Manhattan, should I explain the shifted sensation of the spliffed sparked nights spent salubriously? Should I relate the beautiful beer bonking balking benches bending bodily in the moonlight? Should I try to investigate the hyperbole of these lonesome expectations, or should I sit back on this feather and let the winded trees grasp me towards my fall? Should I precede this revelry of the insane, or should I crouch on a couch beside a warm body and the tightness of the lips? Manhattan, talk to me. Let this fingering wind on my hair be your insalubrious messenger, your winged feet on the cloudy horizon bearing the sunless quadrants of our love to admire.
Manhattan, take the remains of what I am and throw them into the River, take closely my heart, for closely I give it to you, and make it a skylight of the city. Take these hours and these mindless thoughts from my head and build them up to the sky and the night on its glorious darkness, take the white nights and the earth full of flowers and sing to me the Seven Towers of a fallen Troy. Manhattan, shift the blossom of the swan-lilies and the roses in the park and make of them a crown to rest where she lieth.
Manhattan, call upon us the vision and the poet, the prophet and the sign, let us see the line dividing sky from sea and tree from grass, let us hear the rustling of the leaves on the Autumn lawns and the drizzle of the morning-fall, let the windows be open and the doors ajar with the dialects of the city swarming our thoughts, let the moonlit midnight pass unnoticed by these eyes and these hands, let us perpetrate, Manhattan, let us live to die.
Manhattan, a plead to the snowy cradle of the banks as the sounded torches trumpet well afar on the distant plains, hear the reverse of the stars as the fires burn on the Eastern border, weigh the poundings of the ocean and the rushing of the trains into one cold measure, try the double blue-lights driving through the clouds and wear them to a sigh and a whisper, a bottle running empty on a sidewalk.
Manhattan, purify these sacrifices and accept our refusal of mirth and shadowy lamps, take away the lingering traces of the skin and let the new flesh mingle with the flesh and the new soul mingle with the body once more, let us perform the sacred ritual, Manhattan, deliver us from our forsaken piety.
Manhattan, weave the old angel moonlight dreams into our sleeping eyes and hush the tattoo of the underground and the pale shinning of the ribbons, pray the bridges towards our lying bodies and let us call upon your silver name endless and eternal like the bending reeds of the river.
Manhattan, take these lights right off our naked backs, take these ashen smokes and these street-rattling chimes; show us the vastness, the profundity of your Night.
Manhattan, in the dark-cloud naked morning bright, with the thousand lights of the streets heading right through your purple eye-lids, standing in the middle of it all as the windless furies split apart on some alleyway, wet soaked and soaked wet with drizzle down your bone marrow, I hear the rushing cars, the moonlit ribbons of the cabs and the iron feet of the crowd treading all over you, the empty veins of the subway going below you and into you in one sole movement, in one motion of hard cold metal,
Manhattan, a splinter of crystal crushing you with shattered silence, and from the vapor crocodile rat-vamped pavement in which I lie half-dead and half-nowhere beneath the riverbank and the bridge I can hear the lightning voice of New York City with its concrete tongue and its sky-height teeth:
I’ll leave you with nothing. I’ll vacuum the soul right out of your lungs and you won’t even quiver. You are nothing. Shake. Shake baby shake and nothingness is all I’ll command you to own up and release towards the nothing of the world. Grasp, touch, reach, fornicate and consume and consummate into the ice-cold blazing fires of the world. Order. Chaos. Ghostlike into the midnight darkness. A voice, maybe. A spirit, maybe. A body, maybe. No more. Nothing. Let it be this void your void. Unrest your eyes from this weariness and see, you are left with nothing. I’ll leave you with nothing. I’ll give you nothing, and take everything from you.