FREESTYLEVISION

The media has once again cast its dark shadow over another news story. A story repeatedly played on by every news channel and has now stepped up to get it’s own special. A story that sooner or later will have protesters, politicians, and maybe even Jesus speak out against what the media promotes to be the problem. But in all truth it’s not the problem, it’s only the fall man.

Law enforcement has been looking into Craigslist for a while now due to their alleged posting of prostitution ads. Robberies, sex solicitation, and now murder!!. Craigslist must seem like the worst website on the planet?. You go on to a community board in search of a car, a roommate, a job or maybe even a girlfriend and you could now wind up with a axe totting medical student at your door. The media points the blame at the site, portraying it to look like the worst thing since the Holocaust. I hear these news reports and sigh, the same cycle always happens. When shit hit’s the fan someone always has to take the blame. Whether it be McDonalds for forcing people to be overweight, or Craig list, an enforcer for the obliteration of man. Society always has to find a villain to make the accused look like a victim.

Ronald McDonald did not run into your house with a military assault rifle and force you to gobble down three big Macs, two large fries and a diet coke. So where is this law suite coming from? Why is the media reporting the highest percentage of obesity in American history and showing a picture of McDonalds? Because I make mediocre hamburgers that you decided to make your soul source of nourishment is not cause for attack.

Craigslist did not have a tab on its site for murder or mayhem. Did not have a section for robberies and sodomy. It does have a section for adult and erotic postings. But it is not the one doing the postings. It’s a board, a community board that allows anyone to go on and post or search for a desired product. So before the media begins to poke its mighty spears into another innocent. Just remember that something created for one purpose and is unconsciously used for another, is not the cause of the tool, it’s the cause of its operator.

Two lonely lovers on opposite sides of the Atlantic fall into the arms of another. Each wake up the next morning with fear of what the other will think and if they should tell them.

Six months go past and the lovers are finally reunited. They both have completely forgotten about the episodes during there lonely period. They hug and kiss at the train station with such passion and desire that it turns heads. The returned soldier grabs his bags and his wife leads him towards the parking lot. As they exit the station a familiar face catches his eye. Short blonde hair, deep blue eyes and thin red lips. A face also comes familiar to his wife. Brown eyes and dark curly hair. A face directly in front of her.

An awkwardness falls over his wife has she introduces her one time lover. The woman turns to her husband and says. “ This is Jackie, she helped me a lot while you where away.” The husband looks in suspension at the nervousness in his wife’s voice. “ What are you doing here?” the woman asked, now becoming a little twitchy. “ I came to pick up my husband, David.” she said pointing to another soldier approaching them. Short blonde hair and deep blue eyes. The husband gulped and the awkwardness continued.

You can take the poet out of the city certainly. But can you take the city out of the poet? I suppose I will soon find out. This week I left New York City after living there for five years. First I was a college student, and then I was on my own, trying to find work in the very bowels of a recession. Needless to say I was not successful and have had to flee the metropolis of Manhattan for the much greener environs of Arlington, Virginia, my old home town, or more appropriately, county.

I suppose I should consider myself fortunate that I am not moving to any place horrible or in the middle of nowhere. Arlington, if any of you know the area, is across the river from Washington, DC and is the home of the Pentagon, the Corazon of the Military-Industrial complex. That’s right, we were attacked on 9/11 for real. So, I have not come back to a hamlet, or a town with no Vietnamese, Indian, Thai, or Italian restaurants, or a place where there are no bookstores, libraries, bars, or stoplights.

Yet it always feels odd to call Arlington “urban.” At one point we were part of DC, but were given back to Virginia. They did not want us. We sort of went through the opposite process as Brooklyn. I suppose as a consequence we never had the need to develop any sense of pride to prevent from being devoured whole. I have never heard anyone utter “Arlington in the house!” at an event.

So maybe I am still an urban poet, a troubadour without music but with city streets. And perhaps if one begins with poems about subways and grime, one never loses their edge even if they are surrounded by lawns and streets empty as a ghost town in the middle of the day. Then again, can one who never lives in a city ever develop an edge on their own? Without ever feeling that strange combination of joy and fear when walking home drunk at 4 in the morning, unsure of what saints or sinners one will meet or if you are heading the right way down the street? Maybe. If so there is hope for me.

Manhattan made me into a poet, she was the ultimate unrequited love of my life. And we all know that it is at the touch of such feeling one becomes a poet. An urban poet can be surrounded by such reminders of failed romance, and so they can really develop a voice, since they have to stand out against a crowd of potentially millions of admirers. If I had stayed in Arlington I would have been pastoral if I wrote verse at all. I do not think being a writer of prose is so dependent on location, except as source material. But I do not think a city tempts and then rejects a novelist like it does to a poet. A poet can be crushed to death by a city. That is why I am somewhat happy to leave.

A question that needs to be asked is if being urban is good? Certainly in the city it is a defense mechanism. It is also sensible, one writes about what they know. There are few cities where poems about hunting on rolling hills full of deer might connect with an audience. Yet is there something about being an urban poet with an urban vision that makes one important to poetry wherever one might go? I think so. Oddly enough, it is a “tradition” that the poets of the cities are the ones who reinvent the language through experimentation and taking the chances that being in a large mass of people allows to occur safely. A poet who faces the city is looking towards keeping poetry and by extension, literature, fresh, and also keeping poetry a community, not just a series of cells of lonely men and women writing verses for themselves and no one else.

So how does one keep an edge? How does a poet keep their urban flavor? I could travel into DC by subway and roam the streets at night. I could walk the bridges over the river during winter and send clouds of breath over the Potomac like little rafts of myself. A few drinks and rolling in a few gutters could do the trick to. Yet maybe that would just be posturing. Can I bring the urban into Arlington? Can I make my county truly wake up and realize that it is a city in its own right and should begin to love living life on the edge, however dull it might be and low off the ground?