By: Christopher Johnson

New York, you are a blasphemous monster, a sybaritic Gomorrah, a never-ending explosion of neon lights.

Your subways carve through the sinful soil and snake their way forward, walled with darkened tiles and clanking metal and pillars built in the nineteenth century that are smudged with history and grime and cries of despair.

The trains, running on ancient tracks, scream with anguish as they take desperate curves that collide with animal dreams and nearly crash into the wall of filthy tiles.

We are staying in the Bowery with its oversize graffiti and tilting and dangerous and deceptive signs and a thousand and one shopkeepers selling food and gold and happy-ending massages in rooms that you reach by climbing up dingy and dangerous and lascivious stairs.

The subway car tilts back and forth and rocks me to a disturbing intermittent sleep, a

And I accidentally put my head on the shoulder of a New York stranger, and she pats my head and whispers to me to wake up or I will miss the Number 6 train at Broadway-Lafayette.

The subway stinks of humanity dragged down by a long day’s work and by the dank humidity of a steaming New York spring day in which the air is thick with gases and broken dreams.

In the far far distance, crazy skyscrapers gleam in fake-looking brightness and house ant-people cocooning in their offices and cubicles and doing whatever needs to be doing to keep The Economy going.

Those skyscrapers are distant and irrational and frightening and offputting and dangerous and filled with zillionaires and mysterious accountings and endless meetings and anonymous decisions and strange conferences,

Which I used to be part of but which feel like a whole other life.

I venture to MOMA and stare at Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950 and realized that this is a picture of my brain on fire when I was eighteen years old and burning with neuroses and desires and nightmares and repressions and repressed coitus-dreams.

For the first time in my life, I understand Pollock.

I go to the café at MOMA and order an elegant Lyonnaise salad with sauteed worms that are still alive, and I feel so very very sophisticated staring at New Yorkers and tourists and guessing who is from here and who is from Estonia or Romania or Wherever.

New York, you assault my senses as I walk east on 44^th Street and cross Broadway and am attacked by Times Square, assaulted by bulging, bullying lights that blink on and off with tendentious and unrelieved aggression that will not let me go.

I stand still at 44th and Broadway and feel the desperation of humanity as humanoids jibber jabber and walk and stare at the outlandish neon that explodes over us,

And I feel the despair of feet that dance on pavement packed down by millions of lost souls yearning for the fulfillment of their dreams in the

Vast
And
Anonymous
City
Of
New
York.