Absurdity of Understanding a City (Lafayette Square, Buffalo, NY)

Seeking the heart of a city

may be a false quest:

is not each human heart,

each structure

in the built environment,

each shape and flow

of the natural world

suffused with

the peace and chaos of urban life

irreducible constituents of

the heart of a city,

pulsating in balance

the life and death of everything,

unable to be localized

to any one place?

How foolish the human spirit is

to seek something

which cannot be found.

How foolish I was to find myself

at the Civil War monument

beneath the gaze of the Union

and her soldiers and sailors,

seeking understanding

in the interlocutions,

the laughter,

the sparrows,

the comings and goings,

the flags and music

moving on the wind

to the play of children.

Connor Orrico

The World with an Address (West Side Bazaar, Buffalo, NY)

Traveling to the City of Buffalo on the New York State Thruway

from the east there is a green rectangular sign with white letters:

Buffalo, underneath which reads An All America City.

I have seen and have been puzzled by this sign since a child,

not knowing the National Civic League that awards the title,

not knowing America, much less how all its composite elements

could be embodied by one place, earning the adjective all.

Decades later I still do not know, but some days I gain insight,

fitting one more piece into a puzzle of unknown (in)finitude.

One piece – perhaps a corner piece, so significant in strength – is

the West Side Bazaar, microcosm of Buffalo’s immigrant and refugee milieu.

Since its March 3, 2011 opening in the Upper West Side neighborhood,

this retail and food shop collective have welcomed all,

immigrant, refugee, and native Buffalonians, into cordial, spirited space.

Here the world is experienced – as much as can fit at 25 Grant Street --

and after meandering the mosaic of Burmese, Puerto Rican, Ethiopian,

Pakistani, and Chinese conversation and cuisine, I like to sit down

to enjoy an American city with Thai beef salad and the company of my mother.

Connor Orrico

Enduring the Entropy

Indifferent to my plans,
entropy seeks my
disintegration.

Life is heavy,

less as cliché
than as conscious

moments of hidden

eternities.

.
Close your eyes;
heed your chest
rising,

beating.

Keep trying,

tired one,

to keep trying,

living,

enduring.

Connor Orrico

Hebetude

There exists a heaviness,
a headache from existing
whose harsh monotony
holds me in a morass.

Here Without Hearing

We
are actual
and always,
we
call
courageously
with
belief here,

but

our
answers are
absent among
our
complex
calculations
of
being human.

Connor Orrico