Who is Pinero with NYC Hard Times Blues

Miguel Piñero’s poems stood out to me this week, particularly when considering first WHO is writing and then the work itself (except I kind of did it backwards). The piece that pulled me in most was “New York City Hard Times Blues.” When I first decided to write about it, I didn’t have a plan, just read it back through a couple of times to try to make sense of why it stuck with me, why it played out like a song, why I felt more present in New York and then L.A. and then New York than I have in reading many other poems (even though these are not always views of the cities I know from experience).

I pulled out lines that were

visceral: “the sun was vomiting itself up…”; “melt the icicles/from the tears in my eyes”; “…each cold day becomes like a brick wall/and you’re the bouncing ball”; “spreading spiritual bad breath”;

lyrical: “…stumble bum blues band”; “L.A./laid back/L.A./kick back/L.A.”; “as westwood camaro rides very slow very low”; “refugee from a leprosy colony hotel”

stark/political: “…my ashtray became/the cemetery of all my lost memories”; “I should know it’s very rare when/a prayer/gets the boiler fixed”; “12% alcoholic aluminum/recycled viet nam horror stories”; “welfare afro hairdos sprout out/of frye boots”

And there are more and more. Why did I feel I could read this poem over and over, always finding a different rhythm to its lines, new connections between its flashing scenes, another gut reaction to the “hard time/sad time/bad time” Sunday morning blues? It’s a blues song, so it is filled with sorrowful moments, the underbelly of the cold New York street scene and the hidden tragedy of the frenetic L.A. flashbacks—and yet it is so seductive, as the blues often ends up being.

The Om sequence against the bilingual prayers to J.C. show the speaker’s desperation but constant effort, through fitful energy, to get through the moment, dipping into one ideology and then the next. The short lines of the Oms, the hard/sad/bad times, the flashback to L.A. and the four punctuating yeahs give this poem breath. The tension, the visuals, the memories build and build until we need a breath, a scene change, or a break down. The “yeahs” rock the narrative back into introspection, back into focus on place, on the crucial NOW.

The ending lines made me really want to know who this poet was, as he inserts himself into the poem. We learn this is about him, or some version of him or experience he knows personally: “I wish I could cop a bottle of muscatel/stroll through the bowery with a pocket/full of wino dreams/but Sunday morning in New York City/for the junkie there ain’t no pity/we just walk the streets with loaded dice/and hear people say there goes miky/miky piñero/they call him the junkie christ…” The final image is so beautiful, tragic and hopeful—to trade loaded dice for wino dreams. New Yorkers know this man, the “junkie christ”—the image portrays him as a kind of phrophet.

The first thing I noticed when looking for information on Miguel Piñero was that he died tragically young, at age 41 (1947–1988). He wrote a dozen and a half plays, wrote for television, acted, wrote poems, co-founded the Nuyorican; his first play “Short Eyes” was nominated for several Tonys and won and Obie & other recognitions. His New York Times obit reported that he died of cirrhosis of the liver; other sites reported that he had a lifelong herione addiction. Hard to know what facts are facts when you are looking into a someone’s life twenty years after his death. But all the sources agreed that the man was a standout voice in poetry and drama. He also knew what it was to be a child in prison, a child hustler, a child gang member. Writing his breakout, award-winning play while he was in Sing Sing prison, he knew what it was to live & work in the glow of the literary community, but he also knew what it was to be “in New York City/crying the junkie blues.” When considering Piñero, I don’t want to slip into a stereotypical view of his life—the street kid/dealer turned poet/playwright who never could escape the shackles of his junkie past and died young because of it.

There is so much power in his story—he left a physical legacy of work as well as a venue for others. But there is also a tragedy here. And it resounds from the poem “New York City Hard Time Blues.” He writes with seductive, impeccable lyricism and rhythm, offering an insider view of two seemingly opposed worlds sharing similar sorrows (NYC & LA). This is clearly someone who has studied and honed a craft. But the main character is alone on the freezing, early morning streets, looking from caffeine to meditation to Jesus Christ for a fix. I wonder when this was written, and if that matters. How can someone so talented, who has achieved such critical appeal, still find himself in the bowels of a cruel, forced-sober morning? It’s a foolish question. It’s so easy to live in two worlds, or carry one with you into another. Is Piñero’s poem a story of his past or a story of his present? And what is he hoping to teach us by singing it? Piñero calls himself the junkie christ but his colleagues, the editors, call him the Philosopher of the Criminal Mind.