Cocaine

We drank our faces off until the sun arrived,
Night after night, and most of us survived
To waft outside to sunrise on Second Avenue,
And felt a kind of Wordsworth wonderment—the morning new,
The sidewalk fresh as morning dew—and us new, too.

How wonderful to be so magnified.
Every Scotch and soda had been usefully applied.
You were who you weren't till now.

Suddenly with a shy, sad grace
She turns to me her lighted face,
And I, who hear some idle phrase,
Watch how her wry lips move
And guess that the poor words they frame
Mean naught for they would speak the same
Message I read in the dark flame
Within her eyes, which say, “I love.”
But I can only turn away.

I, that have heard the deep voice break
Into a sing-song, sobbing shake,
Whose flutter made my being quake,
What ears have I for women's cries?
I, that have seen the turquoise glaze

When the windows of the West Side clash like cymbals in the setting sunlight,
And when wind wails amid the East Side’s aerials,
And when, both north and south of thirty-fourth street,
In all the dizzy buildings,
The elevators clack their teeth and rattle the bars of their cages,
Then the children of the city,
Leaving the monkey-houses
of their office-buildings and apartments,

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