Midlife Crisis in Midtown Manhattan

It’s hard to be alone in the city
when everyone you see is your friend,
and the only goal that's left is to know
every person who lives in the world. To be present
with someone’s eyes, for just one moment,
really means something here, smiles really mean
something.
By the Arc du Triomphe
in Washington Square, with fountains and sun
and bronze saxophones, a drug urchin drags pink chalk
along the asphalt and talks to art dealers in Villini suits.
“Give it love and it will grow,” say the buddhas
and hookahs in the antiques store on the
corner of McDougal and Bleeker.
One stop away
the magic dusk of midtown wafts up in the complex fragrance
of subway exhaust, with tobacco, kebob, and hoisin sauce.
Cops on horses with bayonets and helmets pose for snapshots
before Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. I walk behind a
woman who all the beautiful women passing on the other side,
whose clicking heels fill the night, eye with hate.
There’s ping pong in Bryant Park, and an army of Asian women
with older Caucasian men, that’s how they’re making
the actual conquest, it’s so obvious, but no one saw it coming
‘til it was too late.
Down Madison, one guy says he’s
going to kill me, another he’s going to fuck me,
welcome to the Middle East, where they dress the mannequins
like Italian robots, metallic and shiny and lipstick thick,
where the buttons this season are big and plastic, while
leopard skin is always in, which must make one grow so weary,
but one can easily dream of harps with painted frescos
and dresses of braided hair, and brownstone addresses
with symbols in the stone, and delicatessens
where they still sell Moxie.
The scaffolding
on the Helmsley Building, that life-size Fragonard painting,
where they desire me now to spend my days,
hangs like a veil before all of Park Avenue. When it comes off,
will I be there looking? Will the city look different?
Or will it be the same old terrifying view
on the plans of the people that matter, who send
young men West as they spray on more gold?
The crowds
make me feel too important, like there’s something
that no one has seen. If it wasn’t for Frankie O’Hara,
talking me through the streets with his poems, a step away,
I’d never know that one can be oneself
yet live in others eyes.