But: Oh!

“In the room the women come and go,
Talking of Michelangelo…” T.S. Eliot, …Prufrock


Yes – this is a temporary perch – but: oh! –
what pleasure that you got away with it! Chance
and destiny and greed – the last a blunt evisceration
of the euphemism “love” (which doesn’t touch
the least scintilla of that urgent and rapacious need) –

convened to leap upon the prospect like a starving
mother lion: come, and come and go, and generate
another scion of the realm!: gorge yourself, and feed
your cub, and rub the blood into your feline fur until
deep-seatedly repeatedly unspeakably replete:

I literally cannot find the words for what it means to me
to look out on my faintly iridescent-feathered wedded
birds – fire-escape duet of widget-pigeons – these
apotheoses of the city’s rampant ingenuity: its rabid
mix of animate and inorganic bits: the marriage of

the concrete to the mist: this feast of prostitute artistes
for whom there’ll never be a breather: cannot get
enough and couldn’t. Shouldn’t be here either, but
I am, and though I know I’m doomed to go as well
as come, let there be no doubt where I am from.


.