After a long drive I’m on foot again, at last, in New York City.  It’s cause for optimism. You can’t help walking toward something in New York City.

Give me a cookie
Steal me a charm
Comfort my hunger
Cover my arm

Keep me from harm…Who is this in my ear with this song, this sweetmeat of nonsense chock full of adult mistakes?  Damned if I know right now.

Walking toward someone
A view to a dance
Perhaps she’s a building
Still standing by chance

This is no mutual romance…no.  I am just one of this city’s clumsy crushers.  Neither upfront Casanova nor backstairs politician, the city beats on me when I’m here and won’t release my head when I’m not.  

Walk from high on the West
to low on the East
Walk like we’re starving
Not seeing the feast

Or someone in need at the least…Once I walked from 107th to Houston.  My feet red and wet by somewhere south of 53rd, I stopped in a bar to drink and bleed.  I’ve been bloody drunk a lot since then.

How hard the streets
How cruel the air
How tightly we’re tethered
How far off we were

I wasn’t born here…I won’t likely die here.  But I’ll likely be thinking of Hell’s Kitchen when I’m on my last breath.

Buy me a dinner
or refund my fee
Empty my evening
Make me less free

It’ll come to me…The last time I was in this town, I got a tattoo of my own death on my back.  Carry it with me everywhere, call it “my pretty picture.”  My own weightless burden.  Carry it home on my skin, call it “my philosophy.”  

Tell me you love me
or answer the phone
Better I leave you
than be left all alone 

Can you tattoo a moan?  An image of a death in the Bronx lovingly crafted in Brooklyn by a woman now from Queens who grew up on Staten Island. Manhattan, are you OK with that?  Can we hang?

I’m in the city
I’ve never lived here
But it is where I’m from
Since my home disappeared

I needn’t have feared…

These horns,
my God,
these horns.  

Almost as if the air itself
was hooked up to a distortion pedal,
but that’s not possible.  It’s 
the players themselves
who must be bending the air itself
into such rough shapes, scraping it and
abrading it until there are surfaces
grit can stick to.  

Warning: our ears
will fill with sand to the rims
if we listen.  Our ears will get filthy
with that if we don’t move
from this spot where you appear to be rooted

under the fat leafed maple,
listening to this scabby racket
as if it were a gospel congregation.
My God, man, they’re bending the very air!
How you can still be breathing it
without warping, without changing,
I do not know.  

Come away from here with me —
don’t just stand there
while music is being torn up like that.
I wouldn’t call it a sin,
but I wouldn’t call it harmless either.

can we agree that this will be
the perfect opening song
regardless of what song 
is selected

opening chords define
the appropriate level of joy
the seats empty
for an epiphany

when the lead singer leaves 
the center of the stage 
it produces mild concern 
as if the world has tipped

the bass player moves to fill the hole
the tone of said hole darkens
much as the density of the drums
darkens the stage

or as the fluid guitarists
straddling and snarly battle 
to light the far corners of the stadium
against the bogeymen we came to forget

can we agree that the world
will not be whole again until 
the lead singer resumes his place
at the center

and the tilt once corrected is forgotten
in the wash of the world restored 
by the next introduction or arpeggio
presaging the tension cycle again

the black cat and I
are sitting up late,
watching heavy metal videos.

we’ve seen a few black cats on screen.  
not many, and all were yowl-faced and claws out.
my companion seems completely unimpressed.

for tonight at least
I’m in love with hair band guitars,
with fast necks and eldritch angled bodies.

I’m in love with the moody faces of the balladeers,
the near-machismo of their eyeliner — everything
about the music, in fact, except for the music itself. 

I think the cat feels about the same
as she leaves for the kitchen to seek food
just before I do.

kitty seems disinclined to be heavy metal angry
as she rubs against my legs, snaking between them
like a wisp of dry ice fog.  I open the fridge.

ain’t no demons in there I can’t gobble up
but just for fun I brandish a stick of string cheese
like a microphone, tilt my head back,

mime a scream.  the cat waits patiently
for me to get over myself.  “if you think that’s
gonna happen any time soon,” I tell her,

“you got another thing coming.” I throw
a split in the middle of the kitchen for good measure,
and surprise myself by not injuring anything this time.

The all-night college radio station
is playing a shuffle mix
of current rock,
poetry, jazz, stupid PSAs.

Right now, something
by Django Reinhardt.

I take note
of this moment.

Nothing
is happening.  
There is a wild-haired
silhouette in the corner mirror.

Django is comping along
while Stephane Grappelli
is tearing it up
happy hot-club stylee
on fiddle.

I have no role to play
in the delicious moment of waiting
for the next moment
to shuffle up.

I don’t have a role to play;
nevertheless, I’ve used the “I”
four times now
in speaking of the moment,
five if you count
the one in quotes.  

A smoking man, Django was.
He would have called a break now,
Would have lit a cigarette,
probably one pulled from a hardshell case.

On my left hand, 
the middle and ring fingers
suddenly, 
obscurely,
ache.

To let your own blood with a straight razor
(whether by accident or not)
is to understand how easy separation
can become when you are not thinking

You say, is that ink
The line is so straight
Then it blurs
or perhaps you touch it

One side of the wound
leans away from the other
The brilliance spills over
as if from a jostled cup

Your heart speaks in drumline
as faster comes the flood
If it were not so terrifying
it would be such a danceable beat

You would dance
partnerless in the center of the splatter
as if that first scarlet line
marked the end of a page of music

There above it was the instruction
da capo al fine
take it from the top
all the way to the end

If it wasn’t so terrifying
at once it might be exactly
what you’d most
want to do