Come Back

I told the subway
before I left,
I'd come home someday.
My toes thumped
a message to the earth,
a morse code
saying 
please let me stay.

I whispered to the misted
towers
and screamed in silence
to the trees,
I'll come back 
I'll come home,
please wait for me.

Because Midtown
coddled me
in the sweet night sounds
and the Freedom Tower
sang with soul,
and I knew the pigeons
in Washington Square Park
from somewhere else before.
With golden eyes
they cooed
for me to stay.

I came home
and I knew,
it was here
I'd been born
before, sometime
many moons ago
with a spirit humming
bright in my bones.

Come home darling
please,
cried the scaffolding,
cried the gargoyles.

I will someday
go home,
where my heart
rests in bodegas,
where my spirit wanders
the basketball courts
that blast with sport
and music in the daylight.

The thrumming of train cars
is what lies with my pulse,
the wind in my hair
blows down from Harlem.

Broken churches
with iron gates
across from gleaming
towers,
these are my chilling
bones,
the brittle vessels
trying to get me 
to where I belong.

Oh, baby
the neon lights
my skin,
and sends the shivers
again, my aching feet
carry on across the blocks
and blocks.

Home
is an island with
a million bridges,
a million breaths,
and one million
jewel-faced 
songs.