Magnetic Poles
Inside the MRI, in which I sat listening to Tchaikowsky, after careful consideration of the radio magnet technician's options which ranged from Back to Mozart and, of course, Tchaikowsky I think, could be the right tone to fly away into a plastic capsule of jackhammer noises and radioactive beeps and, so, yes, Tchaikowsky will be played through these headphones that we'll place right here just after you put your head on the pillos, a little higher please, and now your feet, toes together, we're just gonna tape your feet and don't cross your hands, are you ok? good now this will be about 35-45 minutes of da-da-da-da, pe-oh-uh-wop dat-dat-iya!iya!iya! I wished the Tchaikowsky was a little bit louder but that's ok because sometimes I really feel like I'm in 2001: A Space Odyssey or an LSD hallucination and the music only comes from a memory I once had, wondering who is Tchaikowsky, maybe once in Wroclaw, as I sat alone and had to imagine my life as always working alone in foreign cities and thus I must know something more about the classics because there's a reason they are classics not just because they are classical, but they are still with us, with me here, an American in Wroclaw, like that red haired guy with a beard from Los Angeles who I met one day wearing a Celtics jacket because he's really from Boston but now is from LA, which must be a hard transition although nothing like Los Angeles to Wroclaw, where, as I sat in the MRI's cries of the robotic whale, I thought, that guy, Seth is now alone in Wroclaw, living there for maybe three months now, just enough time to feel like the city you're in has seeped into your pores causing either an illness or a cleanse depending on who you are and where you are and if those two trajectories meet in a positive or a negative, below zero, you could say, cold, the winter is approaching and one's first winter in Wroclaw, which, unlike a winter in New York, have you been through one before because it's long and wet, but Wroclaw, is beautiful and also it's most beautiful quality is it's most deserting, that feeling that each night or day after 4 o'clock when the sun has had enough you find the market square once packed with summer tables and tourists now naked in its tucked in overhangs and outdoor tables stored away from ice coated cobblestone grinning with shiny teeth and wiped away tears blow dry from cyclones of glass winds doing somersaults or drunken stumbling all over the the open playground, abandoned by people like Seth who can't fully imagine why he's in Poland right now but has no time to get to the answer because the only safety he can find to hide within are the uncertain mysteries of subterraneanly submerged stairs leaving you off at mouths open, coaxing the winter burned faces through thresholds into hearths of cheap 5zl, well now 6 or 7, with the new taxes and tourists each summer drinking herbal vodka shots in the winter makes sense in the true profund use of empty words gathering as well around large beers, another vodka please, ok one more, now a beer to sit and talk over but let's take one more beer, no, no, no, more vodka, two more, ok, when I'm feeling it let's go out for a smoke, yea we can smoke here but the downstairs is getting to me, let's just stand behind the alley dumpster and look at the painting on the wall there, that's why Wroclaw is amazing, you know, just amazing city-accepted public art that can't get the same appeal as the ilegal graffiti in the states but still, that feeling fades fast when you realize there's maybe the possibility of a city where you don't have to rebel against anything, you know, and street art on walls is just a good thing, like have you seen those Blus in the park, I heard Seth ask a young girl once (he still needs more time to really get what he's saying to these people, you know, people who aren't native English speakers, who aren't from the US) there are a lot of cultural differences and we have to learn them and some things you can't learn through thinking but over time the learning seeps into you and you learned but you don't know when or how but you did and maybe that's what all the hours you spent alone in a city with a maze of infinite dark bars with cheap alcohol and cold streets and intelligent thinkers who fought for survival and now want nothing more but to be and don't think about more more more but only what else is in me and not out there because isn't it so great that I am here and you are so we must enjoy this cheap food and drink and read books at galleries with painters who need dancers who like theorists in their institute, while we all stare at obtusely gray skies that might block our gaze from seeing the future but also is a fine blanket to keep you here with me now and not off in space in your mind in a plastic tube hearing sounds of beep-beep-beep-dim-dim-gack-gack clack-a-clack ding, how are you was everything ok we're all done now.