I never lived in a city they named twice, but I got the joke,
or took Lexington, or listened to Clinton Street all through the evening.
But I am the longshoreman. That renamed refugee,
the one with the dreams, you know, those dreams
I never walked those streets, but I know them—
the lesions of sidewalks, the huddled masses,
fire escapes curling like iron vertebrae,
ghosts of poets cough out prayers between drags of stolen cigarettes.
I have never felt the summer trash heat,
rising in waves off Avenue B like a fever dream,
but I hear it in the bassline of a Misfits song,
in the spit-flecked sermons of some East Village prophet
preaching from a milk crate throne.
I have never waited for a train in a tunnel breathing steam,
but I taste the rust, the rat-scuttled neon hum,
the graffitied whispers of kids who carved their names into history
with stolen markers and busted knuckles.
I have never seen the Bowery under wet lamplight,
but I have read the scripture of its ruin—
CBGB’s bathroom stall poetry, graffitied in piss and genius,
the leather-clad psalms of Patti and Richard,
a city scribbled on torn flyers and record sleeves.
I have never run my fingers along the scarred bar at Max’s Kansas City,
but I know the bloodshot art, the amphetamine-laced manifestos,
the queens and kings of gutter-glam anointing themselves
in sweat and spotlight and cheap gin.
And yet, in some other life, I might have stood there, but somehow,
it lingers on my skin like the aftertaste of something holy,
a church of distortion and desperation,
where the saints have safety pins through their lips
and the sinners sell dreams on St. Mark’s Place.
Somewhere, a television flickers static in a tenement window,
somewhere, a D’Angelico strikes out against the night,
somewhere, the city is still writing itself—
and I am still reading it,
never having been, yet always knowing.
Or maybe it read me.