Things to Do in New York (City)
By Ted Berrigan
for Peter Schjeldahl
Wake up high up
frame bent & turned on
Moving slowly
& by the numbers
light cigarette
Dress in basic black
& reading a lovely old man’s book:
BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN
change
flashback
play cribbage on the Williamsburg Bridge
watching the boats sail by
the sun, like a monument,
move slowly up the sky
above the bloody rush:
break yr legs & break yr heart
kiss the girls & make them cry
loving the gods & seeing them die
celebrate your own
& everyone else’s birth:
Make friends forever
& go away
Ted Berrigan, "Things to Do in New York (City)" from The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, edited by Alice Notley with Anslem Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan. Copyright © 2007 by University of California Press. Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
Source:
The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
(University of California Press, 2005)