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, and eat

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 poses behind them,

pre-filtered for mood, vibrancy, drama,

but mostly, the capture of being alive.