I’d like to thank God and Long Island and the Dutch for giving me the Hallelujah of naked sunbathing 300 feet above Red Hook with Russian dicks and rooftop fellatio atop century old abandoned warehouses with their apathetic dock workers, black netting condemning the building and freeing our nights to watch the sunrise, to camp out in this cement sanctuary closer to the precinct than our parents.
Because who could sleep when there are empty airports at the end of Flatbush and forsaken sugar refineries in Williamsburg all calling my name Hannah Hannah Hannah.
We, the forgotten hulks of Kings County!
And the Prospect Expressway sounds like the Atlantic if you close your eyes.
And Ocean Parkway is all Sinatra in my grandfather’s Lexus, all Jay-Z in my dealer’s Hummer.
And there is a freight line which runs from Canarsie to Bay Ridge, didn’t you know? I can take you there, it’s overgrown with weeds and needles and we’ll climb to the tops of locomotives and stare across the East River.
And barefoot street races in Bensonhurst bring color to the midnight luminescence of the pre-dawn streets as lax mothers watch our drunken hula hooping from the porch.
And college boys write me poetry in subway cars and I wink and tell them I’m 12.
And Crown Heights bed and breakfasts where black boys kiss me till my lips crack.
And I left my virginity in Kensington with a Turkish junkie.
And every night ends tunneling through the Earth on the G train with nowhere to go but everywhere, my heart beating to the pennies in the bum’s paper cup “Stand clear of the closing doors please”.
This borough, this borough!
Oh I’ve climbed the Coney Island parachute jump in a white dress just to double check this planet is really round.
Oh I’ve boiled rice with rainwater in a Gowanus squat where hands touch you in the dark and you don’t care because it’s love it’s love it must be love.
Oh I’ve walked through the tunnels under Church Avenue and listened to the sounds of the rats and the soil and the F, and it was so beautiful I broke down and cried in an emergency exit.
Oh won’t you have me Brooklyn?
Won’t you take me up and lay me down in Greenwood so I can decompose into your chest.
Won’t you fly me over Vinegar Hill like human sky writing just once so I can scream out.
Hallelujah!