"My friends, let us love what we love" -- Van Gogh
Look, Brooklyn, we've had a steep beginning.
But I'm grateful for five-foot-two inches
Of tremendous shortness,
A nose I can really breathe through
And only a fraction of Dante's judgement and allegories
And even fewer Beatrice motifs.
Hedonist, luck's conductor though exiled,
My leading credo is originality (and I say it
Over and over): women have flocked to me
With bells on, money slumps in my lap and jingles me.
Good health enjoys being in my body
And on Sunday mental stability swills vodka in my head.
All virtues of Stoicism sugarplum my hands!
I would live forever if somebody else didn't need the space.
Meanwhile, at night, should any scholiast
Ask where the sexy moonbeams have sped,
He may telescope in my comforter, peer into zodiac argot
there.
But never footnote what he learns.
A Sagittarius of sparrows flies over my Brooklyn flat
And notices the quiver in my third-floor lungs.
Brooklyn, we burrow in the Hudson's ultimate circle where
Dante weeps in triplicate
That for factions, to err is human and to forgive,
Divisive; we echo that Florentine wanderer's realms
Inside our divinity
Of downtown, midtown, uptown --
From hell to the working out to the bleary bliss,
Where no gods hear our rhymes, though the moribund listen;
All we know of past labor, all we know of desire,
Subway through cavernous brains
Where, though no guide calm our fears,
The last exit inescapably is a forming constellation.
-- Edward Locke