One Night in New York - Take 2

I may be guilty of some blurring of categories here, in that my companion-blog Froogville is usually home for my poetry. However, this is a companion piece to the long 'napkin poem' I posted on this site last week; and even though it doesn't involve drinking, it is about a 'Lost Love' (perhaps the greatest of them all, in fact..... well, it's not like there's been that many of them), which is another of the avowed themes here on Barstool Blues. And the scene, the mood here described did lead to drinking fairly shortly afterwards!

In fact - a curious case for comparison, this - it was written about the very same evening as the 'napkin poem', Siberia; but unlike that, which was composed on the night itself, deep in my cups, this little piece arrived some time afterwards - my sober mind's later reflections on the experience.

I wonder if New York still has this problem with its payphones being in permanent disrepair. I haven't had a need to use one for ages. However, back in the mid-90s I suffered with them a lot whenever I was passing through; it seemed theft and vandalism were rife, and the maintenance budget was non-existent.

I wasn't actually trying to phone the 'Lost Love' that night. I was trying - and failing - to phone the friend who was supposed to be putting me up for my 2 or 3 night layover in Manhattan.... but somewhere during the course of that fraught hour or two hauling my luggage around the centre of the city in search of a functioning phone, as my exhaustion and despair at the situation grew.... well, they seemed to morph into the melancholy that I was still feeling over my breakup with this woman (The Evil One, it was), and the thought occurred to me that I might phone her if I could, that I'd like to phone her; but then I checked myself, realised that it would have been foolhardy, was relieved that it appeared to be impossible. So I went off to that bar 'Siberia' (which I'd just read about in the inflight magazine) to drown my sorrows instead.

Anyway, enough background. Here's the poem:



Six weeks later, I nearly called her....


Every payphone in New York is broken
(no change there)

And you would never have heard me anyway

Not above the babble of starstruck tourists
Blundering about Times Square like dazed moths
Not above the ecstatic whoop of delinquent rollerbladers
Not above the demented bellowing of fire-trucks
Not above the cacophonous derision of taxi horns
Not above the immense sigh of steam
Seeping always from the city's volcanic innards

No, you would never have heard me anyway,
And no change there

Too much background noise:
That was always our problem