If I were going to write a poem about you, New York,
I’d write about your goddamn $10 credit card minimums,
about the 5 o’clock in the afternoon light on your buildings,
And the way it’s impossible to get run over while crossing 115th Street on Broadway.
The way Brooklyn spleens to me, and the Bronx gutters me, and how midtown Manahatta with all its noble courage, disgraces me. Crooning Queens eviscerates me, (imagine me, Seth says, imagine Queens and all the rolling hills).
Hip to me, LES, swing low SOHO, gibber at me Chelsea morning!
I’ve stood naked in you with the snow under the Washington Square Arch at midnight like a witch or a lunatic and with bare feet.
New York, if I were going to write a poem about you I’d color it with my histories, and with Seth’s and with Theodore’s and with Christopher’s and with Dalton’s and with Anthony’s and with Lucas’s because they’re all part of me, now, that which is also part of you.
Allow me to explain:
That when I was a little girl I’d pack six Oreos into a handkerchief and wait at the end of my driveway, New York,
for you to pick me up.
If I wanted to write a poem about you, New York,
I would write about vomiting into the top hat on the L train.
I would write about the L train. I would write about the boy I loved drinking vodka out of a plastic handle on the L train. I would write about drinking whiskey from flasks waiting at various stops on the L train. I would write about the boy I loved, his breath, smelling sterile of gin, whispering kisses at me on the 1, 2, 3 trains. How drunk, we’d sit on the pissed-upon floor of the F train; how I can barely remember the first time we made love except for the beigey flush of lights, the fluttering of wings—we were drinking so much Nikolai back then, and boxed wine.
If I were going to write a poem about you, New York,
I’d remember how you carved help into my thigh with a broken safety razor, I’d remember waking up with potato chips stuck to my legs, to my face; I’d remember
hiding candy wrappers inside my pillowcase, shaving all my various hairs off with a safety razor, not being able to taste anything because you’d numbed my tongue with salt; and then getting onto the 1,2,3 redline with clean legs and red lipstick and black stockings, going underground to go get drunk with all the names I called you: James, Patrick, Marion, Marion, Sylvia, Rachel, Kengo, Seth, Adam, Theodore, Shayla, Steven, Aaron, Spencer, Galen, Laura, Daryl, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex.
I’d write to you, New York, things you already know about yourself;
like about those teetotalers you harbor, and those vegan freaks. Those pretty anarchists, all those young goddamn lawyers going to Fordham getting law degrees in whoknowswhat and forwhy? We don’t know. About all us amoral hipsters Howling secrets into each others’ mouths as the sun cums up; I’d write about growing familiar with dawn, how once when I couldn’t sleep for cocaine I walked a hundred blocks of you above the 1,2,3 certain I was going to die, ducking into fast-food joints at the sight of every terrifying phallus, everything a giant knife, you with meat stuck between your teeth, ex-lovers, and objects dripping with AIDS, dead children, the undead, split by the tracks of the 1,2,3 underneath me-- I was at 72nd when the sun rose above your horizon-- goddammit! the bagel men were out with their huge, clammy hands, salting bagels, brewing coffee, Sleep was out with the bagel men, salting bagels, busy, but not with me.
If I were to write a poem about you, New York,
It would be a love scene set in clean white sheets with a tendency to float up like clouds as if in a Godard movie.
You would be you and I would be me and I would traverse your body in all directions of the compass, and I would sleep with you, soundly, New York, and you would entomb me in your cold streets, swaddle me in your sake, drink me your Hudson, your sweating Atlantic, eat me your fields of immigrant dollars, your heroin-laced hamburgers; oh Glorious Percoset, $5 a pill at Columbia University, sink me down into your dreams of me in sheets voluminous as Godard’s, oh Mighty Robotussin! My heels raw from loving you, New York; my dumbed, unfeeling tongue; New York, Walt Whitman’s eyeing you with a peculiar grin, New York, all your angels are inside me, trying to get out.
