Whirlwind

Rush out of work on a Friday night, afternoon sun dancing across Manhattan as you scale the bridge, impatience giggling in your limbs. Find a face so familiar it runs in your blood, and instantly any time apart is washed away with the emptied champagne flutes. Spend a weekend running through the city in magic laughter, seeing it again as if through the eyes of one who has loved and left, remembering to appreciate every step, every cobblestone, every unexpected gift the city gives you when you are deserving of it. The weekend is over much too soon, and you spend the last few hours pretending returns will be imminent, because the alternative is heart-wrenching.

Monday morning arrives with rain. Fall runs rampant, the year does not wait for you to catch up.

Lace your sneakers. Run like hell into it.

Paris in the Morning

You pushed a button
a small
unassuming
button
it's usually on anyways
but had come undone and you just
hadn't
noticed
you didn't think much of pushing it
again
but it clicked
the magic back into your
vision
the wonder back
into your
words
the irreproachable hubris
back into your
song
that leads you to believe
this is the right
path
and at the end
lies that elusive
Elysian
light
that you came here for

Ghost Town

Be in New York, love the fuck out of these streets, let their madness seep through you until you are blissfully run through with magic, and spend your days pouring out whatever poetry you can. 
Still work, work hard, but work with joy in your heart. The Universe will look out for you if you let it, will align itself if you set up the pieces. 

You have but one life. 
Let it be good.

Hold On

Unassuming street corners in Chelsea draw themselves into your quickly expanding map, as it fills out and embellishes itself in giggles and superlatives. You stand back and look at your oeuvre, tracing particularly sweet twists with your fingers, smiling. Stand in thrift store changing rooms and do not recognize the person looking back at you, and yet somehow you know her well. You like her. An actress comes to look at the empty room of your apartment and you think, why not take a chance, why not live a little?

The past writhes in shadows behind you; the New always looks particularly appealing, how pristine it is, how unsoiled by your dirty hands and inability to hold on to the gold as it sifts through your fingers. But on a rainy, humid, East Village afternoon, with your hair in wild curls around your head and the patient patience of 23rd street in your ears, your hands don't look clean, but they look strong. The gold lingers, glimmers across my chipping nail polish.

I'll be coming for your love, okay?
It's no better to be safe than sorry. 

A Rise

Crawl through the ashes at dusk, as the fire still smolders in embers under the hot coals, every step burns but you know you have to take it, know you have no choice but to make it through. A wise voice comes muddled through the ether; you try to see the words for the trees, will yourself to do better than usual. Begin to run and do not stop, pound the miles underneath your feet until they do not burn, do not drag you down and then return, this run does not flee. Watch the sun set in passionate hues behind the bridges, silhouetting Liberty and turning skyscrapers of downtown into a quiet wonderland. The view set everything straight, aligned the blood in my veins with the cool bones of my determination. I wrote more pages into the night, caressed them like children I had forgotten to appreciate. Sleep, when it came, was heavy, but not dead. 

Do not fail your dreams when they need you most, the note said. I pin it to my wall. Vow it was only a stumble. 

About Face

They trick you with the highs so you do not see the lows coming, flashing sleighted hands in your eyes and then it's too late to turn when the drop-off arrives. You shouldn't have been speeding, to begin with. I tumble down the rabbit hole, my sleeves tearing on rocks and the dirt scraping its way into my bare skin, I am helpless in the fall. What did you think you were doing and the demons all laugh at their newfound freedoms. How long they were locked away and how gleeful they are to make up for time lost. The sun shines a beautiful melancholy smile while I pull strips of flesh from my arms; the pain is temporary relief, at best, a lifetime in crutches at least. There's a veil between us where there should be but clear skies; I yell through the gauze but my voice comes out mute. I know at some point I was doing the right thing, this road looks the same as the one I walked then but the trees whisper their disapproval, the path grows darker as it goes.

A stone lies in my stomach. Reminds me of burdens I only pretended weren't there. The sun sets over smiling faces.

You wonder if your reprieve is over.

Digress

Sunshine, every day sunshine, you wake with a song in your chest and don't recognize your reflection in the mirror, don't recognize the summer in October. Your playlists trip over themselves dancing and the voices that normally would occupy themselves with yelling at your feeble attempts to live lost their direction in the melee. You forget to eat, forget to sleep and go to the dentist but remember to look at the Empire State Building every night and giggle your thank yous. Some sort of magic tumbles about your insides; still, your poetry lies silent and you don't know how to negotiate the trade. I walked through sleeping streets in the middle of the night and spoke a quiet while with the city; when no one else is there to interrupt us, we have such sweet words together.

I am still here. I'm only off on a scenic detour and it's throwing me off.

But what good is writing if you haven't seen anything worth telling the world about?

She Remembers

We sat on a grassy hill in the country and spoke of life, as children climbed apple trees and leaves tumbled to their deaths around us. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by how much there is to say that the words refuse to leave my lips, but in the late afternoon sun time seemed infinite and I forgot to worry.

There's a spot, after you've turned, past the stoplight and the street rises over the hill, where the city skyline floats into view and it rests just at the edge of your vision like a beacon, like a promise. I contemplated a childhood with that backdrop and it played out like a film. She said something about leaving the city because it beat her when she returned to it, but when we emerged from the tunnel and were spewed out onto 42nd Street with the mad air of New York in tornadoes around us, all I felt was a peaceful calm that followed me all the way home.

I saw the streets beneath your feet, the parking lots and train tracks and dreams with your footprints all over them, the map paints itself in words not spoken, a strange soundtrack plays over the speakers but the melody seems familiar. Fall seeps in through the crooked windows but in the warm sunlight I took off my jacket, I think there's a metaphor in there and I didn't forget to worry after all, I only realized I didn't need to.

Hamlet

Fall rolls in over the northeast, painting the trees in seasonally appropriate hues and setting the sun in the late afternoon. We drive out of the city in sunshine, navigate rolling hills and unchartered territories like it's inevitable. Your head roils with words but your pen lies abandoned, you wonder how to have it all while your foot sinks into the gas pedal. At night, your rooms lie pitch black and silent, it's a precious bubble.

You wait impatiently for the other shoe to drop.

Wonder what it might look like when it does.

Swerve

After midnight the late shift starts. The street is quiet for a short moment, you pour a glass and find the music that will pull the generations out of you. Allow it to pass over you, swirl alongside the alcohol and scratch its nails across the flimsy scars you've built to cover wounds that would not heal. It tugs at your heartstrings and sifts through the pools of blood to discover morsels of words about what it is to be what you are. A deadline looms, and you are never better than at the precipice.

A hundred and fifty years ago people made a great journey across the ocean and were never allowed to look back. You looked back so many times you eventually straddled the globe and never could rest.  Some days I think I am not lost anymore, that the tendrils turned to roots and I belong to the world, but I am only kidding myself. On a cool summer night of twilight until dawn, on a wide highway through the western deserts, when my language skips a track and I do not hear it, when I see that holding on to the roots in this soil means burning the ones that came before, I know that I am just as lost a child as ever, perpetually wandering the planet in search of a feeling that is no longer available to me. I sleep well, these days, I sleep fine, and you can't even tell I don't belong even when you look closely.

But I've been homeless for years and I don't know how to make it right.

Inte Ens Gå

Late nights at the Lincoln Center Plaza carry a magic all their own, like they put something in the fountain water to make it glow, like they put something in your step to make it hum I took deep breaths in the foyer like the air is lighter when the ceiling is high. I fell asleep with a smile on my lips and a fire in my chest, I glance at the deep end of the pool and see no good reason to not dive in.

When the alarm rings, all it tells me is to live. I nestle in to the messy corner where the magic resides and bathe in ink, in white sheets of paper colored with my own fevered dreams, I think if life ended tomorrow all I'd wish is that I'd put more of these words into the world and so when the alarm clock rings and tells me to live, this is exactly what it means.

81 and rising

Summer returns, it refuses somehow its death dances and sheds leaves like an anomaly against the backdrop of glistening foreheads and spiking ice cream sales. You complain into conversations but secretly bathe in the blissful sunshine, buying yourself additional days above the surface. The back of your head counts down minutes to reset; you don't recognize this soft, smiling dancer inside you but it's too easy to let her twirl around in her ignorance, you allow it. Tickets amass in piles around you, some yours, some not but the adventures all tickle you the same. She asks how everything's been like she's hoping for a rain cloud. You have none to offer.

You're not even sorry, now.

Is Well

It rains. You wake early, too early, and listen to it smatter against the upstairs balcony. Without glasses, all you see out the window is shades of gray across two boroughs. He says your name in his sleep, while you close your eyes and listen to breaths in tandem, drift in and out of dreams that do not linger.

It is everything and nothing at once. I sleep until the rain passes, but that isn't the part that matters.

F#m

The storm brews and gathers, it huffs and puffs itself into existence around you, feeding off the anxious scraps you shake like dandruff into the air. It follows your every step up Broadway, across the red lights, around the block as a strange heat wave pushes ahead of you, you don't hear what people are saying to you but your feet know the way without you.

At some point, when I was young, I began to sing. It started in my chest and curved around my hips, it vibrated out to my fingertips and electrified my hair, made the room swim. Hours, days, lifetimes were spent in that current and it kept the air in my lungs. I am older now, and there isn't much time, but some days, if I'm very quiet, the chords still strike my spine, still tingle the back of my head and I am lost to a melody that owns me.

I step out of the surf cleansed. Let the storm recede with the tide.

La Chaine

3:30 AM and a full moon floods your room; you do not sleep. You stare at countless conversations about the hells that twist and turn across the land, but you are none the wiser and your dreams when they come are muddled.

October is kind and sunny. For a short moment, there are no chinks in your armor, no flaws in your narrative. The days are weightless. But you see the darkness approaching your house, feel the pull of of the maelstrom circling an all-too familiar drain, you know the way this story is headed even as it is just smog in your periphery. A dusty typewriter stands in the corner of your room. You long for dirt under your fingernails and the smell of burning ink in your nostrils, want to tear the skin from your flesh and bleed into prose, you know what home is and it isn't happy but it holds you.

You know you are only pretending that this will be easy. The insight is unwanted, but here we are. Allow yourself to caress the keyboard. Allow the relapse. But I beg you not to drown.

the Free

Tuesday morning, mild sunshine, the birds make like it's spring and you don't blame them. Sit in Tompkins Square park where sleep children and bums alike, you adore its unapologetic dirt and beg it to infiltrate your lungs. You walk up and down Alphabet streets imagining windows where you might live, views you might have, I passed a school on Second Avenue and every smell from 1994 washed over my senses I knew exactly where I was and how it felt. Your father says he has no memories from when you were little, nor from when he was. You think you've spent an entire life weaving this tapestry to make up for his isolation but when the day comes you cannot save him.

I wanted to justify my existence
but what happened was
I created it.

And if I Could be

I wake at 5 a.m., cold from the open window. It is too early, but I toy with the idea of getting up while staring into the wall. The day will be beautiful, everyone says so, already it looks inviting. Wake again two hours later to mayhem in the west and wonder if everything is falling apart in these the end of days. If you were to die soon, what would you do with your remaining time, and you see not faces, not love, only words yet unwritten. You know what that means, even as you feign humanity.

You return to your room, ignore the sublime sunshine of a city in its prime. Write every story that tells itself to you. It is not time to die yet. There is too much left to say.

What Dreams Could You Have

Sunrise over Brooklyn, the apartment lies still and sleeping even when you no longer can. Watch the light dance across the broken bricks and burgeoning high rises, it's too early but you still step up smiling. Sit in the window reading stories that already live within you, wonder if they look different in this light. Four years ago on a Brooklyn rooftop every broken piece of my heart was mended and I still remember the feeling in my chest that day, and every day since. We looked at apartments and imagined furniture arrangements, the excitement of moving buzzed in your chest, the potential of Tomorrows. That we are never finished, but it doesn't mean we are over. Nothing turns out how you planned, but everything how you dreamed. 

I came back for you, and you let me. New York, honey, no one knows my name the way you do.