City of Lights

Rain falls over slick city streets,
clattering on tin roofs as men bustle to meetings
and women chatter inside warm restaurants,
clinking spoons on champagne glasses and toasting
people they've never met, looking for an excuse
to let alcohol tear their insides out,
organ by organ.

In the puddles, rats scurry,
their slithering tails chasing after them
between Prada heels and old receipts
from that little shop on fourteenth street
that gets lost in the crowds but is home
to a million cultures and verifies that New York City
is truly the melting pot of the world.

Masked in gloom, pigeons bristle their feathers
and the subway slices through earth that no longer remembers
the difference between innocence and sin.
Los Vegas, San Francisco, New York-
they're the cities that never sleep
and their neon lights pierce the darkness
with lucrative temptations for body and mind.

Taxi cabs buzz through traffic jams like bumbling bees,
and Times Square shutters under the footsteps
of another rally, another movement, another demand
of thousands of people moving too fast to remember
the sweet juices of the Big Apple they've bitten into.

Another hundred people just got off of the train,
and they're looking around, wondering why
the last hundred people don't even notice the rain.