For Peter on His 50th Birthday

Oh New York! You bastard burning hope into my heart. You nondescript corporate Irish bar at 57th & Broadway—across from the 8 millionth coffee shop, of equally nondescript, corporate identity. It’s the way you keep your cheese on a roll, so thick and creamy even in its processed state, that makes me love you so.

You, leaving me leaking blue-blooded songs and longing to regale in Penn Station and back, to wherever it was I wanted to come--through tin loudspeakers  and tête-à-têtes with soldiers, ready to deploy.

To your liveliest lights, in your darkest nights.

To your well-planned parks that seem to suggest,
humanity and technology
can coexist,
peacefully.

You’ve a right to swallow the fire,
of those nuisance gods,
and belch it back up again,
til Broadway yawns neon.
.
Who, save for you, New York,
would have thought those claustrophobic theatres
could be the last of communal cares,
forever ducking the blind of progress?

You, New York, in your grey-flannel suit,
who undoes a top button once in awhile
to let an outsider into your heart—
maintaining history, without letting
the historians intervene.

Reckoning with your erosion,
self-conscious of your past,
but without need to redefine yourself,
within the rhetoric
of politics.

You big liberal, you!
Current affairs splash in your wake,
but become ripples
sliced aloft by your stoicism.
No city is an island but you,
New York …

… a fiend and a friend and a find in the
art markets of Soho and the buckets of Chinatown:
“Flesh or fish.”
It’s all the same to you.

From the golden mellow sun,
At the entrance of Central Park,
in summer.
To the perpetual slate of Park avenue--
where, for all its purported glory,
the street becomes unnecessarily wide,
in places,
swallowing
up
its
own
stories.

And, in the midst of Chelsea's tattered dregs—cloth and silken stems—where near morning, pigeons clamour, picking at the humbled ends of fruit stands hastily dismantled at night fall, renewing themselves again by noon, after spewing shredded lettuce amidst a Calvary of slated box tops, smashed!

And oh, New York, with your wealthy enclaves outside yourself. Winding roads left wondering if they'll ever lead back to roam those precise streets, where many found, there, glory, and masses came upon their deaths.

New York, you kill me slowly and I have always loved you for that.

Especially that tiny hovel of clutter above 8th Avenue, where a strange man I once loved bought me cheese on a roll despite his better judgement. Because he knew I was young and tired and brilliant and needy and every adjective that a person who ever sought you out, might be after they'd arrived across the bridge and awed by the suspense, needed sleep and sustenance.