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.