derekpoetrydump | (no subject)

the art

to live in a city is to live inbetween
to love that city is--
the phrase "liminal" is wrong
it is the taint
to love that city is to slide on the knife-edge
between the grief of continual loss
(as your favourite dance hall becomes
another victim of another wrecking ball)
and the delight of the new lover
(in scrubland opens a new museum
whose remits screams: people like you
yeah people like you
we love you too; we love you too)

to live in a city is an art:
you must learn new semiotics
the auguries of graffiti
the maps of ever-shifting blocked roads
the language of dodging.

to love in that city is also an art:
you are no longer two people on the desert island
of the world's shittiest village--
no longer prisoners in the same cell.
anyone you love in a city, you have chosen to love
so choose well.

to live in a city is the art of surrender
to the tides of humanity and the savage dereliction
of what once constituted personal space:
it is the art of finding solitude
with your nose rammed into a stranger's neck;
it is the act of creating silence
in a crowd at 120 decibels;
it is the power that flows through you
when you discover that you are now
incapable of getting lost.

to love that city is to always be found:
it is the choice to be known, or to be invisible.
to bring meaning, whole and entire
to each microscopic interaction--
--and to create in each the curtailed ecosystem
of a stifled love affair.
to love that city is to know what it feels like
to note the fall of each sparrow
and to let them hit the ground
because the song demands it.

to live in a city, to love that city
is eight million epithets for every warm body
that passes regularly through your periphery;
it is i-spy with the language flags
on the baristas who could outfox you in sacred tongues:
it is the potted life history of men
you will never see again at three or four A.M.
who just need to know someone is listening.
(he was a translator for the british army
in afghanistan; now he sells jewellery in camden market:
it is hard. he wants you to write a book about it).

to tend to that city is to redistribute the coins you found in hampstead
into the pockets of the rough sleepers you meet in hounslow;
it is to feed the pigeons of charing cross the crumbs of the croissant you craved in camden passage:
to tend to that city is to tape
on every high place
hand-penned signs
begging strangers to keep their hearts beating.

to love a city is to take the heart that feeds a village
and clone it a hundred thousand times
until it refracts off the river's oily surface
until it shines; until the art that knits together
some single household
grows into something
divine.