New York City (lyric)

 

    The city doesn’t have to make sense, it doesn’t love you or anyone. And if you were to say, I have lived in your arms a long time and the view of the refinery fires is all I’ve ever dreamt of. And if you were to say that the soft glass of the Mies van der Rohe is a machine is an island is a time zone and that there are wolves in the park and see I love you mother would it matter to the Exxon station or the squatter’s hut. And if you were to say these RGB sunsets over the rusting-shopping-cart pasture are going black and that surrealism is dead replaced by voicemail and the girl with the pink hula hoop you just imagined and the man counting the aeroplanes in their holding patterns wonders if they’re Chinese. The city is not a collection of people, it’s where we plant our antennas, the central node the roads lead from in eight directions. And if you were to say I am a bundle of vibrating strings and the city is in decline as an idea and on the time-elapsed film the mid-century apartment tower is taken apart like regret by unseen hands and in its dusty space sprout weeds and in its weeded space is melted gold. Moscow Caracas Budapest Tbilisi Yerevan my ears are ringing Kyoto São Paulo Microsoft Mandalay New York. And if you were to say our world will run out of air and if the sun breaks the windows at Sainte-Chapelle I am bathed in flames once more and if you were to say I separate the ineffable from the slave maker ant and confuse them again and I do this multiple times or my mind will atrophy in the blue suburban juntas and the dinner of onions and herring will grow cold in the cul-de-sac. The Well Wrought Urn holds the ashes of Baudelaire and the Rosa Mystica bleeding her aromatic oil on Palm Sunday offers her figure for your poems. And if you were to say the city in the visual static of a snowstorm in 1958 before the invention of the Taser and the metro entrance is an impromptu society of hats gathering for a journey to a nouveau resort. And if you were to say to the iron lung pushed through the streets you are more important than Ulysses. And if you were to say passer-by, cinema of lush flowers where you slept like Proust. The sky a perfect rectangle with a star nailed in each corner. Aoyama: year nine times the probability of grace is not enough. And if you were to say Hyderabad Favela Agora the sex workers in Lahore have gone on strike. And if you were to say, I hyperventilate into a brown sandwich bag when I read this. And if you were to say, what did you expect, bottles thrown from the roof.