Here in New York, you learn how best to be alone,
Here where you can leave behind your phone, here where you won't need an uber to drive you home,
Here, among the packed express-uptown and local-downtown rushing subway cars,
Here, you can simply disappear into the city's iron veins, and let it take you to where you can forget all that forgetting needs, no matter how far.
It's here where you give into your desires for a season, chasing it down every promise-laced alley;
It's here where you learn how right Ibn 'Arabi was to say that desire is like water from the sea,
That the more you drink of it, the more you thirst. And so, it's here where you learn to let it go,
Here where you spend the season that follows desire learning how to simply be in the world alone.
It's here you learn that you’re as capable of breaking hearts as you are of having yours broken,
Here where you reflect continually on the meaninglessness of all of love's momentary tokens,
Here where you try to understand how someone could hold her face an inch from yours for all the minutes of this hour and the hour that comes anon,
And still leave you only with everyone, from the bodega guy to your oldest confidants, asking you where your signora has gone.
It's here where you find a park in a neighborhood far from home,
Somewhere you and your forlorn love's ghosts-and-memories never roamed,
And find a space within it, under a tree's rustling shade, to melt into the world.
Here, you close your eyes and simply let your thoughts swirl; here you sit, waiting for all your questions' answers to slowly unfurl.
Here where you melt into misery for a moment, as a Strokes song rings an old unfulfilled wish through your mind,
"Can I waste all your time on the sidewalk? Can I stand in your light for just a while?"
But it's also here where a child in Morningside Park, as evening nears, calls you out of your despair
And asks if you, from your greater height, could throw their kite in the air.
And it's here where you suggest instead that they sit on your shoulder and throw it themselves,
And so, take them, high and light o'er your epaules, as you yourself stand on a park bench,
And watch them throw their kite against the rushing wind as, by and by, it comes by,
And turn, turning them on your shoulders as you do, to watch that kite fly against the bright, evening-painted sky.
It's here you wave goodbye, and take the train home,
Reminded of just how much you want children of your own.
It's here where you learn that the mystics, when speaking of desire, were only ever wrong
When they said that it serves no purpose at all.
Here, amid so much life, in this city dedicated solely to its celebration,
Here, you can’t help but find your way back to the roads that promise its creation.
Here, you relearn to love the tantrums and caprices of your heart;
Here, you learn to point it, as it waits for love, to more deserving things: like its art.
Here, you learn to slowly give yourself again the space,
To come back to what makes this life worth living in the first place.
