This city used to roar through its belly back when all the buildings were less and sienna,
when the copper was copper and everything was the shined penny promise of Lincoln's cheek bone,
when women, if told the word Vegans, would ask if that was the name of a savage tribe in a new world.
One that turned their healthy belches of stone gild industry into one white gallery that holds one piece of art, a chrome sphere with a protrusion, and not even the savages know what it means.
But they take guesses in their coffee shops, in their billboards, in their micro micro mega metropolis confusion.
Yes, this city still roars, but only through its nose. And yes, I am also confusion.
Every doorway in this city lets me in and quickly spits me out onto its stoop. Tells me to curl back into myself until I'm my own baby.
If Walt Whitman rode that ferry into the city today, would he tell us wonder and patriotism with double question marks and emoticons?
In the spirit of rejection, I'll take a tour on a double decker bus, armed in a bright plastic poncho. I reach, high five every stop light craning past, because no one else pays attention to them.
And in this lack of reverence, stars don't live enough to report their deaths and coruscate the city.
In this lack of reverence, the tour guide of this bus sings a half-heart America America to the lit up Empire State Building,
a daily routine, as it stands in competition with everything else she'll sing to tonight.
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