Right off of the 7 train,
Irish Catholic schoolgirls spilling
out of Jahn's like marbles
Their plaid skirts against exposed brick
bellies full of kitchen sink

The produce stand next door
eggs .60 a dozen, milk one dollar
Now converted into a bodega
or maybe even a small
Muslim prayer room

I bought my first album
at a record store on 82nd
The brown paper bags, thin as bible pages
It spun on the Victrola in my
parents' Tudor

The yellowing wallpaper smelled of
my mom's Virginia Slims
And sounded of my dad's Vermouth
His own liver fried
with onions, just as he liked it

I’m wearing your old jacket. Remember? The one you used to fish in. The one with the tear in the silk of the right-hand pocket. You used to tease me. You used to say that this jacket kept your loose change safe from my chocolate addiction. You being left-handed; me being right.

I bury my face in the nap of the moleskin collar. My nostrils fill with your scent - stale cologne, a hint of woodsmoke, and...fish. More disconcerting than unpleasant, it’s all I can do not to choke on my memories of you. Of me and you. Together.

'Tell me, how can I be, now that you alone are gone and I am left behind?'

I feel like I’ve been abandoned in a foreign capital with nothing more than the clothes I stand up in and a wallet full of the wrong kind of currency. The day is drawing to a close. My luggage has disappeared with the exhaust from the bus which took off before I could catch my breath and explain my dilemma - that I’m not sure where I’m going or even where I’ve been. Lately.

Maybe a kindness will point me in the right direction. An open-all-hours diner on an inner-city corner, snuggled in between the high-rise office blocks. Maybe I’ll have enough cash for a meal and a trail of hot, sweet tea to lead me into tomorrow. Maybe I’ll close my eyes and remember where I’m supposed to be and what I should be doing.

And just maybe, as the rhythm of the traffic slows and the night progresses, I’ll find some peace in the ever-changing cityscape. A time-lapse production of late revellers, harried shift workers, the dispossessed and restless; until finally the earliest commuters and exercise fanatics emerge from the riverside neighbourhoods to face the new dawn.

‘Hey, lady.’ A disgruntled voice shatters my reverie. 'I ain’t got all day, y’know.' Scrambling for cash, I reach deep into your left-hand pocket and find...***...a limp fifty-dollar bill...and a battered envelope. There’s a note scrawled on the outside in your familiar hand:

'How can you be, now that I alone have gone and you are left behind? The short answer is: you will be. For you are as singular and complete today as you were before 'mine' became 'yours' and 'I' became 'we'. My darling, I’m no tourist. You know how impatient I can get - always taking the most direct route. I’m just out of sight around the next corner. You take your time and meet me when you’re ready. Sometime...later. Whenever. I’ll be waiting.'

Stunned, I mutter an apology to the waitress and step out from the warm fug of the café into a bright, fresh New York morning. The doorbell tings shut behind me and I realise with new-found clarity that I know exactly where I am. I’m home. It’s not going to be a great day but it’ll be a better one, which is a start. Besides I have things to do - chocolate to buy, a jacket to launder, and a needle to thread.

After the incident
we gathered in the reception area
Stalling
Making small talk
Vaguely excited and vaguely bored

We were leaning into
Little gala tables
Covered in white linen
Raised for conversation or
Fashionable idleness

Why look who’s here!
You were slipping by
Like a noblewoman
Floating in her day-dress
so the human machinations didn't show

Why it’s been thirty years if not a day!
It’s not like you were exactly moved
My friend, your friend
barely roused you
Are you plastic?
A formally once-was?
You looked at me as if your eyes were
Marbles
Made of glass and somewhat pretty,
Just for decoration
It was hard to say in such darkness
Your darkness in particular
It may have been the suit.

I know that they’ve fêted you here before.
A king returns!
Is it the magma chamber
for your imminence?
Or a mere
Alcove?

The face doesn’t really move
Much anymore
Forever frozen in a slight smugness
Your mouth that strikes me as
somewhat meta
if that’s at all possible
And it seems to be
A bit rude
A noirish marvel
A dark star

Funny you never once looked at me really
Never said Hello
Nor Good Evening
And the things that
I could have said
Do you remember how you tried to drill a hole into a poured concrete floor
with a cheap tool
while we laughed about dentistry
as opposed to *** practices
How I tried to find a cherry picker
through the yellow pages
on a Saturday afternoon
How you quizzed me about my practice and how I played dumb
How your dealer ate my dinner when I was looking to the right

But I remained silent
bemused more than disgusted
It has been a long time and
Why would that
forgotten phospherence
be me?

I wanted to say
Did you know
that that penthouse after-party
at the
Marmont
was one of the saddest nights of my life?
I leaned over the balcony and stared at the Marlborough Man
puffing rings onto Sunset Blvd.
Desperate.
How has it come to this I asked
shocked myself
This has all gone so wrong.
I looked down upon the street
watching the rings echo
and cars swerving off to nowhere

No amount of drink can fix this night
and they killed the joint without me
being boys.
One is now dead by hanging.
I’d have preferred the other.

But here you are.
Silent
with absent eyes
after all these years
I never opened my mouth
I couldn’t seem to configure the lips precisely
I don’t know why
Perhaps they refused to comply
despite my feathery efforts.
No need.

To the west was the city, towers of steel and concrete that dwarfed even the tallest man, and to the east was the end, where the air turned thick with the scent of hay and soil until you came to an ocean that stretches so far it seemed to fall off the edge of the earth. The salt burned your nose and turned your hair brittle, knotting and tangling it in the breeze that swept off the sea.

But I was not there at the end of the world, instead I had gone north to the sound. Following the twisting roads whose route I had memorized as a child. The radio playing Carole King as though an ode to my mother and the summers she drove under these same canopied trees, past houses of hydrangeas and dahlias until she reached the beach.

I sat along the fence that separated the public from the rich— where lilacs grew thick through the hedges and all I could see were the tiny huts of pale pinks and yellows and blues, a distant memory of the 60s.

The coast was a rainbow of umbrellas and mingled among the sound of the gulls crying and the waves hitting the shore was the laughter of the children and the motors of passing boats.

The cliffs of a nearby port town curved around me, a barrier from the rest of the island. And if I squinted, the grey line of Connecticut seemed almost within reach.

Cirrus clouds lined the sky, intermingling with the foggy blue that melded seamlessly into the water. I felt as thought I was underwater at times, the haze from the heat and the sun blinding as I looked up through the blue to the world above.

The rain falls, the light rises, darkness caresses the city
Passing cars and passed out pedestrians pile on
Darkness and moisture cling to what is not

Illuminated streets from billboards, street lamps, and storefronts
These passing lights fool me into thinking it is day
It is Night

Smoke from the sewers dance around me as I walk through
Will the beating rhythm of cars and shouts ever sleep?
A city that never sleeps

Colors glide over the sodden streets, through thunderous rain
A storm that beats down, hard, ambient, ever present
Inexorable tides of water from the sky

Headlights blind but never linger, as I walk my hustled step
In and around the grid that weakens the foolhardy
But rises those up, just the same

Thousands of buildings, thousands of droplets, all meeting each other
Those skyward skyscrapers are the swords into the clouds
Meeting them with their stand

New York meets everything with pushback
Umbrellas against the wet, Brutality against the poor, Sorrow against the weak
Love-hate calls to them

I stare across the river, to the skyscrapers of another world
Nothing to the majesty and soul crushing weight I get to walk under
A concrete welcome to The Jungle

All that is will be undone, those lights, those cars, those wonders
I among them fade into antiquity, my footprints lost into the washing grime
All is nothing against Time