While you reminisce about your salad days;
The bands of your youth.
What formed you.
Asphalt hot and sticky.
Peeling gum off your shoe.
The City.
It’s monuments.
and it’s extra gritty.
The homeless black men
The same toothless grin
White hair.
The escalator that never works.
Looking backwards.
No forward momentum.

I am shedding the old skin.
left it on the bathroom floor
scrawl black sharpie on the stall.
“Radio wuz here”

I am reaching forward
as time steps back.
now there is no longer a working map.
trading past for a future opening fast.

Even as I lay dying
and this has never been so clear.
I am finally trying to get to you.
I will be right there.

Draft 2