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.