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
Copyright Credit: 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)