WAITING FOR MY SHIP TO COME

For a second, I thought I was in a brick townhouse in Hell’s Kitchen
My prototypical New York
Where the pigeons still chain smoke
And the cockroaches still double park
And the stray cats still jerk each other off for dope
My father is there, but his sunglasses aren’t clip on’s
My mother is there, but her hair is phosphorescent blue
My grandfather is there and his corgi is more famous than anyone living in Manhattan Plaza
 
But I am in Queens
Staring at a blinking cursor
Waiting for the words to come
 
I’m not saying I need to be in Hells Kitchen to be in New York
I’m saying I need to be in an apartment where a beat poet dropped dead in the kitchen
Or didn’t actually, but somebody else wrote a poem about it
Or somebody wrote a poem in general somewhere in the building
Or at the very least wrote a column about brunch on acid for Vice or something
Fuck, wrote a grocery list in cursive, I’m not picky
Wrought words on paper
 
But I am in Queens
Listening to the hammers of greed banging away on the new unit downstairs
Waiting for my ship to come

Let it be a motorboat
Something I can see out the front of while I steer it along the piers
You never know, there might be a bad bitch in a kayak
I might peep the titties but you know I wouldn’t leave a ring with her
I mean she’s kayaking in the Hudson
She probably lives in like Inwood or some shit
And doesn’t have ice cream in the freezer
I can’t get with that
 
Let it be a sailboat
I'm not in a hurry
A ferry, even
That's that off-brand Titanic
I’d ride a fucking dolphin to Hoboken and back
If when I arrived, you were waiting for me
With keys to a brownstone on the west side with a stoop like Arnold’s boarding house
Or wherever it was that Dino Spumoni lived
Or not Dino but the other guy, the one who wrote the words to the songs?

Let me be part of somebody's history
I don't care if it’s make believe
I'm nostalgic for a neighborhood that doesn't exist
And a childhood full of stickball and open fire hydrants that never happened
And the words I wish I wrote with my finger in wet concrete
That might still be there after I'm gone
Buried under Port Authority with a box of cannolis and a fresh pair of 1's
For the kid living in the apartment built on that sidewalk
Who will live in a city with damn near no heritage left
Who will catch the sun's reflection off the Hudson river in a peculiar way late one afternoon
And put his pen to the paper
And his feet in my footsteps

Until then, I am in Queens
Trying to be somebody
Waiting for you to come home