CITY

David walking to the docks. David walking on the concrete, hot and easy, with his jeans caught fast to firm bone, sharp and headlong, hip slash under hem of cheerful kid shirt, David holding up a hand to the familiar whores massed weird in alcove doorways on the broad romantic channels of the yellow light that filters vague down Seventh. The porno theatres and the men in heavy jackets on the street. David has his sneakers tied and he has his glasses on, the heat creeps out of ducts mandated by the city, sealed with heavy grates to filter out the cigarettes, wad cotton that’d stop the treads of rubber soles and tires if the city didn’t have its own vaults open, how the corner stores are open, how you buy your liquor quick, just walk in off the street and have it. Anything you want. A pack of cigarettes hands you your pocket change back on the dollar and David has a dollar in a pocket, David has pockets, and a jacket, David’s hair is thick and coarse and pinned back by the plastic arms of thick black plastic glasses, David’s hair is black. David lights a cigarette. He’s walking on the water through the ragged men caught helpless by the lure of melted fire in the gas drums where the trash burns, and there’s always trash to burn, the time for trash has come, the price of trash is high, supply, demand, the ragged men invest and no one ever freezes on the street. The day is thick with ruined heat. The splinter dock will draw the bodies how a shutter takes an image down in shorthand, how a vein accommodates a needle, easy, how a man can take a lover in the dark out on the rotted boards where thin kids go for contact. Somewhere in the faded neighbourhoods tonight the ballroom twitches hard with babies draped in satin, somewhere a man is eating a hamburger and somewhere the jaw hollows and the hands turn over, stripped to kindle, seamed to paper, fine bone china, razed to ash. The flowers throw up their pollen and the fingernails grow. The city is a constant crisis, David walking, long and easy, on the cut-up hurting channels where the dark blood meets the water, how the rubber torn, scored on the panels flat of city concrete never catch hard on the strip cracks where the weeds corrupt the street.

A short piece inspired by the life and work of artist, writer and AIDS activist, David Wojnarowicz.  The images featured here are the intellectual property of David Wojnarowicz and all rights are attributed to him.