East Village Tweets

Clint McMahon

Would-be messages from the East Village, in 140 characters or less.

Think? He can’t even hear! So he’ll just stand & stare at
the barista there: Sleek update of the girl in Manet’s Un
Bar aux Folies Bergère

If T.S.E. were 23, would he be a downtown dandy,
mouth full of Jay-Z? LinkedIn loner on Facebook?
Poetry Society grandee? Let us go then,

& take a look. (Everything you wrote that was prophetic
& new, Major Tom, has long come true. So what would
you do now, for Act Two?)

You can either embrace it or invent increasingly
complicated ways to replace it. Either way, it’ll catch
you in the end. Worse, before then

One mirror cruel, the other kind, I stick to the latter
when I unwind. If truth is called for, I take a look: The
first reads me like a book

Mr. and Mrs. Martin Amis have purchased a $2.5 million
home in Cobble Hill. They will dine with Mr. and Mrs.
Jonathan Safran Foer,

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Auster, Mr. and Mrs. Colin Harrison,
but not with us. How can we rectify the situation? Where
did we go wrong?

Moved to “evacuate all my hoe’s” from Japan, 50 Cent put
them up in grand NY apartments, and what’s more, paid
the rent. “He very nice man!”

Hours online left his brain feeling like a cover that had
lost its book. So he went to the park to watch dogs play
in the fading light

There’s a toilet in this building which flushes every 60
seconds. A far-off roar, like living near a beach with one
computerized wave.

It’s such little things that bind my nerves in strings.
Parcels of anxiety, luggage of biography, hanging on in
a rent-stabilized cave…

From far uptown, from across both mythical rivers, they
descend on our streets again: Strange suburban misfits,
drunk unruly secretaries,

shuffling through the thin cold rain