Two Weeks Was Just Fine Poem by Hans Ostrom

I lived in New York for two weeks
once. Doing some research in Harlem.
The apartment's sad kitchen
had arrived full of confidence
decades earlier, then
got its spirit hammered. The cockroaches,

who made me pine for my
one-room college burrow,
belonged to a well known
New York roach family.
I could tell by the way they
carried themselves and ignored me.

Only years later did it occur to me
that New York'shard intensity must,
to lonely people, become
a merciless, constant cruelty.