Poem That Wants to Be Called the West Side Highway

You can do the work just by starting it. You can

do whatever you want. A bill

is drafted on a train to Albany, or in a black

limousine. Like how one day I walked

the entire length of Manhattan, except I didn’t.

I didn’t finish. Not nearly. How could I?

Stopped as I was by the boat basin. These

credit cards fill with gin

and tonic. They pool with the stuff. Maybe

I get a little lost sometimes,

start thinking I went to Yale. Once I swam

to Governors Island, between the ferries

and freighters. It was like a job you should’ve seen

me quit. Maybe they looked for me. Maybe

it wasn’t someone else’s shift, and then

it was. Sometimes people are just turnstiles.

You have to tell them to keep

turning, keep turning into someone else. The rain

crashes across a cab, and the road

has filled. We’re waterborne. Or whatever

the word is for that little moment

when the heart lifts. Why don’t you devote

yourself the way you once did? It’s

an old answer, and an early

one. The alarm goes off for a while after it

stops. In your face in the bathroom

mirror. You play that little song to look at

your teeth. My teeth. They haven’t been cared for.

The class giggles at my age. This is

my hearing. The chances taken on a new face.