Simple Things/ Lang Kenneth Haynes
But
"There but for the grace of God so go I." That quote is usually attributed to an English clergyman who lived in the 16th century and you
used to get it. Now it seems like you have been pulling away from those connections little by little. You still have a heart and you
continue to feel things, but something is askew. It's as though you have found other ways to create divisions between yourself and
other beings. You tell yourself that you're more experienced because you've actually been to the place your "friend" just learned about
for the first time by benefit of a show that she just saw on the History Channel. You've convinced yourself that you're smarter too.
Smarter in whatever ways create the biggest separations at the time. One of these days, you'll get really smart and realize that the
divisions are of your own making and that the partitions we build are kind of silly because we all occupy the same boat and the name
of that boat is LIFE - Yogashala
The Bowery was an interesting place back in the sixties during my high school days in New York City. The poem that follows is one that
I wrote back then — more than 40 years ago.
The Bowery
by LKH
(written in the late sixties)
Sidewalks and gutters filled with
remnants of people
propped against buildings sleeping in stairwells
with newspaper pillows
and grey fog for dreams
A thousand hotels and bars
with broken neon signs
where you can stay for fifty cents a night
and drink two watered beers for a quarter
A tall thin man stands
in the dead of winter
in thin summer slacks
and a child's baseball jacket
spewing forth phlegm, bile
and yesterday's dreams
from pink broken lips
A man and a woman — once lovers?
huddle by a garbage can fire
fueled by cardboard
and empty wine bags
They ask you for dimes
for coffee or carfare
and wipe your windshield
with oil stained rags
and expect tips
for obscuring your vision
See them leaving the Salvation Army
With stomachs full of eggs and Spam
New second hand shoes
Grey janitor's pants
And a fresh pack of Camels
Trade plasma for vodka
And in just one hour
They'll all stumble back
to their "home"
On The Bowery
One thing that I found intriguing about New York was that you had to work pretty hard to find a place to hide. The lines on the map kind
of bled into each other. If you stood on one side of the street you would swear that you were in China. If you crossed the street you
could very easily find yourself in a place that resembled Italy. Rich people and poor people rushed past one another on their respective
ways to places only they knew the locations of. Complete strangers pressed up against one another in subway cars beneath the
surface of the street. People became similarly acquainted on the city buses that ran at street-level. There was nowhere to go. It was all
mixed together in a pretty good way in the pre-gentrification days. Gentrification means that the yuppies now look at the homies as
though the homies are intruding on their turf.
I used to like hanging out on the Bowery back in the day. There was block after block of people living there and many of them did not
have roofs over their heads. Now we'd call these folks homeless. Back then we assigned a much harsher title. Maybe it helped to
broaden the distance. Maybe it helped some to believe that there really was a "them" and "us."
The definitions and re-definitions never worked for me though. In my heart of hearts (We all have them you know. Some are buried
more deeply than others, but they are there) I always knew that a very slight, almost imperceptible shift in the Universe could very
easily result in my trading places with the person who had just made it impossible for me to see through my car's windshield because
he had wiped it with an oil-stained rag. Back in my high school days I could hear all the stories I wanted to hear for the 50-cents it
would take to buy a pint of rot-gut wine. They called the wine rot-gut because it really would rot your guts and there were blocks and
blocks of rotten guts on the Bowery.
St. Mark's Church was the place I started out from on my Bowery excursions. It's a historic site. Peter Stuyvesant was the first
governor of the state of New York. Bowery is the Dutch word for farm. What is now not-so-affectionately called Skid-Row was once
Peter Stuyvesant's farm. Peter Stuyvesant and members of his family are buried underneath St. Mark's Church. Fifty years ago tours
were conducted of that subterranean world after the 10:30 service. I never went. I waited a few years to take my own tours above-
ground. I talked with the dead people who still appeared to be alive; the people whom I tried to describe in my poem.
The human connections didn't seem like a stretch to me. I found it interesting to observe how simultaneously fragile and resilient
humans are. One day I sat down on a curb next to a guy who was having a perfectly wonderful and animated conversation with
himself. The cheap wine only managed to slow the talk down a little. But right before my bloodshot eyes the apparent gibberish became
understandable to me and we were talking the same language. The man I was talking with was once a Golden Gloves boxer and he
pulled an old, yellowing newspaper clipping out of one of his pockets to prove it. He asked me if I wanted to fight. I respectfully
refused. He was only about half my weight and easily one foot shorter, but his attitude was intense. There was no doubt about his
resilience. He had an aura of toughness. His fragility was apparent when he told me many, many of his life stories. I half-laughingly told
him that my momma didn't raise no fool (as a way to tell him that there was no way that I'd fight him and to offer a little respect for his
abilities) and offered him another swig of wine as he sat back down on the curb to tell me some more stories.
I met another person on the Bowery who told me pretty remarkable stories. This fellow had been a practicing psychiatrist until his
beloved wife died suddenly. He told me that the grief was too much for him to bear, so he took to the streets and ingested all kinds of
drugs in a vain attempt to dull the pain. After months of surviving among the living dead, he cleaned himself up and returned to his
young daughter and his lucrative practice. Just about the time when his heart began to heal a little from the tragic loss of his wife and
best friend the unthinkable and unimaginable happened: His daughter died abruptly. He returned to the Bowery a second time. His
stories cemented within me something I had known all along which was that the curtains we use to separate ourselves from one
another are about as thick as moth's wings. But for grace.
used to get it. Now it seems like you have been pulling away from those connections little by little. You still have a heart and you
continue to feel things, but something is askew. It's as though you have found other ways to create divisions between yourself and
other beings. You tell yourself that you're more experienced because you've actually been to the place your "friend" just learned about
for the first time by benefit of a show that she just saw on the History Channel. You've convinced yourself that you're smarter too.
Smarter in whatever ways create the biggest separations at the time. One of these days, you'll get really smart and realize that the
divisions are of your own making and that the partitions we build are kind of silly because we all occupy the same boat and the name
of that boat is LIFE - Yogashala
The Bowery was an interesting place back in the sixties during my high school days in New York City. The poem that follows is one that
I wrote back then — more than 40 years ago.
The Bowery
by LKH
(written in the late sixties)
Sidewalks and gutters filled with
remnants of people
propped against buildings sleeping in stairwells
with newspaper pillows
and grey fog for dreams
A thousand hotels and bars
with broken neon signs
where you can stay for fifty cents a night
and drink two watered beers for a quarter
A tall thin man stands
in the dead of winter
in thin summer slacks
and a child's baseball jacket
spewing forth phlegm, bile
and yesterday's dreams
from pink broken lips
A man and a woman — once lovers?
huddle by a garbage can fire
fueled by cardboard
and empty wine bags
They ask you for dimes
for coffee or carfare
and wipe your windshield
with oil stained rags
and expect tips
for obscuring your vision
See them leaving the Salvation Army
With stomachs full of eggs and Spam
New second hand shoes
Grey janitor's pants
And a fresh pack of Camels
Trade plasma for vodka
And in just one hour
They'll all stumble back
to their "home"
On The Bowery
One thing that I found intriguing about New York was that you had to work pretty hard to find a place to hide. The lines on the map kind
of bled into each other. If you stood on one side of the street you would swear that you were in China. If you crossed the street you
could very easily find yourself in a place that resembled Italy. Rich people and poor people rushed past one another on their respective
ways to places only they knew the locations of. Complete strangers pressed up against one another in subway cars beneath the
surface of the street. People became similarly acquainted on the city buses that ran at street-level. There was nowhere to go. It was all
mixed together in a pretty good way in the pre-gentrification days. Gentrification means that the yuppies now look at the homies as
though the homies are intruding on their turf.
I used to like hanging out on the Bowery back in the day. There was block after block of people living there and many of them did not
have roofs over their heads. Now we'd call these folks homeless. Back then we assigned a much harsher title. Maybe it helped to
broaden the distance. Maybe it helped some to believe that there really was a "them" and "us."
The definitions and re-definitions never worked for me though. In my heart of hearts (We all have them you know. Some are buried
more deeply than others, but they are there) I always knew that a very slight, almost imperceptible shift in the Universe could very
easily result in my trading places with the person who had just made it impossible for me to see through my car's windshield because
he had wiped it with an oil-stained rag. Back in my high school days I could hear all the stories I wanted to hear for the 50-cents it
would take to buy a pint of rot-gut wine. They called the wine rot-gut because it really would rot your guts and there were blocks and
blocks of rotten guts on the Bowery.
St. Mark's Church was the place I started out from on my Bowery excursions. It's a historic site. Peter Stuyvesant was the first
governor of the state of New York. Bowery is the Dutch word for farm. What is now not-so-affectionately called Skid-Row was once
Peter Stuyvesant's farm. Peter Stuyvesant and members of his family are buried underneath St. Mark's Church. Fifty years ago tours
were conducted of that subterranean world after the 10:30 service. I never went. I waited a few years to take my own tours above-
ground. I talked with the dead people who still appeared to be alive; the people whom I tried to describe in my poem.
The human connections didn't seem like a stretch to me. I found it interesting to observe how simultaneously fragile and resilient
humans are. One day I sat down on a curb next to a guy who was having a perfectly wonderful and animated conversation with
himself. The cheap wine only managed to slow the talk down a little. But right before my bloodshot eyes the apparent gibberish became
understandable to me and we were talking the same language. The man I was talking with was once a Golden Gloves boxer and he
pulled an old, yellowing newspaper clipping out of one of his pockets to prove it. He asked me if I wanted to fight. I respectfully
refused. He was only about half my weight and easily one foot shorter, but his attitude was intense. There was no doubt about his
resilience. He had an aura of toughness. His fragility was apparent when he told me many, many of his life stories. I half-laughingly told
him that my momma didn't raise no fool (as a way to tell him that there was no way that I'd fight him and to offer a little respect for his
abilities) and offered him another swig of wine as he sat back down on the curb to tell me some more stories.
I met another person on the Bowery who told me pretty remarkable stories. This fellow had been a practicing psychiatrist until his
beloved wife died suddenly. He told me that the grief was too much for him to bear, so he took to the streets and ingested all kinds of
drugs in a vain attempt to dull the pain. After months of surviving among the living dead, he cleaned himself up and returned to his
young daughter and his lucrative practice. Just about the time when his heart began to heal a little from the tragic loss of his wife and
best friend the unthinkable and unimaginable happened: His daughter died abruptly. He returned to the Bowery a second time. His
stories cemented within me something I had known all along which was that the curtains we use to separate ourselves from one
another are about as thick as moth's wings. But for grace.