I love the fat rats of New York
Don't think I don't see you
Scurrying over the grimy sleepers
When our F train passes over you
I know you go still as if better to feel
The breath of your god
Who passes over you so close
Your dirty fur is blown about
I love the high windows through which
One glimpses the mystery
Of other lives
As represented by a bit of pink cloth
That will do for a curtain
Love thinking of all the writers
Especially the ones who didn't make it
Let's make one up his name was Mark
You never heard of him
He drank at one of Auden's dives
And if he was there too early
The bartender would tell him he couldn't
Serve him yet because he couldn't possibly
Have written many pages in the novel
He joked was working on him
Considering how late he'd been
At the bar the night before
And Mark who everyone said was a mensch
They called him the Apostle
And he had real talent if only he didn't
Also have a drinking problem
When he was out of money
He was always out of money
He'd shoplift a bottle of Listerine and walk
Down 5th swishing blue poison
Like it was normal only he swallowed it
When the bartender told him
Go home Mark and write
Marke would nod as if
At the declaration of some formal decree
And return to his sad flat
Where he sat looking at the blank page
Curling like birch bark up out of the typewriter
Until he knew he could get away
With going back to the bar
Though the bartender would know
He hadn't written a word from his eyes
But serve him anyway
Because Mark was a mensch
A real one the bartender would say later
To anyone who would listen
I love cities like this cities where thousands
Are born every day to replace
The thousands who die every day
In sad rooms suffering whatever end
Of life care their families can afford
And on the last day maybe the bitch
Of a nurse who never so much as smiled at him
Realizing he's dying
(It's Mark the guy his friends call
The Apostle) squeezes his hand and says
I won't be too far behind you baby
Iambic pentameter he tells her
What?
But like everyone always says
I could never live here