The City That Never Sleeps
You must never sleep. In the city that never sleeps.
From the moment you open your eyes, they say “keep moving”.
Keep moving, for Life will not stop for you. Life will keep moving despite what you do, how you feel, what you eat, what you smell, what you see and what you don’t see. Life will keep moving.
On your way to work, to school, to friends, to family, if you find yourself drifting away, slowly closing your eyes to endless slumber. Remind yourself that life is endless and you must not give into the desire to rest your eyes for a couple of minutes which will slowly turn into hours.
Remember, as you run from place to place that Time is against you. Dreaded Time, what makes you a prey to the deprivation of sleep and addicted to our only source of energy, caffeine. Shaky hands, shaky leg, eyes wide open, using every muscle in your body to defeat the power that Time has on.
Trying everyday to find a way to defeat your only true enemy: Time. People from cities far, far away, see New York City, your home, as the “city that never sleeps.” Beeping cars, elevator dings, the constant tapping on a keyboard, “The next stop on this train will be 23rd Street, please stand clear of the closing doors please”
After a long day of fighting against Time, standing still in a quiet space, you finally admit defeat, closing your eyes and laying motionless as everything around you continues moving for the next few couple of hours, only to repeat it all again the very next day.
The one of the specific stylistic elements I choose to imitate from the prose poems that Charles Baudelaire wrote in “The Parisian Prowler” was the use of personification and representation of an idea like time have a human like manner to it. In his prose poem “Get High,” Baudelaire shows to the reader the physical burden that time can have on an individual. “not to feel the horrible burden of Time/ wrecking your back and bending you to the ground, you/ must get high without respite.” I noticed how he also capitalized Time rather than using it in lowercase, to further implicate the personification he was displaying; that time isn’t only an idea but like the name of a person it should be capitalized, mimicking human like mannerisms. I also tried to imitate how descriptive Baudelaire in his writing, having an impact of the sensory aspect of the reader. In the prose poem “Cake,” Baudelaire describes the fight scene with the two homeless men in great detail to the reader, done to details such as the following “the first one, infuriated, clutched the second by the hair; the other one bit his ear and, with a magnificent swear in dialect, spat out a little bloody piece of it.” I used a combination of the two elements I mentioned: personification and descriptive text to describe NYC to the best of my ability and what it means to me at the moment, living a busy and hectic life at times.