the city
By Niall Power
My own fangs distract me from
You
who was lying and told me I breathe
rapture
into a glass and let the fog take
*
a highway on the west side
You are the mouth of the Hudson
I don’t want to be home
if that means I am not moving in your
direction
If the needle that scratches the
bottom of the darkness
is the top of your skyline
leave me be on the ground
With the shame of the pretty people
on their way out to try and impress themselves
by impressing each other
With the swollen pride of the rats
whose history is richer than the billionaires
who think this town belongs to them
*
Once I lay in a twin bed
covering my body in nothing but dirt
and I was nothing but where my body was
An Aerial view formed an imagery of
everything that pulsed in nothing but
the city 
The silence of an avenue in the middle of the night distracted the beating of a diseased heart
for as long as it took to find its footing
*
As a boy you started too big to be the smallest city on earth And you grew small enough to be a
prison
Before you took me and splayed me out
into your avenues and introduced me to angels
who beat me into the arms of the devils who took the time to heal me
*
How many times can a man love one island
From the amount of entries you would think
it were the veins into the heart of an elephant
A hidden implant of despair
A disappearing act of violence and the only success that can ever count
Peel the paint off the outdoor plants
and circle the parts of each park I got too high to stand in
I can count the mistresses on my toes
A grid system of anxious monkeys and
only bugs survive to make proper maps
Hold me in your tentacles and soothe the spots between my skin and my blood
*
The only consistent
besides the way my own spit smells on the back of my own hand
is the noises you make and the shadows
you steal from the bricks
Before you give back and before you laugh
tell me meditation is useless in the face of
what the women in the outer boroughs can bring me
*
God has been philosophized into irrelevance here
into a soul that’s been paved over
What’s right and wrong has been buried under a street that existed
only for a minute
You already never ended
You’ve turned me into a statue and replaced my heart with yours
like
you never existed without me
*
There are fingers in my shoes now
And when I walk I feel your skin grow old
It’s like you’ve watched my insides turn ill
Implanted me with a burning in my stomach
that's only medicine is faceless teething
You feed me with your time
and your separation is nothing without my body here
I don’t exist
Niall Power's first collection of poetry and fiction, Fall Risk, was published in 2018 Michelkin Publishing. He works as a freelance creative copywriter for companies like Nike and JUUL and has had a couple poems published in some literary magazines. He loves literature and art and is simply excited that Heliopause exists to churn out content for the creatives out there.
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