Run

By the time I reach the river, the sky is already painted in peaches and golds. A slow barge pulls fireworks up the river, police boats around it with their blinking lights. My steps are strong, willing, twilight twinkles over DUMBO and not an hour ago it was all covered in hail. On my way back, the kids are setting off their own pyrotechnics between the brick giants of the projects. I can't help but smile. The lightning bugs are back, morse coding their love lives into the night: it is summer. The evening is cool after the rain, everything smells like American youth, the humidity makes the foliage greener. Everything is a dream if you let it. On the way home, the tiny shoebox restaurants of the East Village move into parking spaces, plant flowers where before there was only concrete, New York City undulates with the ebb and flow of ingenuity, of life. We sat on the roof this morning and looked out over the skyline, everybody leaves but I have never felt more tapped in to the strange pulsating veins of this alien planet, have never felt more at home.

Sometimes I think I dreamed you into existence.
Sometimes I think my life's work
is believing my life here is real.