I roam the old city, gazing at Gothic gargoyles and touching stonework made by men long since dead, wondering how I ended up in this chunk of time, rather than one in which this land was all just forest or marshland, or one in which we all wait amid the rubble to blast off to some secondary hive of humanity.
Neon-fired
Rippling lights,
churning & flashing,
colors dancing off the walls,
pooling & spinning into each other
Oh, how the colors glisten on wet pavement
cities grow outward
like angry amoeba —
false-feet stretching down
the motorway corridors,
and developing tumors
that will metastasize
into cities of their own,
sprawling until they span
the global petri dish
Cities pretend to sleep.
They fool us.
Eyes close.
Darkness settles.
In the deep of the night,
a city is like a kindergartener during nap time —
fidgety and mischievous.
When Tokyo’s trains shut down at midnight,
far from hibernating in suspended animation,
the city traps people in a dimension
that most people never see —
a headachy, eye-rubbing,
fuzzy-minded
land of waking dreams.
I
crossing the street
in Bangalore traffic —
never more alive
II
even in wee hours,
if I hear only silence,
I know I’m asleep
III
random backstreet:
yet, more color than a
carnival midway
I’ve built cities in my brain,
cities that no one would recognize.
I’ve danced around Dublin with Dedalus and Bloom,
but no Dubliner would recognize his fair city
from my mental projection.
It doesn’t matter how masterful Joyce is in his description.
I’ve only visited the version that I tossed up in my mind
as I tore through his poetry,
and which was torn down in the wake of my reading.
And yet I treasure that false metropolis.
It’ll do — for now.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 