Believing In Ice

There's a glory in drinking your coffee black
and a heroism in puffing away like a smokestack through two packs a day
paving your lungs to make way for cars, buses, trains
artery highways

I did not sit down to write a poem
because this poem has been written before
over and over again

It has not been written by solitary mountains crumbling into the sea
but instead people etched it into back alleys, trash can jazz
when all night long the city sings in gradients
it has sprung into summer and fallen into winter

I'm not writing a poem.
I'm standing in a telephone booth at the end of the world.

There's a release in restraint,
but also a truth in lockpicks and scalpels
pornography and curtains
we're all looking for the final camera that's watching everything.

Here's my question:
if you had never seen it,
would you believe in ice?
After our hundred years of solitude, can you hear the hurricane's swing-sixteenth notes all about your pig tailed children and their love of nothing worth having?
Are you proud of our heresies?
And how do you take your coffee?