Poem from Tony Nightwalker LeTigre

Non Judgement Day is coming

by Tony Nightwalker LeTigre

Last night with transit time to spend
Checked out the skate park under Burnside
Guy wanted to sell a deck for five bucks!
“The bearings alone are worth fifty bucks,”

Said a kid, as we together wished

Between the two of us,

That we could cough up five bucks.

Ogled the old Towne Storage building & remembered
(or imagined remembering) her telling me,

Back in the days of our QuArt collective,

About some friends of hers squatting there

In one of the upper floors, & how she thought that sounded

Like “the most amazing thing imaginable”

It took me a while to appreciate what she meant by that

 

And she may never have even told me that,

‘cause it becomes harder to tell strands of reality apart

From the bright strings of yarn of my own invention
(plus garlands of tinsel I find lying around)
with which I so assiduously weave them

The skatepark looked incredible
Like the portal to another, & better, reality
Where there are tons of punks & no pigs
& I imagined it expanded tenfold, a hundredfold,

A galaxyfold, to the size of Golden Gate Park
(after dark), & beyond—
swelling like the universe in the moments after the Big Something,
swallowing up hellfire & calamity & conformity in its implacably awesome maw,
leaving us with all the time in the world
& the most fabulous place imaginable to play,
for fucking ever.
Can you imagine that shit?

Let us not be so busy preparing for doomsday
That we neglect to tend

The bright gardens of our best (non)judgement

“Are there more cops than usual on the street today?”
I asked a streetscarred fellow on the sidewalk—

“About the same as normal,” he said,

Failing to confirm my paranoias.

He asked if I had any weed to sell
No, sorry, I said—he turned away in blank but expected disappointment—
“but I have some to give away,” I added, bringing him back

In surprise—things like this don’t happen as much these days

Or do they happen about as often as they always have?

“I want to make art again & not just talk about,”
I told Luke, having (almost really) made up my mind
to start again in Philly

Last night
we walked, my friend & I,

On Peacock Lane, & saw the lights
she made me a delicious mug of cocoa

With real love & style, it took ten minutes,

Adding a dollop of coconut oil in last,

& dousing us with lavender,

As we smoked a last chance bowl

—cause I go sober in two days!—

& ate the amazing fudge & peppermint bark & similar

Gourmet confections created by her multitalented mother

I told her about the friends at my last house
answering her questions, “why aren’t you still living there?”

With a plagiarized description from Kate Bornstein

About how he & I briefly united like a binary star system,
Only for our polarities to shift, expelling us
with white hot force
to opposite corners of the universe

How they tried to find work for me
as a floor installer
as a Vibrant Valley worker
as a sort of escort
(“you wanna dole out that cock?”)

None of this bothered me,

Any more than it excited me

“So what should I be?”

I asked one evening over those dinners he knew how to cook

 

He meditated a moment
“You should be a monk, Tony”
he finally said.