Pull, Annul, Impel and Lull

To know this city is to know that fire engine sirens
will wail through the careful sentences with which
you’re trying to regale the inner you as you walk
mutteringly down the skew and slew of Flat Iron
Broadway in the muddled air of middle-afternoon
of nearly middle-June. To know this city is to know your

poise is ever constitutionally altered by her noise, that
your inimitable human sweat will intermix with every last
unfettered little humid bit of all her public, secret,
fated, fetid heavens, hells: subtly but dramatically affect
your body’s smells, which you would miss if you
washed up (which you’ve again decided not to do)

when you got home. To know this city is to know you are
an animal completely doomed to roam feloniously
through her alleyways – too hard to tell from neural
pathways in your skull. To know this city is, for you,
to know that nothing but her steep cacophonies –
her deep capacities – can pull, annul, impel and lull.

.