Leaving New York - B. Dolan

6:05, Brooklyn Bridge:

Failed and tongue-tied

Body aching, hands shaking, bloody inside

Still alive

Sunrise like a pillar of fire

Still running like the static on a blank channel

Sunken to the bottom of the barrel of a gun

Braced against the railing looking straight into the sun

Like I was waiting for someone to burn a picture in my mind…

Like i could recite scripture off the lids of my eyes…

Fishing in the East River for a reason to die

Voices whispered in my mind, I believe they were mine

Another pilgrim come to find that the bridge is a lie, and

There’s nothing on the other side…

I was told to pick my battles.

This isn’t my war

My fight is with myself.

I’m leaving New York

Leaving my prayer rug in the apartment off Van Cortlandt

Caught in constant paranoia coughing someone’s jagged hallelujah

Buildings like a burning cross, withdrawal

The drive north, all five burroughs fall

Lizards listen through the walls, born into this funeral

News of war from city hall, subway station, FDR

Tanks and guards, riot squad, movement of the violent mob

I dissolve

Fall apart

Dusted in the dark, watching the war start…

They’re going to send us to the deserts of Mars

Where we’ll die or go crazy with our legs blown off

Don’t want to suffocate in space

While God and the State face off

Flags waving in the grey dawn

Better to break north

I was told to pick my battles.

This isn’t my war

My fight is with myself.

I’m leaving New York

I never found solid ground

But slept in a burning bed

There’s a couple landlords

With a bounty on my head

Never learned to bend my neck

Or to worship the dead

Metro card expired;

hop a turnstile and then jet

Was I a coward to abandon

The broken down mechanics

That crowned Biggie Smalls as the King of Atlantis?

«Like trees to branches, cliffs to avalanches»

The sea in which she vanished…

Lost Kingdom of Jay-Z and Def Jam Cannibals

Beating a dead break on the decks of the Titanic

I am it but I can’t fit

So when the sky fell

I felt like one of the guilty

With the populace in lockstep

Ready to come and kill me

Did Providence demolish the buildings

That rust and rot beneath the Hudson?

All of it came to nothing

And the devil’s still running…

And the devil’s still running…

I was told to pick my battles.

This isn’t my war

My fight is with myself.

I’m leaving