The city’s a conundrum,
It isn’t anybody’s friend
With its steel taxicab claws;
Talons from the green glow

Of the stock exchange;
Teeth rooted in the veins of sewers,
Rising to the acid sky,
Shining either in sunlight or in rain

As a child my father placed a bow in my hand
And taught me straight to shoot
The narrow thud of the arrow shaft
Embedding in live prey,

The stilling of cooling blood
And a comfortable piece of praise,
“Son, I couldn’t do better myself,” 
“Son, you’re a man today.”

Outside, the charming voices
Of boulevards and streets
Promise satisfaction, promise
Prey to trail and rape

And while the city trembles me
It leads me to believe
That it’s power can be mine
And all I need to be is part of it

And in the darkness,
In the heat of impulse and the 
Terror of fiery skies
I’ll strike with a weapon improvised.

One mild winter when the snow
Was thin and slush
A deep dark automobile arrived
Carving furrows in the gravel drive

A sickening groan 
From my fathers study issued
Like the pulling an ancient tree’s roots
From the ground

So I’m in two minds,
The mind that fears the cluttered
Babble of the streets,
That keeps me safe within unclean sheets

And the mind that takes a narrow bar
Against a stranger in the dark
On the gravel of a park path,
His blood mingling with the dust

Two minds and neither one 
Displays confidence
And I don’t have a preference
And I’m ambivalent 

She sold the drapes,
The heavy circular table, all our chattels,
Paid off the maid, the serving staff
And we moved away

On the long drive down silence ruled
But as this city like an iceberg loomed
I let loose a whimper and a tear
The steel and the architecture baffling me

I am fractured 
Into two odd pieces
A piece to flee and a piece antagonised,
Filled with disgust and bile
 
A piece on fire
For it’s own gospel and it’s sword
And a piece with the power of cogitation
And the disease of sloth

If only the finding of a narrow exit was as easy
As catching a glimpse of the next easy victim
A lift of a skirt or a head bared,
Facing away from me.