Yellow taxis weave up and down the

Avenue of the Americas,

horns honking like it’s a language.

Learn how to drive, one cabbie rages, 

Fuck you, auto-responds the other.

The city’s beat brash and unapologetic –

until the sounds soften

in Strawberry Fields.

A busker is singing Imagine, and

Lennon’s lyrics drift through the trees.

We sit on a park bench,

sharing thick cookies

from a sugary pink box, remarking

how pharmacies here

sell sweets

next to diabetes pills.

And how smoke shops

are popping up like Starbucks,

cannabis curling in the air

between the joggers in the park.

New York contradictions,

casual as breathing.

Westward to the

Empire State Building,

we ride its Art Deco elevator

into the sky.

We kiss there,

like every romcom

promised we would.

Below, the streets lie flat-ironed

into a neat, numbered grid,

like a blueprint for dreams

for the city that never sleeps.

Down and out again, all the way

to the Statue of Liberty.

She holds her tablet

like a laptop logged in with

Independence_04July.

Later, on the subway,

a man with hollow eyes

and stale breath

swigs from his paper bag;

freedom looks very different

when you’re just getting by.

Back above ground,

Wall Street towers,

and there’s Fearless Girl

facing down the Stock Exchange,

like she’s got more to say.

I pause

to stand by her side,

listening for it –

while elsewhere,

girls hang off Brooklyn Bridge

for the perfect Insta shot.

The city posing behind them,

pre-filtered for mood, vibrancy, drama,

but mostly,

the capture of being alive.