horrible stinky place

Off-white street milk
pools next to steaming trash

and collabs with fruity pebble
urine smell. Certainly, somewhere,

there are feces. The mess
people make of themselves,

the ooze we leave
in all this wanting.

I won’t tell the other poets
our secret, dear city,

that there is no greater
meaning to your splendid filth,

that your constellation of garbage
is neither metaphor nor badge.

We are obsessive, gross animals.
Oh metal sister,

oh steeled flaw,
you are our gilded proof.

And now, look!

There is one friend
on either arm, former

roommates and current confidants
hold plastic cases of dunkable cookies.

The pizza slice drips
peppered gold past my

sun brushed mouth. I’m here
in you, a city so nice

they named it twice
and claimed it “empire.”

The only city with a
capital “T” in its “The”

because you are,
cliche as it may be to say,

Thee City. Horrible, stinky,
shit stain you are.

I sacrifice to you
my heart and all

my sneakers. May I always
feed at your table

and sleep by your
sleepless clock. You

remind me who I am
with your glass buildings

lost in a violet sky. Two
boys, perhaps not for long,

sit at the bar. They
share mozzarella sticks,

they talk about fear.
They call a cab and ride that

yellow chariot into a chorus of
a thousand, lonely nights.

pigeons

A storefront across the
street is closing down,
some inconsequential
British retailer.
They left a lot of trash on
the cobblestone:
a shipping box,
an empty Softsoap®
refill carton, neon
slips of paper, etcetera.

The sun starts setting on the trash, and I wonder:
if you sliced New York open like a pomegranate,
would you see all the clustered discards,
bags, bottles, and broken
parts of people? Their bones
ground up and spread into fragments,
their dreams rusted like gears,
their hair like malnourished violin strings.

Here lies the species where they stood:
their shambling arms and silly wishes
and footprints on the moon.
They woke to reach and slept to wake again.
They marked their days with wanting,
and oh, poor things,
look where it got them.