I Love New York

I love New York, it’s a
great, big, beautiful blowjob to the mind
and that’s why everyone wants to come here (pun intended).
I love New York it’s true America like Wyoming
is true west, only more so.
I love New York with its beautiful symmetry
of Manhattan street grids, the neat criss-cross of east and west
like threads in a fishnet stocking,
and because of four teen boys with a boom box
working the plaza at B'way and 51st ,
and because of the bones of Dee Dee and Joey Ramone,
singing from the stage at CBGB’s.
I love New York because of Toys in Babeland
where I can choose between at least 102 different kinds of dildos.
I love New York because I can buy kasha knishes from Mrs. Stahls
out in Brighton Beach or shop for books at the Strand
or go to art shows in Soho where there is a photo
of a young Allen Ginsberg standing naked and grinning
besides an equally naked and grinning Gregory Corso.
I love New York where the streets are paved with spit and sex,
what comes next and fat-tongued voracious hungers,
I love New York because of the tomato plants
growing in a vacant lot on Saratoga Avenue in Brownsville, Brooklyn,
I love New York because New York girls have the best legs in the world,
and because of its feuding politicians, carnival of lying, lice bitten saints,
quick change artists, fan dancers, fly-by-night-jewelers,
drug dealers, gender benders and has been- wannabes of all ages,
I love New York, a rhinoceros in the eye of convention,
it’s fat as a fart and it screeches like a cat in heat,
it can fool me into thinking
I’ll live forever despite the tombstones I see,
growing like forests of Chicklets,
when I am driving north through Queens on the BQE,
I love New York, it’s an anarchist nation,
a bump and grind of funky out-of step elation,
I love how the New York night beguiles me,
its dark fingers filled with memories,
I used to see the tarantulas mate with the centipedes
on the old, banished Forty-Second Street.
I love New York, the home of Hiphop and Ralph Kramden,
it bites me, entices me, it’s Shanghai, on the subway
I get to sit next to sexy, exotic men,
I love New York because before 9/11 I took it for granted
but now I know New York is a hero for our time,
I love New York, it is whiskey in my bottle,
it moves me full throttle, like true love,
like an everlasting, twisting, bitching,
yearning, burning hand in my glove.