Did he drown?
Did he hit the ground?
Did he take flight again
Like a goose gone south for longer
Than a winters night?
Daedalus should’ve done a practice flight

Did he laugh?
Did he throw his head back?
Did he let himself fall
And with a smile on his face
Feel peaceful fright?
Needing less discipline to fall than to take flight

Did he make it up as he went?
His finale waiting for the sun’s repent?
Did Daedalus drop his maps and designs
Did even the sea reach out from the benign
To say, the sun shines awfully bright
You should’ve done a practice flight

Lights under the train station, find your way home tonight. Sometimes sundown and sunrise doesn’t make things right.
I stop to tie my shoe, and hear a man with a gray sweatshirt, hood up, yell like the traffic and the city lights are gonna drown him out.
“You got change?” It takes me a second to realize he’s talking to me.
“You got change, sweetheart?” He asks me for coins, crumbs from the table of dollar bills. I reach for my wallet and hand him a green single. He looks at it like I rained cash on the desert.
Yeah, I got change. I got it electrocuting out of my fingertips. I got it locked up in my mind with all the would-have-been’s beckoning to be set free.
I got change under my bed with the shoes I put on in the morning, shoes I tie even on days I feel like numbing everything with sleep.
I got change in every stutter, every repetition of my too-quiet voice,
These veins are swollen with change. These brains are wishing for us to stop acting like everybody on the sidewalk with nowhere to be is just part of the concrete.
“Have a good day,” says the man, already turning away. He doesn’t say you’re welcome, but I know I am. I’m a part of these streets, no questions in city or from the ***** trucks, no comments from the puddle flooded subway stairs.
“Have a good day,” he said, but it’s night, and I find myself waiting for the train during the grace period between the 5:35 and the 6:02.
Change is in the people-watching, the night owls, the ones working long days to feed families, the ones waking long nights to feed their psyches.
Yeah, I got change, it’s right in front of me.
A kid in a black sweatshirt, hood up, kicks a penny around the train platform, a sliver of dollars that aren’t worth anything until you need them to be.
I wonder if time is his greatest asset. I think it’s resilience that brings him home.
Lights under the train station, find your way home tonight. Sometimes sundown and sunrise doesn’t make things right.
Two trains line the platform, one inbound, one outbound, a screeching symphony of commuter rail and commuter. They won’t cross again tomorrow. I hop on the jam packed purple line and wonder what we could do if more people knew they got change.
Change is in the sky. It’s gonna rain coins into all our pockets and I’ll be catching droplets.
Lights under the train station, find your way home tonight. Sometimes sundown and sunrise doesn’t make things right.
This place is rundown and the train’s packed tight
But we all got change and we’re gonna be alright.

Some lexicon you got there, kid, some funny picks you choose from the lot you were taught, some things you spit that I look for and just aren’t there

Why do you need poetry and bloviation to tell your story? What aviation, fight or flight does that give you, burrowing your meaning in storms of complexity

Does it do you no work to simplify

See a problem, rectify it

Why do you look at a shoelace and untie it

Unlace the strands of humanities patterns like the peel of an orange

The earth is one big orange

And we flatten it like a piece of paper

Superheros were given capes so that in flat spaces, they fly

Why do you try to weigh yourself down with salty slabs of thoughts you cry?

What is it about the look in that eye the cooks you so hot you break like clay in kiln your eyes see a film in everything

It’s all a deep surround sound movie

And to you, it’s so rewarding to blink in your real-time recording

Camcorder on board with the lines you drew dragging your sneakers in the dirt

It’s random like that but it’s raw and dries like glue- clear, but smells like something manmade and stuck together

And there’s noise around you, however, whatever overstimulation annoys you, you are not alone

People will notice you and say,

Who’s this?

And when all the bright lights fade, there'll still be stardust in her veins

It is running through her. She needs no blood for then she would have something to shed. A snake sheds skin, a butterfly sheds chrysalis and caterpillar alike, the things in metamorphosis it needs no longer. A dandelion seeds. But it does not shed

It waits for someone to blow, whether breath of a human or breath of the wind or just the breadth of time and gravity

She is the stars’ dandelion, a night gazer

We’re all made of stardust you know

But in our mental light pollution of darkness, we lose ourselves

She sees carousels of knowledge swirling with fear, in an iridescent delicacy that only comes with ideas that aren’t and will never be tangible.

How big is the ocean? How big the sky, the earth, the universe? How far out can we go, but also how far in?

If every night she lit a lantern, the night sky would sing for them. The trees would catch them. They would sparkle even in absence of the moon.

One day they go out, light no longer

Today is that day

She is

Stifled

And just so small

But when all the bright lights fade, there'll still be stardust in her veins

Get us on a train to Brooklyn
Neath the ***** subway stairs
Let's leave this rain and foot traffic
Times Square is for the go-getters
We are the finders keepers
We are wanderers.
In stores out stores.
But we don't buy
Streets, streets again,
Puddles
Rain washes out the concrete jungle in filthy puddles
Just another tourist obstacle
Inside a pizza place
I sit
And draw the raindrops bouncing off the concrete
One day I'll take a train to Brooklyn
Get deeper lost in someplace new
Where the streets make better art

Under the starry skies and the colder days, in streets lined with wrappers of Milky Ways,
Ledger lines are sidewalk cracks accentuating where the high notes are,
Hiding who the ones on the low roads are,
Shade of broken twigs too light to block rain,
Frost on the ground not thick enough to show from whence footprints came.
Electric fence invisible from self defense, next door the front yard full of rocks hides pebbles of gold,
The golden geese flew south but the wind came and told all the weathervanes that there was something in this urban forest of junk and lost dreams.
This way, they pointed, down from the north comes a city winter for this city autumn.