The cement remains cement.
The bricks are bricks.
Lorimer street is Lorimer street.
I have walked these avenues
for three years and it’s contours
are still vague.
I could stay another three years and know
little about this shining landscape
of light and machine.
I frequent her clubs with queers,
I have kissed strangers on her rooftops,
and slept inside her penthouse chambers,
yet New York is no home.
I cannot exhaust the wonders of her womb
and I cannot undo the brutalities of her fist.
New York is a reminder of all the possibilities
I cannot live out.
New York is the hustle of opportunists
and the dreams of suffering idealists.
She is everyone I love,
and everyone I love to hate.
She is the fat banker and the hungry immigrant.
She is the young model and the mother on welfare.
New York is the stomping ground of excess and greed.
New York is raw and unapologetic in her filth.
She spits on my face before she fucks me
and leaves me.
New York City, the Amazon of people,
still plays by the laws of nature
and survival of the fittest.
The madness of Fifth Avenue is the infection of want.
Three Starbucks are on one block by demand.
Every advertisement is a dictation on what
to wear, drive, fuck, or eat.
The sky is mostly gray
a grim hue of material obesity and spiritual poverty.
The only hope is art.
New York is the pinnacle of human brilliance
and the benefactor of creative impulse.
But the dancer is waiting tables
and the painter is plumbing toilets.
The MET is a holy sacrament to the fine arts
and the crown of the Chrysler building
shines like an iridescent jewel.
Tourists revel in the beauty
New Yorkers are too busy to remember.
The skyscrapers climb upward to God,
and the humans travel underground
like ants on their rite of passage to the queen.
In this city of homeless and billionaire,
of politician and prostitute,
of doctor and cripple,
Who is the dearly beloved?
Who is worshiped?
Who is consecrated?
An abstraction people are willing to die for.
An ideology woken up for.
A flattened truth and a pregnant fallacy.
In everyone’s searching eyes,
they look for the same thing,
hunt with a singular focus.
The birds have instinct and
New Yorkers have inertia.
Everything here says the same thing
“follow the money.”
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