from the fifth floor apartment
i can hear this group of kids
laughing and all
talking at once
and occasionally a ball
smacking the pavement
like these kids were just
sitting on my window sill, even
my sister in the next
room, talking on the phone
is a low mumble
from the fifth floor

but everything is amplified
in the city by 2,000,000, anyway.

these sounds are not home,
        will never be,
    because,
i remember what home sounds like
    and
        home sounds like
    the garbage
truck coming by at seven a.m.
on Wednesdays and that's the
loudest thing there
    unless
it's spring and the sky is
dark in the day time
and you hear the tornado sirens
coming from the armory

so loud because i lived right next to it
                my place
and it was quiet, my
                    place

some people are running on the beat
        of the city
    the throb, it's the sex
that gave birth to them,
   the
night-time crowd
    in Georgetown with
        the pumping
                pump throb
when you pass their clubs and
    feel the noise running up under
        you and then pushing it
inside of you like an
    eager lover, like
        the push and pull of
            machinery, it
is just like the whole city you can see
    fucking to the same beat
and this gave birth to you,
    I can understand,
        I can see your
home in the pulse,
    the sex of your city
it gave birth to me too
            but

I made my way down home,
    and i want it back
        to be
            detached
from your pulse, i have to
    have my
dusty roads,
    my trailer parks and
texas radio with the
    low aching country blues
        to have
my careful observation
and that still awful
                    stillness,
and yes,
i've hated that place too,
    my sweet somerset country home
i've hated the white trash and
            dingyness, yeah,
    everything was always so
god damn dingy
        but
walking empty streets
at four in the morning,
    barefoot and
that sweet noise of the crickets
                        still. still.

I'll never do that here.
Never have my gravel roads
    in the longest drives just to get
        to nowhere, sitting by
lake cumberland with the boy with the sweet smile
                    skimming rocks.

Where in your pulse,
            big city,
is your heart?
Where in your sex,
            big city,
is the love?
Where in you noise,
            big city,
is my lonely home
by the gravel road?