Sandy.

Cast-off, beloved nyc - i watched you burn in 01 and now i watch you drown + feel like i left my heart in your underwater subway womb - would you ever take me back - when there are more tears in me than raindrops

child of gravel and granite, glass, railroad and rubber

born into human hands less human than the starry mica in the pavement

nyc my shepherd of stone and taxihorns

Guardian Alphalt Angel

horizon of hazard lights and fiberglass eyes
briefcases flashing through chinatown stalls
peeks into lives where the other apartment dwellers hide
reading picturebooks at the library that once was a courthouse
salvaged by ee cummings
discarded people in cardboard boxes, minds that fell into gratings
whole lives that fell into sewers
the streets lined with Stradivarius-throated ghosts
crystal iceberged psyches - all memories lost..
a darker night than other cities will ever know
when that other child disappeared
and left me holding up the walls.

groomed in cathedral skylights, clawfood tubs of tap water n' heavy metals

~in central park, in my snowpants ~ sharing my castle with squirrels

there was no other home,

but the kind coldness of the snow and the question-mark art left in mausoleums
a message from another realm "this is a code between me and you. this is our secret
society..."

that's how you raised me + warmed me - and faces on buses told me, like our island, i had an inviolable soul...

some sacred soil underneath the skyscrapers

and the strange green shoots that would split rocks -
are you me? i said to the little iron weed..
you're ugly and beautiful,
like a rainbow in the gutter.

Manhattan my friend,

it takes a typewriter to meet you

now that i live in the sun...

but we will always be blood

us dense and lonely -- crammed and lovely...

crumbling, as the earth reclaims the earth.