One Last Morning.

as students, they promised we’d write best about what we knew,
yet we write mostly of love and death
, and still know nothing 

it’s just that I’m swaying in a feeling here and struggling to name it,
as I sit marginally up in bed in a fifth-floor apartment in Manhattan,
having traveled the three-thousand miles on the belief
in something seemingly pure 

I can say with certainty there is a mixtape for this moment
, even though I’ll never actually hold it
, even though it could only ever be compressed, at best
, like our moment 

below, the sputtering engine of the traffic of everything
, from the filtered window view through safety bars and fire escapes,
amplifies the silence in the room 

and I wonder whether I’m safer out there or up here
, where our hearts haven’t the same safety bars protecting us
, where they haven’t the same fire escapes to flee to or leap from 

, where gravity is nonpartisan.