When I was a helpless teacher,
nervous and unable how to reach kids in the South Bronx,
I stopped reading hard boiled crime fiction.
Stories of decay in cities seemed to hit too close to home
and I got back to the fantasy
I loved at an earlier age.
I looked up Terry Pratchett
who wrote a follow-up to Discworld,
but it was only available in one library
in Brooklyn.
In Flatlands.

On a Saturday, I got on my bike to ride.

I was living in the Upper West Side,
so GPS tells me
that the best route would be sixteen and a half miles.
I didn’t have GPS.
I had a print map and a limited sense of direction.

I must have gotten lost a half-score times,
stopped at a bunch of parks,
rested on the side of a few roads
(which might also be known as city streets)
but eventually found myself
in this very foreign,
lightly populated part of New York called Flatlands.

It seemed like civilization just seemed to stop there.
It was eerie, and I was amazed to be in New York
and yet so far from civilization.
I decided I could bike on my off-time to see more of the world that was NYC.

I saw a lot in my travels through the boroughs
but I’m not sure if I ever reached the high
of the isolation
of Flatlands.