Leather coat. Oxblood.
Denim jeans. Faded gray.
Rhinestone belt. Black.
Wrinkled button-up. Charcoal.
Old Ray-Bans.
Silver necklace with a brass cross.
Canvas boots. Burgundy.
Three Moleskines. Brown.
Two pens. Red and blue.
Six picks.
Twenty seven dollar and thirty four cents.
One beaten down carrying case. Black.
My guitar.

The whole is greater than the sum
of its parts
but just barely

I might as well be a polystyrene box floating through the city
dodging traffic
bartering breakfast
strumming heartsongs in subway dens

Oh. One glass pipe. Clear.
I forgot that, it belongs on the list.

Okay I didn’t forget it.
I lie, sue me.

Getting high
or low is just a part of me though
and some people think it’s all of me.

Some people look at me like
I don’t have a home, which makes me angry,
not because they’re wrong,
but because they always look disgusted
with I think they should look concerned.

My guitar case likes to change itself from time to time.
Sometimes it’s with the seasons
and sometimes it’s with the sun,
but generally its with the sparks in my head
and how it reflects them.
I’ll wake up round 6
underneath the Williamsburg brudge
with warm bacon in my nostrils,
cold sun on my skin,
and my case will show me the WD
on it’s back
and tell me it means “Wonderful Day.”

On snowy Sundays in Battery Park
it’ll flop down on a quiet curb
and whine, “Warmth ******.”

I’ll amble up Prince Street through the holidays
looking for breathing buildings.
He’ll jump from my right shoulder to my left
and whisper, “Where’s Dad?”
He goes back to my right shoulder.

I like to laugh when I walk past Starbucks,
any old Starbucks,
because everybody in there is from Seattle
and they came all this way for a cup of coffee.

I came all that way too,
but I don’t think it was for a cup of coffee.
I lived with a girl named Cat
or a girl who had a cat
in an old walk up across from a Quizno’s.
Cat gave me coke.
The girl
not the cat.

I remember she
or we
had an ivy green front door
because I’d stay up and stare out the peephole
watching people come home late.