maybe midnight new york

midnight new york, you're clean
and loud and your cool air is sharp with
girls on the street
screaming.

and midnight new york, you're alien and
your buildings crowd and glow and cut,
sometimes reach out
sometimes grab.

midnight new york, you throw
piss poor yellow street lights in
through my window, awful color but
softened
i don't know
through glass and you make
my shoulders delicate
or shadow, like you make things seem
so easy to break.
and i think about you
and here
and now
and there
and the late hour of your setting moons.
like you touch down to the grimy
street corners
with steel beams and men
who toss boxes, light
like matches.

maybe midnight new york, maybe
you are keeping me here in my
tidy cage,
neat corners, you decide
what to tell me, you decide
cars past my window and you tell
me
tell the folks in the bar under
my window
tell us how to go back
to our neat cages, the long
avenues
light our paths with
street lights orange and going out
before you'll let the sun roll up.