We are in the air. I am not sure why I say it, but I say it: it looks like a motherboard. I speak the observation and it stops being real.

We can take the F. The twenty-four hour haunts close early now. My brother knows a place, the doorman knows a place, I heard about a place where jazz outlasts the eternal curfew.

We pass the dungeon-like bar where the girl lit a sparkler thinking it was incense. The place where I drank caffeinated alcohol dressed like Frida Kahlo, a sexy Minion crying curbside on my shoulder. I was a different person with a different laminated card.

Scanning the laminated card, the security guard welcomes me back to a place where I’ve never been. Extending the hand like a warranty. Picasso is downstairs, trapped in a box.

The open laptop is playing a movie about a satellite falling in love, like a Lou Reed song designed by committee while we soar.

Hart Crane and Biggie wrote poems to the steel. As long centuries float by, what is solid turns to air. Tomorrow’s poem is a ballad to dissociated post-everything.

Sondheim in the sirens, the trains piston Hammerstein. When curtains close you recognize your role as an extra in the guerilla theatre.

Crossing Madison at this hour is a gamble, but we double down. This is where they drank whiskey and taught us how to smoke.

Cathedrals are capacitors on the motherboard, Central and Prospect the heatsink. Situated against the lawn, spread out to maximum surface area, the fever dissipates.

The portrait is blue, like twelve bars of song or a Mets hat.

The gambler is addicted to a memory, not a risk. Either reach for the sky or double-down like you’re in deep until you roll seven. Don’t take the L. We can take the J.

For the swelling population who think life is a simulation, the city seen from orbit, with its circuitry and glowing nerves, might induce cold panic. A rigid box over our serpentine chaos. Trapped in a cube.

Invisible hands run blades along the tether and my phone is dead or dying. We can take the J or walk from here.

The golden calf grew up vengeful on wall street, embossed. No one gets the joke.

The laminated card is unconvincing, but manages to be me. It has the state’s watermark, best seen slanting left.

This isn’t class critique or my first world burden: I never take the bus. It’s forty minutes by foot in the shade of the sweetgum and elm. Spaces between us only escalate to distance once measured.

Blue like the pigment on the monochrome work, signifying transcendence of form and deep spiritual freedom, currently under copyright. Like the old subway cards.

A father of three says, “this guy really hates America,” and means it in a negative way.

A woman in cropped cotton says, “this guy really hates America,” and it is a good thing.

The pigment matches her hair. Blue, like a diminuendo and crescendo. Blue, like kind of. There is a boy with a dove perched on his shoulder, smiling with buddha grace.

Slanting left from the window — airplane, gallery, dream — the skyline arranges itself.

Staring at the stationary camera of the security guard, I transition from an image without caption to a caption without image.

Aura is diminished by knowability. A coin trick you’ve witnessed a thousand times. The begrimed inner life of beauty threatens its allure. Uptown is that way.

One must initiate. A life of beauty begins with acknowledging how untrue, how ugly, how malign beauty can feel.

Each set of fingerprints is a unique constellation like a snowflake, like a protein spike, so every touch against the mosaic is a singular user experience that cannot be replicated. Connect at the junction.

For reasons never cohered, there were motherboards scattered around the house. Growing up we imagined bustling cities, zoos and enclosures, flying cars and swimming pools. Monorails gliding high above the transistors. Vaults opened to let the future free.

Whitman used to write here, ecstatic in the frontier language of an archaic time. Whitman rode the bus. Soldier on, love, we must access our Grand Pastoral on foot.

This is where we walked, mid-breakdown, until a spraypaint image of Nixon with the phrase ‘I LOVE DICK’ in block letters broke us from the erotic fugue.

She walks between the track lights and her shadow reaches first, the way instinct precedes reason. Absence of light is a ghost touch against the canvas, an interaction of the negative space, holes cut in the universe.

It would not be the right time to phone a friend. Ignore the laminated card. I’m a different person and everything is great, hella good, fine, just a little blue.

Adirondack blue. Deep blue. A supercomputer against the grandmaster. Blue like a flame burning, a fraternal order, a simple sky.

The past is a little island off the western coast, suspended on concrete structures.

Anvil cloud overhead is not metaphor, it is the atmosphere’s decision to interpret the surreal, to speak in velocity. We are under pressure literally and figuratively as the vapor heats with pitiless friction.

Foaming the fatty milk of another life. This is where I slung the chiaroscuro to the midwestern corn-fed, where the coffee raised the circulation.

Conquered first by men in britches, later by men in cufflinks, lastly conquered by electric light, blue like Matisse’s window.

Our trajectory intersected with a previous iteration of this sky, of this sidewalk, of this Egyptian tomb downtown, in a freshly tattooed era of hope and poverty. There has never been the same cloud twice, like fingerprints on tile.