it’s funny, that most people live in a world where there is just ‘too much noise’ and if only the car alarms would stop wailing and doors would quit slamming and lights would stop changing and the neighbor would quit blasting that damn music at 2(am), that their minds would finally quiet and they’d be able to finally ‘listen’ to what their oil-stained city streets are trying to tell them, but the thing is they’d be one step forward and three steps back from being able to find heads-up pennies and the skins of lovers peeled off the sidewalks with signs flashing ‘stop’ in cherry red letters, as if they would stop when their hearts are beating faster than the sports cars flying by at 200 miles per hour, not giving a damn about cops or death or even living, because, really, have you ever heard of someone who wants to scale twenty story buildings in the dead of night, hoping they’ll find whatever it is they’re looking for at the top, only to realize that it’s on the ground, maybe a star wedged in the asphalt or bullet casings drenched in someone’s blood, that crushing discovery that they were too late to save a stranger’s life but maybe that stranger saved theirs, with a grin on the subway or a hand to balance on in a teeming crowd or a dollar tucked into their back pocket when they weren’t looking, too busy calculating the time it takes to fly to the moon and back, hoping they’ll meet someone who feels as small and as stuck in a city full of ‘too much noise’ as they do, even though they don’t know that it’s the taxi horns and jazz and shattering glass that keeps their feet on solid ground and their souls from fashioning nooses out of discarded plastic bags or swallowing shots of gasoline whole.