Twisted Bitches of NylKoorb

I wish it were now.

The unblemished day gallops through

Every seam. A guiltless day. 
Automated catering of the clouds,

Creampuffs carted in from obscurity.

Busboy, give the yellow seat a quick brush with your warm rag.

Spend your sweet time with the city, 
the careful orchestration of cabs running down like bows the long taut catgut strings of the avenues,

The old shouldered skyscrapers threadworn by interplanetary rubbing,

The stout mangers and stalls rank and file down the village’s streets, grid pattern

like a mind backtracking 
lost synapses trying to cohere.

The sun dons like a crown. It is the day of coronation.

The Butcher walks by in a clean leather apron.

Sit and eat. It is all being prepared. 

It’s the everyday streetscape, the reconvening screen of spring.

There is no great project but to survive

And so we are barely holding on, this city smuggling every one of us

In its decorously impromptu ways. 
We’re doing our time in the greatest city in the world.

A heart pitted out by ambivalence milks 
a puny beat,

Strung out on a vein 
along the long tile corridor btwn the 6^th and 7^th avenue lines,

the corridor a kiln that keeps its heat, bakes its transgessors.

He’s not schizophrenic he just sublets his personality sometimes.

His house is a house with many roommates.

His mild poem obstructs the advertisement’s leering yellow

“Twisted Bitches of NYLKOORB!”

(There’s not an ounce of unannotated surface in any of these five boroughs.)

The Cockroach Man is quite the skilled conversationalist when it comes to talking

To himself. “I will boost your motherfucking self,” one of him says.

“Act like the man on Sunday,” answers the other.

On one ear a gold earring reading “Love”
The other “Disaster”.

I am jolted into spasmodic laughter. My sympathies lie with him, and

With the cup of ice sweating into the bicycle’s

Icebox. The first salty carmel cone of the season struts by

And the curtains are drawn back

On the long striding legs of the secretaries.
Kept high in a tower in the middle of town

A woman I know with a head like a radish, exquisite.

I’ll bet there was much ceremony

when she emerged like a naiad 20 years back, the daughter of a sea-king, rising

On a hydraulic shell, a divine iteration from its toothless enamel mouth.

A man alone eventually evolves into an assassin, 
the street a shooting gallery and everyone a target. 
“It is what it is” one of the voices says, the one

In the leather pillbox hat. The other does not reply.
It doesn't say

“It isn’t what it isn’t” which may be

closer to the truth.