Dear Boston....

I wrote this the other night at work. I don't really know where any of it came from, but anyways...

It's Mardi Gras and all the colors
explode in front of a glass blown lunar lamp,
Drawn out to a surreal hyperbole with the ends pinched out and bent.
I lean against the rail of a green and white
Pistachio parlor that was built two years after my grandmother was born.
The stripped Roman columns crack with age and the chips of paint cup like
Closing Petals. -- The moon has a dim bulb tonight, Congress street doesn't seem to notice. The cars move like cut schooners through a choppy Boston youth. --
I clamor up the windy slanted staircases of old North End buildings
Where the contours of faces give way to wild silhouettes in
Poorly lit landings. We lean against the ledge and watch the State Street
towers with its erratic patters of lit offices and the blinking antenna that sell the world
secrets, and love stories, and soft drinks. We sip vodka from mismatched ceramic...the conversation grows stale and my thoughts drift to women that once loved me. They catch me smiling and wonder how third world economics is funny.

"you had to be there" I dismiss.

They go abck to their treatise and I go back to when you were here. -- And its harbor breezes still come ashore, and the express way still roars into the night, the horns of the trailers still sing to the late-night gaggles of hipsters on the overpass at the top of Newbury but... Look Boston I'm sorry, its not that I love you any less. I don't. -- The ghosts of my ex-girlfriends have taken up residency and have tea with Paul Revere in the Old North Church. And fall won't be the same and the clam chowder will suck but I have to do this. If not for myself then to prove it to myself. I'll come home for the fall, I...I'm sorry. I hope you understand.