The wind screams around the corners,
My hair lashing my face painfully,
My frozen fingers gripping frozen bars
My face pressed against its frigid surety.

Beneath this circle of arctic existence
The world lays splayed out before me.
Proud buildings vying for supremacy,
Each scraping the sky with their spires,
All daring the sun to touch their tips.

Windows upon windows, towering high above veracity.
Each vast mirror reflecting the other,
Splintering reality into a million pieces.
A million people, a million ants crawling over the steel graveyard.
Elevators lifting them higher above the earth, so that they would not know solid ground
If they fell.

Diminutive, miniature lives
Played out underneath the shadows of the planes on the pavement
Crazed and livid, blaming each other for
Living horizontally in a vertical world.
And the towers that should steep them in gratitude loom high overhead
Almost pityingly casting their shade over the ants that dreamt them into reality.

And I grip the bars ever harder, afraid that I will slip off and plummet.
Into this city pulsing with life so fiercely
It’s as if it knows if it were to slow down, to pause,
It would fall apart.
And time races at a breakneck speed,
All eyes on the ground, each foot before the first,
Forgetting about the last.

And if one or two of them would glance upward
Toward the sky they try so hard to conquer
They might be humbled by the pinpricks of brilliant light,
And they might understand.
But, of course, you can’t see stars
In New York City.