two MTA

workers play invisible baseball across platforms at Union Square

the runs in my tights mimic the skyscrapers
whose marks I see across the black sky from the rear

window while he ***** me in the backseat of his Audi

an alley in Brooklyn,
the threat of a subway slasher,
the likelihood of getting lost,

but the questioning by tourists for direction

if I say “I am one of you”, it

discredits my memories here:

[pumpkins on 34th in July
kisses in bathtubs in Meatpacking
top of the Whitney]

but I am not (yet) one of you:

impatient drivers,
L train riders,
rainbow bagel obsessers

I still feel a hand grip my throat when walking down 5th
and throw my bones off the Chelsea Pier
before I spend 11 hours wondering why I haven’t yet committed myself to you.

I don't think deep thoughts every day.
I think of them when I'm alone in a car, with my headphones on,
And when I'm on a bus, when I don't have a friend to pass the time.

The buildings rush by me, and I concentrate on their cracks and blemishes
Only for those few seconds.

But in those few seconds:
I think about how that particular crack came to be,
Why that particular color was chosen,
Why they weren't able to afford a better house,
My favorite memories,
My best friends,
My favorite songs,
How poor our society is,
How I want to help,
How I know that whatever I do,
Things will always revert to what they were.

You want me to cut straight to the deep stuff,
To have intelligent conversation,
To ask me my opinion on everything.
You can ask me all you want,
But I already would have forgotten the answers.

I f l e w too close to the sun
And fell too close to the stars
I cried the tears of the moon
As I felt the loneliness of asteroids.


I hugged the never touching trees
And kissed the lonely roses
And b r e a t h e d the air for the dying grass
And sat in the laps of the evergreen vines of ivy.

I ran with the wolves
To forget the malice feeling of the cougars
And s a n g the song of freedom with the hawks
As I let the rabbits comfort me.

I walked with the preoccupied humans
As I stared at the nervous buildings
And hugged the crying street light
Then let the cold air b i t e me

I sat a l o n e in my empty room
With the joyfully stained razor blade
And with the vain and well woven noose
Jumping off the chair as I choose.

I like to think
Of our effect on flats
Of the change we make
On buildings of cold brick and steel

I look at houses, strange to me
And see the dead glass in the windows
I like to think
That to someone it is home.

It's a testament to humanity
That we can make buildings mean something
I like to think
Of how we give our world a story.

We give concrete and wood
The memories of a family meal
Of nights before a fire
Of a first kiss.

We are as important to what we see
As what we see is to us
We are the wind through the forest
The cricket in the starry night.

Don't believe me?
Look at an abandoned house.
There's nothing quite so tragic
As a doorstep never used,

Without a memory to bring it to life.

The great New York metropolitan
stretching its  vibrancy
trafficking its wears.
Car horns combating in contemptuous arguments
habituated eardrums unwittingly pulsating

Great buildings upward; towering behemoths in grandiose splendor
This great asphalt jungle sprawling its electricity for blocks,
for miles
The jazz of the city continues the chanting; the sounds of bass and the blowing of the **** sax, the horn, the piano
and the drums drumming on its rhythmical beat

Beating hearts feeling the vibrancy; the shock waves of nuances echoing the great hustle
Multitude of voices singing praise to the different tongues;
vibrant in diverse rejoicing, the poetry of men and women
Metropolitans claiming the world condensing into small
blocks and listening to its RHAPSODY.

I never paid much attention to abandon buildings until I became one.
It was after I heard the words,
I heard you say the words,
"She's gone."
Two words that can make a fifty year old veteran feel empty inside the pit of his stomach that was just fed.
After all, no matter how many meals,
no matter how much liquor he drank,
It was never enough to make him feel full.
And no one ever tells you being so empty can be so ******* heavy.
And no one ever tells you a stranger's soft hands cannot hold you back together.
Because the truth is you can't always turn your sadness into a poem and sometimes it just sits in your chest and drains the life from you.
And you can run away,
as you will try,
but you can only go so far until noticing the sidewalks are only cracked to commiserate the broken hearts that have stood on them.
This is not about me.
This is about the human spirit.
The resilience we have installed within us to feel
Everything.
And when my best friend broke up with her boyfriend,
she told me he was OCD,
always doing everything in threes.
But he only said goodbye once,
And I don't think she realizes that it is killing him,
as much as it's killing her.
As humans,
we have the ability to create,
and destroy.
Love letters and suicide notes are just different combinations of the same 26 letters
remember that.
But love is a beautiful thing,
Our love was a beautiful thing,
A fragile thing,
A glass castle,
And we were both sledgehammers.
We created and destroyed and we did it beautifully.
Mr. Lunn said some people are already dead.
Walking around the halls in their own high school,
Waking up for work every single day at nine o clock only to start driving back home at five,
these people are already dead.
And it didn't hit me that he was right until I was lying with a friend,
his head on my chest,
admiring my heart beat in a way confirming he did not have his own to admire.
I asked him if he believed in God, if he believed in the universe, if he believed in the stars staring back at us, if he believed in the connection when you can look at another human being and feel
Thankful to all of those things,
thankful to every god in the world,
for the mere pleasure of knowing them.
And he said he just didn't know and I still don't know what moment was more alarming.
I wondered if he payed attention to abandoned buildings.
I didn't either,
Until I became one.