Winter in New York

The streets stick to your feet.

Remnants of trash,

piss,

and matcha lattes.

It’s filthy,

like a nightclub bathroom,

but somehow it hangs in my heart

like a Duchamp.

Manhattan corridors will blow you out

like a candle

or a hooker,

and leave you wondering

if you really needed the hotel.

Then you land in Brooklyn,

where graffiti is an add-on charge

for a new apartment,

and there’s so much matcha

it covers up the trash and piss.

A kid will teach you not to say sorry

and just walk

until you arrive in Williamsburg

unsolicited.

Williamsburg,

a nest made without straws,

somehow approving of women in furs,

and somehow good on the nerves

like wool draped over snow bitten ears.

Perhaps there’s something underneath the concrete,

something real

that makes the temperature tolerable.

Something that moves the gears

that on the surface

seem to turn each New Yorker

into each other,

into the city.

Perhaps it’s the friction.

The epicenter of exiles,

where dreams and destiny’s

huddle to defrost

freezer-burnt hearts,

crowding the silence

just to forget

they’re all alone.

And just then it greets you,

the banter with a bartender

who’s prevented more suicides than divorces,

the traffic police

who whistle disco drillbeats,

the old lady in leather pants

that says you’re sweeter than a Shirley Temple,

and the doorman

with polished shoes

who always keeps the cold outside.

There’s humanity in the hive.

But I’m not convinced

everyone here is harvesting honey.

They say they don’t sleep,

but show me who’s awake.

Accepting what I walk amongst

feels like a soft smile

by a mute at mass,

standing over the Hudson,

fishing

for those who didn’t survive the city.

Where there is no soil,

people are farmed.

Where there is no soul,

there is rapid demand for currency.

Pride in a city.

But who here

knows

where they really are?

Perhaps that’s not the point.

Perhaps it hides at the end of this cigarette.

Not quite here,

but bound to burn

through my lips.