That the city, after this enormity, may be renewed

 So I saw a tweet asking...

Well...

That the city, after this enormity, may be renewed 

They told me that my sex drive would be

'ruined' - the exact word that they chose,

as if the hormones were a bomb

that would destroy the proud erections

of an engineered city.

What they didn't realise

was that my metropolis

already lay in ruins:

behind the neoclassical facades

of banks, the people gathered

'round the fires that burned in drums,

bartered shoddy goods under the tarps

slung far beneath the shattered skylights

of the covered market;

that taps gasped air and dirt

in sailors' bars beside the silted harbour:

and here, hormones came as wrecking ball

and blueprint for renewal, as mortar

in the sense of both explosive and cement,

as the new broom in City Hall,

and that, where once I had a Miesian libido,

gridded and predictable, what sprang up in its place

is more like Gehry: complicatedly

amazing; twisted and baroque,

always apparently about to

tumble in upon itself, but stronger

than the mess it seems to be.

Where once I was the New York Subway,

now I'm Harry Beck's map of the Tube

reimagined as a rollercoaster

(though I happily will go

South of the River):

complicated, multi-coloured, centripetally

alive in all directions, and I know

that cut-and-cover, and the pounding

of the tunneling machines

can look like demolition

but they aren't. I'm not in ruins:

this chaos that you hear and see

is not a war:

 it's just my future,

working.