My city is a series of lights and shadows
Stretching out beneath me, piling up into high rises
And walling out the horizon
In every direction
It is a cement and steel cat
With filthy paws
Sprawled out
On the naked lap of a God
Who has fallen asleep watching TV

Unsupervised we go on honking our horns into the distance
While planes come and go over head
Just high enough to let our cell phone towers poke at the sky
Making sure
If a child even gets the idea to look up
Their minds will never wander

Everyone who lived in cold war America
Knows their town will be bombed first
But I feel like the one in a million
Who knows which ones should

We who are so full of hate we only have enough room
For the love for ourselves
You can see it in the faces of our homeless who lay on sidewalks
Cooking in the sun
They know us better than to ask for help

If we be anything
—I pray to that sleeping God in the televisions glow
That it be resigned
Resigned to fate and to facts
That we will never be anything but an expanse that stood between something
Between a past that built a city from nothing
And a future that’s better than us
We few million angry non contributors
Who drive with one hand on the horn
And the other in a permanent middle finger
Ready to say hello to the first person
Who inconveniences us