ROB COOK The Lord of New York

ROB COOK

The Lord of New York

commands the Thursday night inebriation from his tagged ledges and windows in a building that is mostly the sound of taxis done in by red lights that don’t end.

On the day he lets the rain back into his limp, he will eat chicken bone dinners with others who’ve given up their names.

Today he took his coat to meet another coat in Elizabeth, New Jersey and was not kidnapped.

Today he returned as a smile only—no flesh, no cop bulletin, no one wanted alive.

He’s learned everything about his apartment-

how much sunlight costs when it grazes the curtains, or when it goes missing in the walls, the mirror, the cupboards, the moths birthing in each of its nails.

He climbs the stairs to the roof and traps clouds with Mr. Bilik and Mr. Cap.

Tonight they vote on a maintenance committee. Tonight they inform on each other. Tonight they curse with their beat-up fingers.

He watches the easy annihilation of sunset—

he waits and follows the cigar smoke stairwell back to the bridge lilies inside the kitchen losing their petals,

losing their petals and no longer touching.

Tonight he returns to New Jersey and finds the two coats snuggling in a cemented bed of bibles.

“Why do my eyes feel like bricks?” he asks.

“Why do my eyes feel like everything they’ve lost?”

The city does not go looking even for what it still remembers— “I was offered kisses that weren’t real,” he says-

God’s little boy sitting in a chair by himself at the bottom of the sea.