your heart and the sea

iv. the city, at midnight

the oklahoma moon makes everything shine a bit brighter, don't you think?
bathed in moonlight, the florescent office building lights seem to burn just like stardust
red brake-lights and yellow streetlights and blue headlights turn the streets below me into a brilliant amalgam of color
the lights of the living reflect on this concrete hell like the sun reflecting on the moon
and the heavy southwest heat, blended in on a cool breeze, melts into my bones like butter
i like the wind up here the best,
the dusty smell of it,
the way it feels as if its kissed no one else but me
and i like how the cicadas hum louder than the blur of the city
so it sounds like home
even if the only lightning bugs out here
are the neon lights of the pawn shop across the street
and the mural painted on its brick wall
the one i've fallen in love with
the one that makes me wonder what this place looked like before gentrification destroyed it
(it's beautiful now:
it would have been a different sort of beautiful then,
a better one,
a purer one,
a real one)
and the lights in the park below me
glisten like the scales of a snake
while the people molded from the sidewalks morph into animate, expressive beings
(they're ants in the daytime:
plastic people in a plastic town
like the walking dead)
they talk, and they laugh, and they shove each other down the concrete stairs:
do they have any idea i'm watching
ten, eleven, twelve, not-quite-thirteen floors above,
perched on the edge of a window,
held out of harm's way by metal bars,
outside the safety of my hotel?
do they have any idea i'm naming them, creating them,
asking who they are, where they've been, where they're going?
does this city at midnight make them feel a little bit immortal like it does me,
like maybe—
like maybe in another day,
like maybe in another life—
like maybe one day they,
too, were one of the gods?
are they thinking what i am,
perched all the way up here?
this is not the kind of thing
man was meant to forget
why did we?

***

this was originally published in ribs :-)