New Year's Eve
December 31, 1975

Richie playing the maracas
is the universe becoming fluid
and the Nuyorican Café
floor becoming platform
for the shape of art
to mimic so that the artifact
becomes direct message
         no symbols of
         but the very thing itself
the knife in the belly
and the blues singing soft
shoes of pain as my gut
kicks my nerves insisting
on its pain vomiting more pain
about gifts that on a Christmas
day reached a dead child
too late to be played with
but it wasn't the deliverer's fault
it was his uncle who kept forgetting
that Christmas falls with love
not on a calendar but on the tenderest
feelings where the self of all others wants
love and sharp edges that awake
the internal mind into a self-created speech
that reaches over into your listener's system
and reschedules his entire psychic set,
I once had a friend who in one afternoon
traced all of my spinal short-circuits
and rearranged my electrical flow
into more fluid work than the switch-on,
switch-off, I'm overloaded crisis
that results in nausea, asphyxiation and the
swallowing of my tongue
          hay algo
          hay un epileptic fit
trying to reduce me into a trembling
mass of jellied nerves, formless,
shuddering, there, on the subway floor
while hundreds of passengers masochistically
look on both enjoying my crisis and feeling sorry
for me, the poor wretch, lying on the dirty
concrete subway floor imploring my muscles
and nerves to keep cool and cut the short-
circuit tongue down my throat menace
out and institute a no-nonsense
coherent I'm a mechanical and predictable
human being behavior modification program
to counter my muscular violence against myself
which keeps calling attention to itself while the
transit cop is almost breaking both my legs
by throwing his full weight on me as he
tries to hold my legs still and my mouth open
grabbing at my tongue, yanking it out,
shaking my shoulders, slapping my face,
working to neutralize the short-circuit
in my spine till Dr. Psychiatrist starts
to define my mind and its connections
into a State Asylum where I can get more
medication than I do out on the streets
or have the medication forced on me by a
well-meaning nurse who relates herself to me
through an every four hour give him his
dosage routine
          hay algo
          it’s 11:59 p.m. 1975
and I got one more minute of talk
before 1976 finds me shooting up and down
behind the Nuyorican Café bar trying to
decide if nuclear war will ravage
New York before I find out just how
to divide the line so that it repairs
short-circuits that block the world
from coming together! it is 12 a.m.
the new year’s been bombed and over the T.V.
the hottest news release tells us that at La Guardia
Airport an explosion was so strong that tiny,
invisible slivers of glass have penetrated the skin
of many but the slivers are so fine that
it cannot be detected where they’ve entered
the body
and here it is 1976 enters in like a
glass sliver undetected yet causing pain.
 

Copyright Credit: Miguel Algarin, "New Year’s Eve December 31, 1975" from Survival Supervivencia.  Copyright © 2009 by Miguel Algarin.  Reprinted by permission of Arte Público Press.