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Forever Turn the Midnight Carousel In Focus

  • Writer: Matthew Abuelo
    Matthew Abuelo
  • Dec 9, 2018
  • 3 min read

“Forever Turn the Midnight Carousel” is a requiem for all the people and places that writer Matthew Abuelo has seen slip away over the past few years. In the first half of this latest collection of short stories and poems, Mr. Abuelo, focuses on the loss of New York as a living city; a working-class town and a refuge for misfits. Looking back on his old neighbourhood, he remembers the few former neighbours still left at one of the last residential SRO buildings left on the upper west side and a Beggar’s Opera cast of characters.

For Mr Abuelo, a housing activist of many years, the causes are clear; rent laws held hostage by upstate Republicans and the city itself transformed into a tourist Mecca by Republican Mayors Rudolf Guiliani and Michael Bloomberg while residents and small business owners struggle with massive rent hikes demanded by predatory landlords. A once great city, now full of shuttered, empty storefronts and a homeless population numbering over 70,000 souls while iconic, original institutions like the Bowery music venue CBGB and Big Nick’s Burger Joint on Broadway are gone forever.

In the second half of Midnight Carousel, Mr. Abuelo focuses on the deaths of loved ones; the sudden loss of his mother to cancer and the suicide of a friend. Both losses forced Mr. Abuelo to put all other work on hold while he struggled to come to terms with these devastating developments. When he started writing again, the manuscript took a different turn, becoming a memorial of sorts; a contemplation on mental illness and desperate acts driven by depression.

Matthew Abuelo has read many of the poems in this book in venues around Manhattan over the past few years, where they have received much admiration. Many of these poems have also appeared in various publications including, “Outlaw Poetry”. Those who have heard or read his works have admired his style and the content itself. The following are some reviews of this latest work:

“Matthew Abuelo’s Forever Turn the Midnight Carousel is a head-spinning depiction of harshest reality in New York City. Reading his sequence of poetry and stories is like “visiting the world of the forgotten.” In subway tunnels, psychiatric wards, and single occupancy rooms are individuals depicted in such brutal honesty by Abuelo that the reader cannot turn away or forget. Those of us fortunate enough to live “ordinary lives with ordinary fears” won’t easily file away this writer’s images–a “shut-in” dreading an eviction notice, a depressed tenant conceding “the instinct to survive but with no will to live,” a suicidal pedestrian for whom no cab stops. Forever Turn the Midnight Carousel is poetic recognition of lives cordoned off from meaning by urban excess and corruption. Through his searing poems and unflinching narratives, Mathew Abuelo speaks for those who know “the voice can become a severed limb.” His stark reminder of desperation just up the block or down the hallway is a jolting call for compassion.” —Judith Austin Mills, author of Accidental Joy: a streak of poetry, and the Texas Revolution trilogy How Far Tomorrow, Those Bones at Goliad and The Dove Shall Fly

“I have the privileged of reading yet another amazing work by Matthew Abuelo! Midnight Carousel will take you on a colorful, yet deep, deep as a midnight sky, ride. The ever turning spiral of emotions are filled in every line, stanza and verse as you are brought high and then downward again. The love of a city that is wrapped up in the arms of an old lover, that is slowly deteriorating around some while flourishing around newfound mistresses of whose sole purpose is to dine on the fatted-calf. Matthew paints a glorious picture with words as he shows the side of the “city that never sleeps” that very few and only those true professionals who keep the midnight oil burning long after midnight ever see. I highly recommend reading Midnight Carousel and following this profound writer. I look forward to interviewing him again very soon.” —Mary E. Rapier, aka Art Sees Diner

Matthew Abuelo is a writer, professional blogger and award-winning poet. He has four books out, Last American Roar and Organic Hotels, His third book "The News Factory" and “Forever Turn the Midnight Carousel” have just been released by Plain view Press, the first two can be found at lulu.com. He is a former journalist for the online news site Examiner and he most recently worked for the Times Square Chronicles as a housing rights journalist and political commentator. Matthew Abuelo has performed around Manhattan including at the forum The Poetry Project's marathon, which also featured, Pattie Smith, Suzanne Vega, Lenny K, Steve Earle and many other icons. You can check out his other books and works at his website,


 
 
 

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© 2023 by Saman

Guilt

 

Why do we race for the scrap heaps of all forgotten things?

Is it to watch the plumes of smoke

Bellowing from a future

Which is not a future but wasted hours waiting

For men and women to finally stand

But who never stood for anything at all?

Do you understand?

And what are the solutions

When the young become as brutal as New York City landlords

Turning our buildings into shooting galleries

For out of towners who walk pretty

In their cock sure skin

With its perfect glow

And whose gravity broadens the shoulders of

Those who live with bent backs

From the labor of becoming exhibits

For those who will never stay

but will always be

Just visiting.

As one mayor put it

“New York is open for business”.

The brutality Mr. Algren is that only the truly wealthy

Can own a judge

And getting off on a misdemeanor is afforded only to

Those who can pay the price of admission of staying out of the tombs.

 

 

2

 

Are we (the new Indians)

To be buried under the ruins

That were our rooms

Or the bathroom that sat at the end of the hall?

 

Oh New York

With your buildings as clean as ancient Rome

Would you have the waters of the Hudson River

Wash us away into the oceans

And our breath bleached from your air?

And what are air rights other than

A rich man’s attempt to claim the horizon as his own?

Are we to wash up on the shores of Plumb Island

With all the news papers

Used syringes and Coney Island white fish?

Even the taxi driver who passes through the nights

On streets that are nowhere avenues to him

Will never call the great pinball machine of Time Square home.

His place is across the George Washington Bridge where he disappears

Into the view across the Hudson.

Someone saw to that along time ago

In some backroom deal.

 

You can’t love a city

Unless you love its ghosts

Who will always haunt the SRO of the heart.

They are all there here:

The subway suicide diver

Whose last act of desperation delayed the 1 train for 6 hours.

The squeegee man

who will forever clean passing windshields at new intersections with old and soiled water

The shut in

who lost her mind only to be locked up in Saint Lukes

The street artist who found his lot among other street artists in Washington Square Park

Before freezing to death in the jaws winter.

Or all of the iron workers whose words will never make it into the history

As dirty faced testimonies of those buried under the concrete

Of a story white washed.

Richard who wound up on the streets after being evicted from the apartment he was born in

 for being a hoarder

Only to be let back in a few months later

Then dying in the hospital two weeks later.

There is the cop who was shot in the head up in the Bronx

And the punk still looking for a place to play

Now that CBGB is gone

 

A question to the city from a letter

Are you really a dying arcade?

 

ta Jonse. Proudly created with Wix.com

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