to new york and back

this city,
so familiar through images, ideas, sounds, and my dog eared copy of Catcher in the Rye that i loved so much,
this city,
a place that we all know without knowing, familiar and strange,
people burst from subterranean chasms like jack-in-theboxes,
grim and grimey, a city upon a city,
with half never knowing the snow and sun,
half never knowing the dank odours that emanate out of human existence when it goes underground,
ice skating under the christmas tree in rockefeller centre,
billboards on broadway eclipsing the sky,
beautiful in a grotesque way, bigger than life,
and is there happiness here?
cafes, clothes, and a pit in the ground that made us all gasp,
explosions that we still feel the tremors from,
and is there happiness there?
black kids beat box on the bus,
signs in spanish,
shopkeepers light their mennorahs,
and is there happiness there?

as a pilgrim, one is always homeless and yet always at home,
wandering down strange streets and savouring their names for the unknown promises they conceal,
imagining the day when they are familiar,
imagining life in this place.

when one crawls into a cave,
the walls of comfort grow thick with the mosses of fear and apathy,
only when one bursts forth out of hibernation
does the whafish intensity of the winter sun hit eyes that have grown dim and useless.

white boots aren't meant for heroes,
they dirty and scuff in ways that a 10 gallon never seems to,
no,
white boots are meant for crime
and for love that comes out of a hungry spirit,
a wandering spirit,
a spirit that only finds satisfaction when it is consumed, overwrought and perturbed,
a spirit that wants to be shaken with art and filth, poetry and constant love.

drifting over this familiar and wild geography,
contemplating those little lights of scattered homes,
distant as stars that burn and churn in galaxies I will never venture to or know,
so many lights,
so many lives,
with vastness of oceans and space in between,
bless my wings.