The City

1 0 0
                                    


Sleeping streets never seemed to tell my story

Finding nocturnal lights that illuminate littered curbs

Is exhilarating

My story is told in every sidewalk crack

In every sleeping man beneath graffitied bridges

That I trapeze past with my pencil in my hand

Because I found a street that tells my story

My story is written on an undecided path

The tail of a lit up firefly that I haven't had the

Sanity

To see in what feels like months

A rolling quarter following loose change

Down a dirty drain

I see graphite paths on every button in the elevator

The pad of my thumb cleans whichever floor I please

There's my story,

Dirty fingerprints and broken stiletto heels

Writer's block and spilled coffee

Pollutants in the air that block my connection with the stars

But my story is up there too

Hidden behind naive smog,

Written sloppily on the purple moon

I find it on the roof of every building

Peeking over the edge

To remind my slowing mind

That my heartbeat can still quicken

That adrenaline is still my favorite drug

So as to tell myself I'm still who I was when I had no words hidden in sidewalk cracks,

Or tucked in the craters of the moon

I'm still the girl writing on confined walls

Chapters preceding the clutter of city streets

Perfectly formatted scripts

Of repetition and grey

Until the binding finally gave up on encasing unimportance

My story is written on the back of a plane ticket

On leaves falling past me and crunching beneath my rolling suitcase

On the palms of my mother's hands as she grips my favorite sweater

On the ridges of my spine as I hunch over my desk for another sleepless night

On the lips of a whistling street vendor

My story is written with the words of the people I meet

My story is written in the foundation of every wrong turn I take

Every building I scale

Every missed train

Words cling to the edges of the river and erode onto the banks that I hike over

I found my story in the knit cap that I throw over my messy hair

In the remnants at the bottom of my teacup



The CityWhere stories live. Discover now