To NYC

From the Editor: The poem contained in this book is an unfinished ode to New York City written by my dear childhood friend William G. Cockrell in January of 2021. He sent it to me in this state accompanied by the note following this introduction while I spent the winter holiday away from Victoria, British Columbia in his adoptive and my own childhood hometown of Carbondale, Colorado. The ode he composed was one that to my knowledge he had never finished before his death, and it was one that he had seemingly not shared with anyone else at the time of composition. It is a short piece, composed of only nineteen stanzas and ordered into four parts. The first is untitled, and parts II-IV contain titled fragments that presuppose the collected stanzas. I am unsure if they were intentional buffers for separate sections or lines in their own rite. I have opted here, in his memory to assume the former.