trying to pinpoint the past,
or even just the last couple days, hours.
I think I live in Brooklyn,
and I think I have a girlfriend.
rent, souls, art, sex, salvation –
all have price tags in the expensive city.
my future comes at the price of the past,
plus a blood hug, a vibe check,
and a total rebrand of Buynak.
from meeting your main hang
or your best friends in a bar on Franklin Street,
some of us might have fallen in love once,
or maybe we’re falling in love several times a day.
and every poem worth its salt was unpredicted,
just like love.
she keeps one shelf free in the fridge,
everyone in California is terrified of Autumn,this dude spends most of his time deciding
whether he is a painter, writer, or both.
I stop listening,
look out beyond the pale,
time traveling in monologic thought.
an especially low point, when I saw from my window
an odd-looking one-story building made of smooth stone,
sort of shining there, at the southeast corner of 23rd,
with a phrase from Isaiah carved in its side:
“This house shall be called a House of Prayer for all People.”
I think about that moment
more than the message,
and I wonder if this is what I want.
after ordering another club soda with lime,
I introduce myself again;
I want the world to know the new me,
but for the difference to show
they all must know the old me, too.
Walt Whitman writes to future New Yorkers,
“I am with you, you men and women of a generation,
or ever so many generations hence,
just as you feel when you look on the river and the sky, so I felt…
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island.”
Lucie grabs my hand and we leave,
giving an Irish exit to the Californian from her youth,
hugging my brooding Italian by the door,
walking towards decisions and 99 Ryerson St,
looking for codes in raindrops.