Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.
Jose Padua: The Shape I’m In
I have never had what anyone in his
or her right mind would call a bitchin’ bod.
I have never been what anyone who wasn’t incredibly drunk
would refer to as a hunk or grand specimen of American manhood,
because like the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow
my status as simply specimen is rarely debated in the country
of my birth. Though I have consumed many a six pack over the years,
I have never had six pack abs, and of course the reason for that
may have something to do with all the six packs I drank
and is, I think, the subject of several other poems—no,
not this one. The only time I ever had sexy buns was for eight hours
one Saturday night when I lived in New York and had purchased
pork buns from Chinatown, but somehow wasn’t hungry
by the time I got them home. I was asleep for most of those hours,
and it was the middle of a Lower East Side winter and the heat
in my apartment that night was up so high, after being completely out
for a week, that I couldn’t help but feel sexy, knowing I had pork buns
in my tiny fridge. But like a tree falling in the forest when there’s
no one there to hear it, there was no one for me to talk to,
no one to see my chest, expanding and contracting, breathing in warm
Manhattan air, then breathing it out—no landlord, who went home after getting
the heat fixed, gathering his rent checks like drug money;
no drunks drinking next to me; no addicts shooting up in the hallway;
no partyers partying anywhere near me, not even at Save the Robots,
the afterhours joint down the street from me; indeed,
with everyone in the universe but my landlord seemingly
unaware of my warmth, can that really be called sexy?
I had a dream that night, which I’ve long since forgotten,
and a job, from which I was laid off the following spring;
yet I was alive, in love with the world, and making
incredible sound.
Jose Padua is the author of A Short History of Monsters published by the University of Arkansas.
Copyright 2024 Jose Padua
Photograph “Van, China Town” by Jose Padua
Discover more from Vox Populi
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
A great poem that has inspired my next essay, which will include Morningside Heights, Harlem, the Bronx and Egidio’s on Arthur Avenue, Alphabet City, the time I got thrown out of The Met during the Marriage of Figaro and the bouncer who snuck me back in, drunken nights in Alphabet City, Yankee Stadium, the incident involving Malcolm Gladwell crossing a dark street to avoid me during a lit crawl, and an appearance on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on my very last night in the city, for starters. Stay tuned. Oh, and I love the allusion to The Holy Grail.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Go for it, Matt!
>
LikeLike
A wonderfully evocative poem that has inspired my next essay, which will include Morningside Heights, Harlem, the Bronx and Egidio’s on Arthur Avenue, Alphabet City, the time I got thrown out of The Met during the Marriage of Figaro and the bouncer who snuck me back in, drunken nights in Alphabet City, Yankee Stadium, the incident involving Malcolm Gladwell crossing a dark street to avoid me during a lit crawl, and an appearance on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell (who I gifted with cannolis from Egidios) on my very last night in the city, for starters. Stay tuned. Oh, and I love the allusion to The Holy Grail.
LikeLiked by 2 people
let me be the first to tell you that you are a grand specimen of American manhood (unless someone else beat me to it, above)
LikeLiked by 2 people
ha, you are the first!
LikeLiked by 1 person
ha, you are the first!
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s all been said. I am still smiling.
LikeLiked by 2 people
THANKS, ROSEMARY!!!
>
LikeLiked by 1 person
Smiling. Love this one. Kinda envy folks who feel a kinship with New York. Have only been there a few times. Remember wonderful Japanese food and a taxi driver telling me the neighborhood around my hostel was unsafe.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I love Jose Padua’s poems for their noisiness, with all the senses alertly engaged, and the push of his language grabbing everything around! All of his poems say “listen, listen!” I love Padua’s heart, and his messy passions. Thanks, Señor Padua — here’s to you!
LikeLiked by 2 people
thank you, Laure-Anne!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Feeling great love this poem: for its sense of place(s). Maybe you could call it the Rime of the Ancient New Yorker. I’m filled with great admiration for Padua’s way with the language, the tales, and the sly humors. And I love it for how it evoked for another reader, Sean Sexton, the poetic memoir of his genius cousin who also lived a New York life. (See his comment)
I was only there once, but my wife Pam had lived a couple of blocks west of the Chelsea Hotel in lower Manhattan for a handful of years after college, seeking her “fortune” in the theater world, later becoming the Art Librarian at the 42nd street branch of NYPL, then leaving when her husband abandoned her for a sexy actor. She said that when that happened the bright lights of the city turned to an inner darkness. Funny, how that city means so many different things for us.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Padua’s sly humor. Exactly what I love about his poems.
>
LikeLiked by 4 people
I love these Joseph Padua city poems. My genius cousin Meredith, the painter—now no longer with us, lived at 8 Spring Street on the edge of the Bowery in a one-room apartment, the sounds and smells, the Bodega on the corner, and lovely Spring Street station—time warp about a “thousand” years old that graced our coming and going on the IRT, the names of the string of local stations after we transferred at 14th St coming home from the Met or the Frick or the Guggenheim in rush hour. Fulton Street at 5 AM—a whole fish market that disappeared by morning light, practically a Padua poem now is gone forever. Later, she lived 6 arduous floors above the Broome St bar perched over the entrance to the tunnel and 9-11 felled the twin towers out of her kitchen window (she saw the people screaming and running in the street below, breathed that fouled air for months…)
I love Joseph’s mortalities so tied to the heartbeats of that City and what they return so vividly to me! His life and poetry indelibly tied to that essential place—I am grateful!
LikeLiked by 4 people
Thanks, Sean: yes, I love Jose’s poems as well.
>
LikeLiked by 3 people