New. York.

Dark. 
We move through the bowels of the city in the middle of a dim afternoon. The sporadic flashing of florescent lights attached to the hard, graffiti illuminated cement walls are a flash and then gone. 
My fellow companions, the other subway travelers, look asleep, or maybe drugged. Eyelids closed, heads lolling against walls and dark windows. I feel as I am the only one of us awake. Watching. Listening, to the click and hiss and rumble of the wheels beneath us on the straight steel of the rails. But then as we pull into a brightly lit station and the fluorescent light illuminates their faces, they come alive again, eyes opening and feet fluttering to move, to stand, to depart. 
The doors chime and close with a click and then we shoot off back into the dark. The stupor falls again around me. 
I feel like I could get up and move between their limp bodies, letting my own body sway and move, dancing wildly, my feet tapping out the rhythm in my brown leather boots. 
New York. 

Hard. 
The faces. Carved like marble. Moving as if they are a part of some fluid, moving sculpture, filling the sidewalks with their black buckled boots and cigarette ash. 
But there, a spark, a flash. In the deep of someone's eye. Alive. 
New York. 

Inspiration. 
The quiet street. Morning light flooding the pavement, dark fingers of shadow to the north and west. The brief hot aroma of fresh coffee, lilting on the air, and the good smell of earth as you cross the empty street towards the sun filed park, it's trees beckoning like friends. 
The thoughts in your head buzz and sparkle - dancing until they are bigger than ideas; they're plans.

Music. Midnight. Waiting for the L train. Descending down the dirty subway steps. The sound echoing up the worn stairs, off the gritty paint peeling ceiling - the music - a bass saxophone, drum and guitar - seeping beneath your skin, like shimmering drops of summer rain.  The magic of music . It moves my feet. 
I feel my heartbeat quicken and my stomach lift. Because the song he plays, that well dressed hipster man, sweating slightly in the July heat in his leather shoes and felt Fedora, throwing his soul into this music. 
The song he plays, is the song that plays inside of me. I am in the song with him and the song is in me and I didn't know it before this moment. I don't know what will be next, what note, what gleaming chord, but as it emerges I recognize it because it is in my bones already. Written as humanity. 
I feel my soul leaping up, thumping fists of delight against the cage of my ribs, my bones in untapped delight, of unsought recognition.
It's the same song flowing inside my veins. And I have to dance. There is no other way around it. 
Humanity. Dripping in the humid summer air. Inspiration. Midnight magic. 
New York. 

New York Breeds love. It breeds kindness and crudness. Directness and rushing. It strives. It's sexy. It's controlled and wild. 
It is a beast. One day you find it devouring you, in its fire laden jaws; but the next you ride, triumphant, upon its mighty back, sword held aloft in hands grown thick with city callouses, as the beast beneath you breaths fire upon the world. -- But this time it's fire isn't to inflict pain or destruction  -- it isn't to ravish the world - no. It is to reforge the world through the hottest heat of fire and the strongest of winds. From atop this beast's back you gain a view of the wreckage, and the purified, you can see it clearly.
    Because once you move through the fire and the storm you find yourself walking triumphant; out through the ash, the cigarette laden streets, the smoke of a burning building floating on the air you pass through, arms held aloft in victory, because, more than anything, you are learning how to live, in your own flawed and radiant skin. The one you were born into, and the one you'll die in. Concentrated and distilled until your soul is what you know, what you understand, more than any map, you've ever read, or book, or bit of written verse. Or any compass you've been told to carry. Your soul is what fills you up. 

New York. 

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