The Newtown Pentacle

“they’re building another one?” – photo by Mitch Waxman

This is the final installment detailing my experiences in western Queens, on that day when I finally located the grave of Calvary Cemetery’s first interment (Esther Ennis, 1848), stepped in a dead rabbit, picked up a paranormal companion on my long walk, found myself in a state of “stupendous ruin“, soon realized that my perceptions had grown “bafflingly homogeneous“, and that my senses had become occluded due to “sleep filmed eyes“.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

As mentioned in yesterday’s posting, tardy delivery of content to this- your Newtown Pentacle- has been caused by a cavalcade of obligations. Both personal and professional, these obligations have placed me in a room next to personages who enjoy the highest reputation and standing, lettered academics and eidelons of “the professions” both have taken me to a private corner of the room and confessed to having had similar experiences to those which I’ve been describing in this series of postings- which is VERY interesting.

This day, I was in Tower Town, down by the East River in Long Island City… or Queens West as its proponents call it.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Former days of grandeur, industrial might, and utility seem to be over for this part of Queens. Perhaps it is overworked and deserves a pastoral retirement as a park and residential center. Such meta-lopolitan planning is beyond the understanding of one like myself, who is cursed to wander through this infestation of the human hive but forbidden to do anything but observe. When my nervous scuttling and vast perambulations are performed, dark glasses are worn and the earbuds of my iphone are firmly in place- serving to isolate and insulate.

Of late, I like to wear my hood up, but loss of periphery can be a fatal mistake in these places I go.

Perhaps this is why I was casting two shadows.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

My companion was familiar to me somehow, an atavist and insistent presence. Definitely male, the image of a double headed ax was impossible to banish from my thoughts as I neared the bridge…

– photo by Mitch Waxman

…THE QUEENSBORO BRIDGE!!! Queensboro is its name, not 59th street nor anything else that Manhattan elites might attach to it.

CALL HUNTERS POINT SOUTH OR WILLETS POINT “KOCH CITY” instead…

– photo by Mitch Waxman

…sorry that sort of thing just blurts out of me these days…

At right about this spot that I suddenly perceived that my spectral companion was no longer present, and when I noticed my nervous shadow had returned to its altogether wholesome and expected aspect. Whatever it was… perhaps it was just the moment when “one of my states” had passed…

– photo by Mitch Waxman

It was here in the shadows of that great machine called Queensboro that the splendid isolations which your humble narrator so enjoys returned, and roamed once more alone amongst the multitudes. The disturbing vision of that double headed ax though, seemed to stay with me and caused ponderings to begin.

What connection could there be between Long Island City, a largely Irish cemetery, and a battle-ax?