of such an oppressive realm like land ownership, like parking-lot-construction, like corporate/conglomerate psychotic insanity. How do we, precisely, rob the robber?
