Beyond Mountains

Offered a ride in the cab going uptown, I declined. I love that walk, I need that walk, crossing the island back to my heart in the west. All the evening's prose and predicaments bubble in me, rush around my blood stream and settle, as I pass the hipsters, the clubbers, the girls in too-short dresses and honey if you can't walk in those shoes, please don't, while preppy boys, hood boys, oogle and attempt to catch cabs that slip easily from their grasps. Manhattan air so warm, lungs working twice as hard to extract any oxygen from the vacuum, my neck perpetually swathed in little beads of sweat, lying still like winter breath on my skin.

How dead mid-town in the early evening as we arrived at Grand Central. A ghost town of black skyscrapers and garbage piles in the street. Last night, in the emptiness of having dropped off dear friends in New Jersey, I rode back on the train and saw Manhattan, saw my little toy Empire State building in the distance, and I felt like I was returning to a loved one. I didn't leave, after all. Look, see, I'm already coming back. I emerged from Penn Station and walked home down seventh avenue, smiling. Taking deep breaths of dirty asphalted exhaust and feeling revived.

And then, another night of poetry slamming on the Lower East Side. Another night of staring into brick endless high ceiling abandoned microphone stand in the spotlight. How these words dance, how the P in poet is a force at every utterance, soft thin razor limbs of the poetess are replaced by dark machine gun jaws of the converted. In my heart, I quit my lease, I pack up my things, and I move in to the sanctuary of the Nyorican.

In my heart, I am happy.