You know first stop is always Istanbul,
from Christ-converted Constatine unto
the tattered coat upon a stick and through
one New-York mayor’s fiscal opuscule—
Dardanelle-to-Hudson stepping stool
of first-class fares and frequent billets-doux,
Byzantium-on-Hundson revenue
for what?—some jerseys, some dull travel pool
of junkets? Once we laid awake and dreamed
of Hagia Sophia’s jeweled tiles, tinkling
fountains, palace eunuchs, fabulous
Eastern riches, pashahs, oh, it seemed
unearthly, magic—hadn’t the slightest inkling
it could become so grotty, dull, and sus.

There is one mayor of New York City, and that
is Eric Adams. Singular as El
Shaddai, fire-ringed as Ahab’s hell-
mouthed stab into the white void, rat-
killingly prodigious as a feral cat,
indelible as August’s garbage smell
from farthest Rockaway to Riverdale:
father-figure, lord and autocrat—
the feds will try to flay him, let them try;
how can one unskin a man so layered
in foreign soccer kit and glinting swag,
both cherry tree and ever-untold lie:
salvation’s self, the prayer and prayered-
to: won’t go quietly, will get the bag.

We need Eric Adams to succeed
as mayor because he’s mayor at this time,
heuristic method of self-same paradigm—
I AM, as Yahweh, Popeye both decreed:
born of birthlessness, I antecede
myself, by being supersede the crime
and/or the crimes which creep, and creeping climb
the Gracie basement like a millipede,
its feathered legs in strange coordination,
marvel that so few nerves could make it walk
serenely till the light! the falling shoe!
the crunch! Once-vaunted future of the voting nation
squished before it could evolve and talk,
and yet . . . it made its wings in wax, and flew.

His passion for justice sacrifices com-
plexity; he loves his neighbor as
himself too simply, from moral Alcatraz
he birdmans all the guns out of the scrum
of magazineland’s packed obamasum,
last green and gassy stop before it has
to shit its takes, thinkpieces, all that jazz—
tooting reassurance: we’re not dumb.
The writers are dismayed, and seized by fear
and trembling; heard the wailing shofar and
they cried—the Day of Judgment, not for us!
It shall not be inscribed, it is not clear—
we cannot explicate the Holy Land—
heave-ho our former colleague: comes the bus.

I’m sitting in a Romanian court with 30 women
I’ve slept with and they’re all yelling at the judge:
I’m innocent. Bitter as persimmon
and as sweet is fate’s cruel kludge,
chimera of comeuppance, punishment,
poor timing, choice of venue, pure bad luck—
what a world, to make judicial sacrament
of one man’s overweening urge to fuck
and found a cult, be bald, and be online,
giving dating advice to Anglo tweens—
Is that proper when you’re thirty-nine
or so? A rented sports car, man of means-
manqué: whatever is upon me proved,
I never did, nor no man ever bruv’d.