It's just that like, I miss you and stuff.

Memory - Winter

I walked down and saw the biggest Christmas tree in the world

and in the lights all the rain was misty and it maybe even looked

like snow, like instead of water droplets falling boring it might be

crystals absently forming into unique shapes, like you or me

or everyone in the world and we all will be there in that tiny

square, that millimeter of time when the world is utterly quiet

and bathed in white, missing everything that it knew was

important and wrong and right, dreaming about the greatest

day in the world - the snow day - when we would throw on

our layers of clothes and three mittens and the snow pants

newly purchased and race around the village of our lawn

and create all the necessaries for life. Because life goes on

even in the day-glow newness of snow, because it goes on

beyond even the crest of a drift or the igloo or the tunnel

weaving past the backyard, beyond the train tracks,

to the place where the sledding occurs, where the power lines

bend with packed ice and there is nothing more than the cold white

hot chocolate breath as the first exhalation of steam

before the plunge into the unknown frosty whiteness

on a piece of plastic colored blue because that was my

favorite color when I was young and somehow Mom knew

that she knew she knew my favorite color was blue and

it was not any simpler or any more complicated than being

outside and then inside and then warm and then sleepy

and then a dream inside the heart of a long winter.

Flashes

So I'm walking this girl home and she asks

Which one is your eating disorder?

and I tell her and she says, That makes sense

and we should hang out sometime. So we do.

So I'm walking this girl home and she asks

How many times have you fallen in like?

and I say Lots, and she says, Well, that makes

you kind of a LikeSlut, doesn't it? And I don't

answer and maybe never see her again.

So I'm walking this girl home and she asks

What's your favorite position? referring

to a soccer team, and I say, Winger and she

laughs and says, You must be fast! So we go

home and fuck and it means little.

So I'm walking this girl home and she asks

Where are you from again? and I lie to her,

I say, Australia, and she vomits in the next

trash can and I call a cab and that's it.

So I'm walking this girl home and she asks

What is your disease? and I tell her and

she says, I have that too, and we make out

but I'm uncomfortable because I have it too

and don't want a reminder of it

when I look into her eyes.

So I'm walking this girl home and she asks

How much do you like Charlie Brown's Christmas?

and I say, Lots and then talk about how my favorite

is when Linus tells the story because it makes

me cry. She doesn't know what to say, but takes

my arm and strokes it for a while, which was almost

to her stoop.

So I'm walking this girl home and she asks

When was your heart last broken? and I tell her

and she gets really silent. So we keep walking

for a while, and for a while we don't want to say

goodbye on the train and I wonder if I should

kiss her and pretty soon I'm walking her home

again and I do kiss her and pretty soon she's

saying things like, How was your day? and

making fun of me and my awkward strangeness

and that lasts for a long time.

Untitled #4, based on Japanese love poems

The reeds crack in the frost

and you breathe in the air -

you expire warm steam

in a small cloud above us.

untitled #3, based on Japanese love poems

The waitress asked if we were ready

and we said yes, and you kissed me.

It was enough.

Untitled #2, based on Japanese love poems

There was a drop rolling down a leaf

and to me it painted your cheek

in green sadness just after a summer rain.

Untitled, based on Japanese love poems

I cannot find the picture of you

so I dream it. There I draw you

and you smile innocently, like

the flapping of a butterfly’s wings.

Musing

It's like picking up a tennis racket again.

Or the first gear shift on a manual after

a couple of years away.

Like talking to a lover you dismissed

a long time ago, but everything's ok

now, because you're both much happier.

Like learning to play golf.

Like speaking to a ghost.

My muse is fickle, and won't come out

easily tonight, after his forced vacation.

I Guess This is Sad

I have a cough that won't go away

and when it runs me down the ground,

I think it will move on and find

someone else to lay low for a while.

This is my hope. My nothings

are made of imaginings, of futures

that coalesce like fungi on a petri dish,

rings of green and yellow cities

that are brightly lit by ultraviolet

light and frozen to perfection

in a batch of premium diluted

water. I think that we are simply

the worldly, all stepped awry

from our bottomless, bottomest

pit of an excuse. All I thought

about tonight was how wonderful

it was that it was raining outside

and I was inside and watching

my Netflix account, streaming

New Age documentaries that

scream about the goings on I

seem to be missing when everyday

just passes me by and I spend it

inside like a new convertible

in a Seattle winter. My thoughts

turn to grimmer stuff, to blood

and guts and gore and violence

and all the evil things that root out

fears and place them on the table

at Thanksgiving so that when a meal

is supposed to be shared in reverence

it finds itself a macabre decadence

that worships a culture dead a long

time ago, the evidence of which

is writing itself in this nonsense

I'm putting on a virtual screen,

on a virtual server, to be virtually

appreciated by - no one. Maybe the

printing press was the worst thing

ever invented, because after that,

I'm sure no one talked to each other

anymore and I know that because

parts of me remember being a little

old peasant lady getting kicked in the mud

by some bootsteeled patron

of the chivalrous soul. And parts of me

see how no one really talks to each other

anymore, and how no one really talks

to each other anymore and how no one

really talks to each other anymore.

Grace and all that

It was like being pulled apart by gravity -

as if the g-forces began to shred and shake

us away from each other and we were no

longer standing on solidest ground.

I didn't know then that birds fly

so awkwardly in their adolescent stages,

that their wings, pinioned like a butterfly

to a corkboard, take such time to spread

and beat free. I guess it was something

eternal that brought forth freedom,

so why do I worry about it so much?

Where is the lyric of purest simplicity

that will set me apart from the others.

My undergrounding scans have brought me

to a place of heightened observance,

as if the whole human race could be revealed

to me in the touch of a hand to a forehead,

or the forgetful act of pressing against

a stranger in a crowded subway car. Simple

simple melodies along a flat world.

Such is my quota

for today that I

seemed to need

to upset the fragile

balance of your

ego and tip it

away from me

again.

Sunday Night Spending Monday in Bed

I said today your room was the color of fall and I meant it. And you told me you decorated it mostly in the fall, mostly in that time between warm and cold, when you were changing your way back into the new york city life. I thought about you then, thought about you coming back, with a new boyfriend, with money in your pockets and with the will to dream yourself into another role, and take that next step to the stars you crave. But then there was that time we went to the planetarium and Whoopie Goldberg told us we were all made from the Big Bang, that maybe all of us had 2 or 3 teaspoons of original matter morphed into whatever in our bodies, and I thought, when I think about you, you already have the star inside. So I went to your show, and you were so lovely, so blue, so unlike you, so like all of the things we love to hate about high school theater, especially that scary moment when you don't know what you're doing and everyone is looking at you because you (I) forgot your (my) line and instead of making up for it, you (I) bend down and find another piece of cash to throw on the betting pile because you pulled out all of it and panicked instead of letting the scene go on. And that really happened. And then, in the darkness that gathered around the train as we sped home, I was confronted by all the worst parts of myself, all of the dreamy little lies I tell myself of how much better I am than I actually am, and I realized how much harder it is to actually be better than who I am, and how much I wanted to be because it meant you were a part of me, and I could come inside your room and sleep there. I did, later, when all the crying was done, and you, like a fountain in the rain, made beautiful music from the drops I littered around you. Your eyes changed colors then: at night they were red like your sheets and in the morning they were golden like leaves and when we were done showering, they turned green again, but with the gold in them still, like a wooden door in the side of a hill, leading somewhere comfortable and warm, like the color you want to paint your room when you re-decorate this fall. Then we joked on the train about me writing a poem about all the different colors your eyes go, and here it is, because I am a joke sometimes and I know you can laugh at me. But I wanted to write the poem anyway, because it meant something, because it was good and green and gold and red, like all the colors that remind me of you, and when I sit sometimes, alone in my inky blueness, in the darkness I have built around myself, just seeing you rains all of that away, and I love you because you remind so much of fall, of change, of all the dreamy things I want from my life, like soup on Sunday nights and traveling luck somewhere in the Scottish highlands, howling and laughing dog at the moon, drifting in and out of the sea like the tide, and because, deep-down, I know you would love nothing more than the truth. The truth is, I am lovely lost in my mind sometimes and the world seems nothing more than a passing shadow in front of my eyes. But what joy I can find is in the candle-lit warm water nights of September, of dancing and letting go beyond all letting go, and of poetry in an inescapable rehearsal room, coming so close to a world of perfection, of a dream realized that my body could do nothing but realize it and here we are. So you will paint your room the color of warmth and someday I will move all the way in and be there.

Troubles

I think I dream in bits and pieces

piecing together bits of my pasts

and pieces of my selves and all

of these come crawling back to me

but I don't remember any of them.

I just get headaches on extra-tired

nights, and don't sleep because

I feel there are more important

things to be done. How did we do

this? How did we make it? How

did we suddenly up end as a great

love story, maybe the greatest

I have ever written and I have

written many in my head. I will

somehow try to not ever make

sense of any of it and leave it

that way until sun sets and I can

write about it again, in metaphor

and simile because I can't think

in anything else and you told me

that. You told me all of these

words and they somehow all

make sense and they are all

right and all are keeping me

going right now, when there

is something tough in my brain,

that won't go away, that won't

go away, that won't go away.

And I don't want to sleep

because there are more im-

portant things that need saying

and all of these things and all

of my selves and all of my pasts

I think are screaming at me

in these insomniac forays

to listen and write them

but don't listen and live them.

In Love

It's fallish now, and I think that every time the season changes or something changes I'm left to stay up all night to commune with my muse and not go to work in the morning because there are more important things like walks in the park and thinking to do. I wish you could understand how little there is of me in my poetry; how little my thoughts are actually a part of all of these words and how I just listen to the voice in my head that sort comes from the back and to the side, so if I were to swing around my head really quickly I would never be able to catch sight of it, like I can never bite my own ear. Sometimes I wish I was more ambitious, more ready, more connected, more motivated, more interested, more sincere about what I want to do in my life because I like to float around these wandering days, especially fall days, in dreaming little ways, like I'm already forgetting so many things in my past that come out of nowhere and then vanish again when the smell dies away. I remember when the green grass smell before soccer practice and I remember thinking that 24 was so far away and that maybe life would be simpler when I was older and didn't have to follow the rules like I did. But then I got to college and took a clown class and found that I loved rules, ridiculous rules, but rules that gave me freedom and flow and the ability to make people laugh in an entirely weird, trivial and magical way. I want so much to be able to give myself a meaning, draw myself a box to live in just like everybody else, but the more I try, the more I resist and know, without knowing, that it just isn't all that right for me. That as much as my mind cries out for a traditional life, my body cries out for the spectacular and my heart cries out for mystery and passion. Underneath all of these things, all of this rust, and tiredness and worry, is a spectacularly happy being unable to be so yet. There are moments, like moments in the dark, with candlelight in a bath, or moments on a train with crossword puzzles, or moments in a classroom teaching - finding out what that word really means and how fucking tough all of that really is. There are moments, but there is also a spectacular mis-communication in my body I'm only now finding out about; only now trying to really do something about.

I smelled bad just before the lamp went out

and you drove me off a cliff when you told me

you didn't like the jeans, but it was a more

perfect day because you were honest, and I

am so happy because you are honest, and I

will dream that someday when we are old

we will still be honest and cranky and in love.

We Were in Long Island City on the First Day of Fall

And it got all dark and quiet and suddenly all the orange light behind the guitarist meant something and it was beautiful, like a breeze that reminds you again of fall, of a time when it meant something to actually fall and be picked up again, as if we were an overripe apple in a yard away from everything and found us for cider and we loved being drunk like that, like a leaf falling slowly through the air, beyond the recognition of time, beyond the cognition that seemed to rhyme between seconds, between the hours that could creep by or dive in a flurry away; cloudy minutes spent being nothing more than a leaf on a forest floor, a simple quiet, dark little time before the orange came out and made everything beautiful, like lightning hitting a wall of graffiti and it glowed so like the glowing of lightning in the distance and I was tired and content and it stopped my thought for a while.

A prayer from a Stranger

This busy, stretched life holds no interest for me anymore. I'm wickedly swinging in the breeze, an apple to be plucked, mashed and cidered for the rest of humanity, so pungent in the fall air and so ready to be dead and gone and left for anything but tomorrow, hanging there again. So I'm just not there, I'm just not here I'm just not anywhere that I need to be right now, and I'm lusting after the quiet life, of a simple little tiny life that creeps and crawls along, like a house on a stream, gently drifting to the bank as night time calls. I'm such a laughline right now, just a little old man with rickety ankles and a tiny brain, that can only handle so much at one time and this might be too much and maybe all I want to do is just write and write and write all the wired ideas in my head and leave that to posterity for some caveman to dig up 12,000 years in the future and translate into something beautiful, lots of grunts and shapes that make more sense than the coded ramblings in my head. So I think I just want to be left alone to do what I want, not plucked and fondled, rounded and juiced until the core of me is all bits and pieces left sweltering in the fading orange sun. I could use that right now, not forever and ago, not just a tomorrow, but now, in a friendly way, like a prayer from a stranger, and what I will always believe in is the world's way of working out, so please. Work out.

Dreaming Awake

Cumbersome tires find ways of thrilling me into a drenched, broken untimely mannerisms, like getting married before going off to war, in a way that I have nothing to talk about but the greatest and least of all my problems, which is sleep. So I'm left to study the cold absence of lightbulbs while you sleep soundly next to me, like some goddess I have yet to attain and perfect within myself, and maybe if I did I could be sleeping too and wouldn't be writing all this underneath the glare of artificial sound and a ringing in my ears that won't stop and can't stop, all because two years ago I went underground and found money to be more important than matter. So it was a dumb day when I felt compelled to leave the lasting memories of earthy coffee dreaming and light myself like a drug to take away holidays and feelings and honor and memory and sad sad songs on the radio that play over and over again, like a memory that won't go away, like a pain that still listens to itself even among the dead quiet of the night outside the city where nothing happens but a mosque-y brusqueness as I walk past and listen to the beautiful sounds of faith floating past my ringing ears, and for a moment my hat is off and I am well in the present. Now I can regurgitate all of this because I can't have sex, because I'm horny like a satyr, my huge penis swinging awkwardly between my legs as I dance like a fool around the electronic worshippers of 'Post-' ages and I am not judging them because I am one of them, but I am judging them because I cannot break free of them myself, and sometimes I carry them home with me, like skittles in my pocket and they sleep with me and jump my heart into an unfamiliar staccato pulse that beats and beats and beats and I won't relax and I can't relax and I can't have sex and it sometimes it all seems too much to me. And now I remember that people like Gary Snyder exist and I can somehow try to be more like him, living in the Oregon mountains away from it all and existing more perfectly than all of this noise and trash and lead and money. And then I remember that you are still there sleeping beside me and I might ask if you have something, so at least I can go to sleep too, and we can well up beside each other in each other's dreams, like perfect mannequins of grace, sleeping silently in arms, among the dead quiet outside the city. I remember how you leaned on my back and relaxed me in your arms those days ago when I found you, you you you, in the past quietness that leapt out of shadows to listen, finally, to the present, past the ringing in my ears in the stillness in the city. I remember that here I am, among the quiet in the city, and I'm not alone, and I'm not afraid and all of this money will go away one day, and nothing will be left but the cold and the fall and the leaves and bears forever roaming the near ruins of our greatest achievements that literally meant nothing once we destroyed the green blue of the world. I'm not alone and I'm not afraid, and this weekend I will make myself a salad to bring myself closer to heaven, and that will be the simple thing that wakes me up again, like deer in the rain before the headlights, and we all will be laughing together, and making love and living ecstasy like beings out of the eternal foresthood of the long ago, like quells of ancient monastic truth, like owls of the daytime. It will be so simple to cut my credit card in half and pee on it, like I might the head of an enemy I vanquished when I was younger and stronger and outside more. Now all is inside, internal, the the movement of oceans in my searching soul, the past objections of sins remembered so utterly like a reflection I could have stabbed with a pitchfork a long time ago. And we are all but the little tonal rings that circle our axis like twilight, each bouncing from each other as if we poisoned the air between us and we did.

I think the city sketched us into the grayness of its buildings today, buildings and buildings that ran through our minds as we hopped in between taxis, like ghosts of green lights, flailing our joy like whips cast around us, roping in those that were near us, and settling like raindrops into their parched skins. It was now that was so near us, so close as if we were freezing time to watch the trail of stardust a meteor leaves as it travels across the sky. Time frozen in a ball, to dance as if were green and good and young, like old trees still are when they are old and weathered, but still flower every young year, every spring time that dances through the mist of our wanderings, keeping us the color of gray gray buildings watching us manage our questions of each other so aptly.

Walking Along 23rd Ave Before the Big Rain

It was the lightning lightning, melded together like two robert frost poems, that lit up the sky big big in the darkness under a streetlight casting mellow tones all around the rain-soaked patches of misunderstood witchy people, crying out to the darkness in a little VW bug that sounded more like the tuba from a bad old orchestra on a 45 record, scratching the wilted twilight in some staccato shades of lastingness.  I wrote little jazzy hymns all the way to your place, under the bridge where I'm sure Paul Simon wrote that song about groovyness and for the moment I was transported back to the eternal 1960s when we were all Kerouac wanderers under a summer sun; glancing off each other like light thrown from a prism and how we laughed to dwell so deeply in the forever under the title of Now.  We watched the lightning, big big in its sky under the roof of the men and women dwelling in that now, with their little dog wilting under the cloudy hurricane raindrops, so perfect and present within the manliness of a dropped trinket in the fascinating place underneath the porch to which the last moments of this deep godly meditation were thrown.  I took a deep breath and sat down like Buddha under the tree and thought of nothing but flashes of light thrown around the sky, as if God were me and I was deeply troubled by how the Earth was moving so quickly forward and how Time was leaving us, like an extinct mammal blown through the town, dustballing and wheeling around a frozen artifact that dropped and missed the point, landing and melting like ice cream in the middle of a packed July carnival, with teenage wisdom breathing on necks in the shaded areas near the firework trees.  It twisted away in a spiral and was gone, and we left to eat the last of the gold, disguising ourselves as vegetables and how little we thought and how much we laughed and how beautiful all the moments with each other had become because of that.

The Quiet

I once told my father that I didn't like to fish. I think he was vaguely disappointed, but made up for it by attending every one of my performances. He also came into the living room when I started playing piano and would look over my shoulder, trying to decipher notes like a strand of DNA. He would always say, "That sounds great Seth. Your piano sounds great." I was embarrassed by this. I couldn't lean over my father's shoulder when he was fishing and say the same thing, but maybe I didn't ever have to. I suppose the admiring looks when he would tie knots, then teach me to tie them as tightly, was my own way of saying, "Your own instrument is beautiful too, Dad." He would magick a canoe onto his shoulders as if it were a kitten lifted by its mother in her jaws, to be carried across the floor safely and quietly to rest. I suppose my father will always be somewhat magical to me, as if he is always somehow above me, aloof to me; an angel that looks down on me with laugh lines around his eyes as he casts his spinning plug into the dark recesses of a stream at dawn. I still don't really like to fish, but I will with him, because it is where he is happiest and where his artistry glows like sunrise. I am confident when he is gone, my father will live among the reeds and cool waters of mountain streams, jumping to catch the sunlight on his smooth back. And I hope I never catch him, but always live there, waiting in my boat, as he swims swiftly by, the corners of his mouth turned to a smile, the ripple of his tail reminding me of his grace.

Unfinished

I feel like we are two little bees

dancing around a flower

that we think might be poisonous

and so I say, "You go" and you say,

"You go" and we both go together

and suddenly we are dusty with pollen

our abdomens swollen

our chalklines misshapen

into one blob, so that you can't really tell

where one arm ends and the other's leg

begins.

And that's what we are doing,

we are beginning, like kindergartners

to discover our favorites.

What is your favorite mood swing?

Mine is the one where you are laughing

and then suddenly you look at me

and you are deeply serious in your soul

and so afraid and so captivated

that I can't help but smile mischievously

and smirk at your incontinence.

I think yours are my sounds I make,

like a manatee would if it were groping

on dry land,

at every bad or good or weird part in a movie.

I like that I can't remember you are lactose intolerant

and so consistently offer you milk products

which you decline politely, every time.

I like that you keep hitting me.

I like that we are unfinished, like a Sappho fragment,

and only we, who write ourselves into each other's lines

every night, know what those hidden parts mean.

Salmon Basting

Sounds of gunshot wounds at 1:30 in the morning

make me think about the life I may have lived

outside of this petty room called Time. Where

was I when Ferdinand was shot? Did I know

that Caesar was doomed to lay himself down

on the steps of the Senate? Was I one of the knives

in the crowd that broke his final resting place?

I know not. I am a traveler in my own time,

a monkey's reflection of silly little bastard children

that wreak havoc in my twilight soul. I cannot

be more than a longing in the deep midnight

of some oft-forgotten terrace down south, but

I long to be more than a Moon that Creeps

Under Doorways to lash the fine night with

haze and mystery. I want be more than a part

of you. I want to be entirely of you, as if I was

made of macaroni and cheese and you were

an art project that swam into existence on some

fourth grader's fingertips. I want to be the wind

that macerates your hair on a sailboat driven

by your yuppie ex-boyfriend, his shiny teeth

overpowering the glint off the salt-water.

I'd like to think you are laying down beside me

right now, in a jungle somewhere, licking

blood off your coat, and gazing smugly

at the sun-dappled sky. I want to be the snow

on the tip of your tongue as you catch it

twenty years ago, and realize how sweet

and plain this life is when it's fresh.

Truth

To say simply, in a few words:

When I first saw you, across the room,

I longed to sleep beside you,

that I would know the most peaceful

and most precious of your truths:

how soft you breathe.

Somewhere

You are becoming a redness in my eyes,

a vague notion of sleeplessness and pre

occupation. I am somehow a traveler

that has gotten stuck around you like

a kayak on a rock, twisting and bending,

the plastic and kevlar moaning across

the rapids as I fight to keep afloat. I am

exhausted by this chase, this madness

that floats at me like a poem on the wind,

drifting lazily into the back of my head

as if I were nothing more than a pen

meant to digest and regurgitate these

words of trouble. It frightens me, to think

I have become so unhinged by you. Now,

I'm waking up later every morning,

trying in vain to think, to pasteurize

thought into something coherent, but you

keep popping into the fruitful well that

is the underside of my eyelids and I feel

naked to its power. I am surfing, not

for the first time, on the wave of euphoria

that is you. I am tumbling, headlong, like

Alice through the looking-glass, and I have

met these strange creatures of thought

that manifest like silent drill sergeants

around my ears, ringing my senses with

their cursory glances backwards and

through my defenses. I can be no more

than a memory now, a sluggish poster

boy of promises that I simply cannot keep;

maybe never keep, to you or anyone else

and that keeps me awake at night, keeps

me dreaming and hoping that tomorrow

I may see you again, to forget, forget, forget

all the nights and their doubts that creep

around my bed and hide themselves in my

pillows, so that when I lay down, I am

suddenly alone among the dead quiet

that becomes loneliness. It is here I cannot

hide from the future that lies so perfectly

straight ahead of me, like a yellow brick road,

that began in Oz, and ends, somewhere.

But if only it could end with you, and your

golden lashes fluttering against my shoulder

every morning, and your perfect smile

and your eyes that simply are the color of dawn

reflected on the ocean on a deserted beach,

somewhere. Your eyes that contain an essence

of a soul I knew when I was much younger,

and the world was much younger, and we were

both - somewhere. How I long for us to meet,

in some future time, in some distant country,

so that we may, without the prejudice of our

former selves, fall like raindrops in love,

and kiss like fireflies whispering gold into

a twilight field. Please, whatever you may do,

wherever you might go, whoever you may

belong to in the end, agree to meet me in that

somewhere, that extends out of my heart like

a current of rippling gold. Dance with me,

like a firefly, and I promise I will love you

until my soul is worn to a thin and silken

strand of nothing and woven into everything,

so that when a butterfly beats its wings

near your skin, you will feel me calling you,

beckoning you, somewhere.

Past Lives

I have always written my best because of you.

I suppose you are some kind of muse, that often

highlights the poignant gray matter of my brain,

skipping around my neural highways

like a bicycle on a freeway. I think seeing you today

was a sort of wake-up call to all that. Speech flowed

from my mouth like a perforated gunshot wound,

bleeding red red red from freedom.

I was happy to see you, so blessedly happy to see

that you were still around, and still, after all this time,

still wanted to speak to me, and after all this time,

still happy that I wanted to speak to you.

I was a florist of words and ideas around you,

picking and choosing an arrangement of thought

that came so naturally under your careful gaze.

It will be good to visit those places, those dusty

museum pieces in the my mind; to treasure

their dusty consequence and laugh at their

hopeful naivete. I look forward to our backward conversation.

Jessie

I remember when my dog came for the first time,

the day after Christmas. My parents picked her up,

and she was still weak, and groggy, and sick

from the anesthesia that went with being spayed.

I remember seeing her, dull-eyed, looking at me as if I

were spoiled milk, and promptly retching all over the kitchen.

My grandparents, who were visiting, began then

an archaic tussle, trying to move an immovable object

to a spot already cordoned off for her: the porch.

But as she grew bolder, more comfortable, and older,

she and I became fast friends. We had a kind of mutual

respect - I would take her on long walks, indulge her

in every smell, every squirrel, every dog that had ambled that path;

and she wouldn't tell when I had my girlfriend over

when no one was home, so we could make love in the shower

like a much older and more responsible couple.

She died recently, was put to sleep while I was away at school,

and I still have not been back her grave to say goodbye.

Part of me still expects her tail to scrape against the door

as I come home for the holidays, begging me to love her

as compassionately as she gave herself to us. There are still

echoes of her nails across the wooden floors at night,

like a tinkling of bells in the beginning of a Christmas Eve service.

Perhaps that is why I never mourn her: she still lives

somewhere inside my heart, like a lighthouse on a foggy night.

Perhaps that is a measure of success. She is remembered

because she loved. Maybe that is all we can be.

Father's Song

When I was younger, we used to sleep with our doors open,

the wind blowing from one window to the next,

keeping us tied together like prayer flags on a mountaintop.

The moonlight would bathe us as if we were nothing more

than a baby, sitting in the sink, being washed and held

as only my father could hold me. He counted my breaths

on the first day I was born, and that's how I know

he still loves me. I used to sleepwalk into my parents' room,

their door wide open, and play baseball with my father

in the dark of the night, swinging at his curveball

in the pale moonlight. He would put me back to bed,

singing me all the verses of 'American Pie,' and that song

was never sung by anyone better. In his lab, I would play

with pipettes and watch as he set fire to the counters,

only for it to vanish like a magic trick. He loved his work.

He would teach my brother and I to fish, to cast out

our lines into deep pools in shady spots,

where the good fish lay deep in their brine and contentment.

He taught us to kill, to gut, and to eat the fish.

My father taught us to J-stroke, to use the paddle

as a tiller, so that even on the windiest of lakes,

battling waves above your head, you kept a straight line;

and we did. He would find things; a moose, a loon,

an owl, a flower - and he would marvel, with the concentration

of a fishing man, at its beauty and newness.

He kept books of his birds, marking down each

like another trophy he picked up for the day.

He still builds perfect fires, that glow so warmly

on Christmas Day it's as if the logs sing

'Chestnuts roasting' as they become ash.

I can see him, drifting drowsily on the sofa,

his chin on his chest, with a green turtleneck and plaid pajamas,

a book lying quietly beside him. He is so beautiful,

like an old canoe kept trim with time. He starts,

and makes his way upstairs, to pass by the open door

of my brother's bedroom, where once we both slept.

And I think he smiles, as the wind comes through the house

and the lines are drawn through his memories, tied together

like prayer-flags on a mountaintop, each gusting with happiness.

19 Times 9

Drifting towards the moment

when I may ripple through your

wake, I stop, and sit.

I cannot be more than

he can to you, but how much more

do you want from me?

I feel like a schoolboy,

duped by his smarter, more eager

and ruthless classmates.

Now I'm not sure where I stand

in your world. To what side of

the line should I stay?

Should I err with caution,

give you an ultimatum,

or languish in abandon?

The world will continue

turning, and happiness will

present itself once more -

But here is a chance for it now.

Do I take it? Do I leap?

Do you know...?

I think maybe not, not in the way

I want you to.

So I will be honest.

Which is good. Leave nothing

to chance. Leave opportunity

open. Ripples to respond.

Joker

My body sings the light electric,

like a cover of 'Blue Moon.' I'm

caught up in this storm of some

thing, some sort of magic that

is playing subtly over my fingers

and toes, deepening the damp

darkness between my ears. I

am grasping at some thing, a

monster out of reach, in a dry

basement, that creeps up the

stairs when he hears no noise

above him. He is gnawing at

my feet, playing havoc with

my sleep, and generally, most

generally, marshaling my body

for some sort of push into the

abyss. It's like I'm a massive

sponge, soaking up everything

around me, but not giving off

anything to anyone. I'm a

queer kind of parasite, who

cracks open eggs of dinosaurs,

eats their young and dissolves

into the shady night. I'm a

troll under a bridge, wishing

for solace on the side of the

road. I cannot be anymore

than I am, but life is demand

ing it somehow, like a joker

in a card deck. The lucky ones

always die first.

Playing Love

It was too easy, when you grabbed my hands

so tightly, like the world meant nothing but

them together, to look at nothing but you

and even kiss you, in a clandestine fashion,

like the way I imagine penguins might kiss,

all a huddled mass, performing private functions

in public places. It was too easy then, to watch

nothing but you, as I lay beside you, trying

vainly to sleep in your perimeter, like some

kind of clown in a too-small bed. It was easy

to regret that I could not sway your vastie

conscience, and easy to fall in love with the

next girl that came along. It was hard to leave

you there, underneath a plaid scarf wreathed

about you like a prayer. It was hard to tell you

things I didn't mean, to hurt you, to push you;

to try in vain to fight a spell not of my own

making, but not entirely of yours either. It was

so easy, so blessedly easy to say I'm sorry, to hold

you in a muscled fashion, as a mother might hold

a child who had stopped breathing. It was so easy

to sit there, whisper jokes into your ear, to laugh

with you and intertwine our fingers like twigs

growing from the same tree, as we watched the

drama unfold from our shield of happiness. It

was so hard to leave that behind, and remember

reality's mirror; to throw you over my shoulder,

like a heavy bag from IKEA, and dance on down

the road. It truly was a dream, meant for a summer's

night, that rolled so easily, like the tide on up the

beach, to be everything and all to you. To be your

world, like a blind man that hears Chopin for the

first time, and cannot describe the beauty his ears

may sing. It was something to hold onto through

the shallow days that pervade my existing. A lilypad

floating gently in a lake somewhere up north, as my

canoe ripples its grace. A lone loon song. A catch.

Starry Night

I tried to find a beanie today, to go with my plain

white t-shirt and linen cargo shorts. I thought you

might find it cute if I became one of those hiker

guys who wears a beanie all summer, maybe because

he's balding, but maybe because he's just too cool

to take it off ever. It's a fleece one, light material that

only covers the top of the head, but says something

like, "Life's Good!" or "The North Face" to increase

its hippie and outdoor-ish value. I couldn't find it,

though I didn't look in all the best places. My one

hopeful place was a sporting goods store with a

huge section of camping equipment, but no winter

gear was to be found. I suppose that makes sense,

it being summer, but still. But I couldn't find it,

couldn't somehow complete a better version of

myself for you. Maybe a simpler version, maybe

something you might like better and better until

you finally got the courage to...be with me. I already

have the adorable backpack that comes everywhere

with me, the clever smile, and witty rapport - will

the beanie do the trick? I even showed you my dance

moves, read you some poetry. But if life has taught

me anything, it is that the heart of a woman is

as complex as fleece fabric. She is twisted into

a million tiny strands of soft wool and cotton, each

one holding a secret she keeps so dearly to her heart

it's as if she were growing a pearl there. I have dared,

so many ancient times to open such a shell and pluck

that brilliant jewel from her breast, but nothing will

protect me from its aftermath, from its inevitable

decline from dream to reality, myth to periodical.

So I steamroll on, in the hope of keeping the dream

alive, even though I know it will probably fade and

die like the rest of them. But I have watched the stars

under a strange sky, and seen how long it takes for

them to flicker out. My hope will not wane so quickly.

Patterns

I guess it's true that I always fall in love with the wrong woman.

Maybe she is entirely too much, entirely too little, entirely too

taken, or entirely too brittle to bend to my shifting, changing

shadow; a reflection that time should not be measured by.

Honestly, I don't know where Time goes. It's like a three-legged

race, but Time has three legs and I have none. I'm crawling

across acres of my past to catch up to it, but it's simply out

of reach, out of the manic, underlying energy that pervades my

heart and spirit like some wild colt running free across a moonlit

field. What I want I see in front of me, and so it takes me on a

journey into familiar outposts - stations of longing I set up

a long time ago, back when love was such an adventure and

a woman was but a subject line in an e-mail address. We were

the worst kind of pen pals, making promises to visit each other,

wait for each other. It was a ridiculous courtship, a scenario

of vastly understated naivete, broken now and again like a glass

bottle, which was briefly held up to each other's throats in turn,

passing it back and forth to mean nothing in the end but a

turncoat phrase: "Goodbye again. I won't be speaking with you

until I've found myself." So many women have been handed

that phrase, and I left them like a rubber sole peeling from a shoe.

They wore me out, tramped on me as if I were nothing but a pet.

They treated me the way you treat a hamster, telling it to run on

its wheel, eat its food, drink its water, and occasionally, bring it

out to stroke, or fondle, or show off to a few friends on weekends.

I liked to watch the birds eat off the feeder, while she was watching

reality television. I liked to cry at heroic movies, while she watched

me weep, without understanding. I liked to read her poetry, that

I had written for her, but that she could not understand. I wanted

to have sex all the time, and she wanted more; more understanding,

more pity, more feeling from me. More something. Who knows?

I am a vigilante of love, seeking out the next thrill, but always, always

falling in love with the wrong woman.

Samson's Dilemma

Time/Life on a rampant commercial spree

spinning daylight into the last foreigner -

the kind of American sunlight that grows

soybeans and corns like weeds through

the dusty bowl of our morning breakfast,

like a cancer of undulating grain broken

now and then by the late retort of a wolf,

howling to welcome in a new nighttime.

Moonlight and sounds of bullfrogs beating

lasting treasures into the earth, as if they

were a drum that went straight through

the iron core of Western civilization;

as if they knew we were all doomed at one

time or another, and it was their job to

drum away our lives through the endless

saturn night, leaping around the edges of

our dreams. Such is a task of multitudes

to continent contentment into a massive

lily-white bowl, serving banana and sugar

cane, looking like day-old, truculent gummy

masturbations. They are leftover messages

from imperialistic platitudes, jumbled

like canker sores on a prostitute's lip, so

magnetic - gleaming to be touched, fondled

and forgotten. Here I sit with quicksilver

on my cap, and running through my veins

and I can think of nothing but how tired

the bull I ate today made me, how I would

love to regurgitate him into being again,

float him into a field somewhere and tell

him to fuck as many cows as he possibly can.

I would love that. But nope, I just gotta

wait for him to come out the other end,

like some submarine traversing the North

West Passage, traveling under deep ice,

frozen away from everything, maybe never

to turn up again, but to continue down

into the iron core of the Earth, meticulously,

thoughtlessly, and tirelessly, like a rapist

stalking his next target. A wolf stalking

the edge of night.

50 Cents

The internal motion serves up a menu

of ripe fruit, raw seafood, and bad karma;

expostulates, in the driest of ways, a little

bit of heaven, while plunging deeply into

the madness of hell. It is a little bit of a dream,

a little time to wear away the hours between

sleeping and waking, when all seems so

possible, so positive, so in shape, and so

improper, like a napkin folded under

a spoon. I like to think there is a place

out there without any spoons that respects

the merest human intelligence a tiny bit

more than the overbearing weight of custom

and propriety. I like to think there is a place

where I can go where no one is tied to anything,

where everyone is entirely free, without

possessions, without manic hatred, without

languid love. Sort of like a play where the audience

comes because they want to see the show, not

the actor, the idea, not the lighting, and the

dream, not the reality they so fully come to

expect, doubt and nullify. Do they dream,

then? Do they know what their lives are

made of if they cannot imagine themselves

into someone else's shoes, like a clown imitating

a horse in a river, very badly? I want to think

there is somewhere that I can live without debt

and labels, and trying so hard. And running on

everything and empty, so empty, so devoid of a

genuine human interacting, which is so vital, so

personal, so heartfelt, that we cannot and will not

let it into this fake world of money walls we have

built around each other so tightly, wrapped around

so rightly that all I can do is drudge along, like the

world's biggest idiot, knowing full well its problem,

pointing to it and laughing, but like a court jester,

completely without the power to deliver a mean-

ingful message. Believe me, I am angry. I am

sad, and woeful, and doleful, and spirited all at

once, thinking of you there, underneath your

umbrella, tramping against the rain, when you

know that in every play and every movie, rain

means change. Rain means change. And we've

been getting so much it lately. Rain means

Change.

Sex Poem

Let me fuck you.

I want to know

the inside of you,

weeping out,

staining the sheets

with self-evident

passion. Let me

want you. Don't

say anything. Just

moan. Just cry.

Just scream.

Become draped

across the underside

of the present and

for God's sake

shut your eyes

and feel it. Run

your hand across

my back;

the starry sky is there.

Grab the hair

on my chest;

the deep dirt

of gods' hands

are folded and trapped

with the dust of my mind.

Unlock the struggling

hawk, sunlit in the fire

of passion.

Suck the very soul of me

and digest the waste

with your pleasure.

Let me fuck you.

Let me say nothing

but horrible things and

let me grope the orgasm

from you. Give me

stripes to wear proud

on my back and

I will make you forget

every bad memory

in a blinding flash

of head and sweat.

Let me fuck you.

I promise you

will want it again.

Headache

My head hurts. I can't concentrate

because the great brass bell

of thought is spinning wildly

through the contours of gray matter

landing on nothing but pain receptors

making their bedraggled way down my

neck, shoving my head forward

into the future; a grimy stressful prospect

encumbered with weighty cucumber

decisions, growing and growing,

greener and greener, until the fruit

needs picked. Clang! Clang!

My brain shifts in its skull case,

moving right to left, leaving filthy

rusted imprints on the insides

of my eyes, that are popping out, ready

to implode upon the sucking vibrations -

the necklace fabric situations that make

up the sorry sad days of late autumn

windiness. It's too dark and my heart

burns listening to the sarcastic palatial

edifices of language spinning around the

hallway, landing dead on the sandpaper

carpet. Time out, as I retreat into shocking,

gut-wrenching emotion, moving the air

in pitch and swiftly, my head to the past.

Devil's Mouth

The distraction of the unstudied mind

brings talking to the forefront, while it

blasts away the patient intellectualism

forged in long long hard hard sessions

in front of the devil's mouth. Such a man

is no man, until he strips away the sucker-

punch jovialism conjured up by the images

of his mother and father copulating. He

can't leave his undressed adolescence

at the doorway and simply let go of every

TV show hero he's ever seen; rebuking

reality for a fat paycheck at the end of his

convenient diatribe about "the girl he did."

The didactic quality of a high school jock

culture breeds every insensitive tendency,

while the untapped resource of the sore

chest stagnates in pools of bloody belt

notches. He speaks with utter un-self

and puts on the face of a court jester.

Closeted Girlfriend

He talks on the phone to his late-night,

underachieving girlfriend, "Why are

you ignoring me?" she asks.

He senses malice and makes up for it

with, "I didn't get your message till now

and - " He's cut off by her un-obvious

attempt at a joke. The probing, prying

questions of mistimed conversations

swell like an off-key sonata, unmade

by the fact that the tuba doesn't trust

the conductor and the flute ran off

with the second violin. He talks.

His cadence rises, an irregular march

toward - what? The final blissful chord,

screaming endurance and faithfulness,

surround the air, melting the fragile

dissonance once held so permanently

under a veneer of conquettish gossip-

talk, donut-shop sexuality. If all women

want is sex in the city, then what happens

after? Did you? Did she? Did he?!

What a terrible man, breaking her poor

heart. He talks more.

She listens to the unbroken stream of

consciousness, browbeaten by her own

lack of sickening commitment. Her

veil fades and she can't wear white

any longer, a product rich in the disinfected

kitchen sink whitewashed laziness of the

Upper 90's. A beep summons her awake.

A lamplight draws out the distance.

The staccato pulse of her hearts drums

the sounds of the boys away. She unplugs

the drain and her eyes come leaking out.

What did they see? What did she mean?

How did it end?

The skittles of plain time

are falling like last minute ova

across the pimply face of the

Milky Way.

Heartburn

Somehow I have very little time

to even think about you any more.

It's like the sadness you wrote

on the insides of my eyelids

is very much gone and now I can

close my eyes comfortably without

being reminded of your perfections.

Because you weren't anything more

or anything less than a perfect illusion

in my fevered brain. Like a mouse

picking its teeth with sawdust in a

mansion made entirely of stone,

you were somehow out of place. Like

the place you occupied in my chest

wasn't the traditional heart-space,

but maybe a little up and to the left,

so I always felt like there was something

more to digest, something stuck in

my throat, somehow something left

that stuck with me like an python

trying to swallow a crocodile, whose

skin is thick as armor and bone.

Like an owl catching a mouse in the

moonlight painted by an open window

in a house made of stone.

The last great architect of the Western World

stood up from the table he was working at

and let out a deep sigh. Let's see where this

is going, he thought. He blew a deep walrus

note through his nose, bristled like a brush

ready for the teeth and masturbated on a bunch

of toy soldiers.

That seems about right, he thought.

Home

lately i've been thinking of home quite a bit more, and what that all means, especially now being away from it for an extended period of time beyond the couple of months or weeks that was sophomore and junior year. i wrote a simple poem that gets to the heart of what i really can't express more gracefully:

i suppose it's sad
to leave home for the last time
to trippingly spin your way out the door
knowing subtly underneath
the children's blanket warmth
of crispy golden-fried leaves
your room will be
painted
when again you return.

i suppose my life is on a track to finding a new home, and not for the first time, i feel homeless amongst the masses of hundreds and thousands. Home is home, but not in the same way. it's home in the way the evergreen scent of trees and dead-snow silence is christmas. and i suppose christmas, being a time to be home, brings these thoughts out. under the guise of something more profound, i think i'm simply ready for a break from the city, from people, and i'm ready to be taken care of for a bit.

i think what the poem really means is that i'm simply longing for a nurturing hand, but now, getting older, means that there are new layers, new coats of paint, to the relationship with family, and to the relationship with myself. discovering these new layers brings me to a new stage of self-realization, but also a sadness at the loss of the downy days of childhood, when a soft bed of leaves was enough for countless afternoons of fun. it still would be, but i have no time. and Time, such a precious commodity, moves unforgivingly forward. i always feel as though i'm catching up, always a little bit behind Time, because i hold on. i really don't know if this is a bad thing or not. i really don't know if chinese medicine is right, and my colitis is somehow part of that. but that's another day.

this poem reveals a side to me i don't share with people, because sadness and regret are hard to bring up in conversation without offending. but i am haunted by my childhood; by trees, lakes, rivers, a snowy whiteness, the mountains, and through it all, my father's hands on a fishing pole, quietly dipping into the molten-gold water at dawn. the moments of peace are few, and i weep gently, from the depth of my body, for all.

Jazz

i really want to thank everyone who responded to the note. be it good or bad, i'd love to know your opinion. that could mean writing back, telling me in the hall, or simply discussing it (or anything), with someone else. i suppose this is a forum for thought and feeling, and if something moves you, please do let everyone know. communication is becoming more essential in a world growing so small, and i feel that finding a place where your opinion counts is life-giving.

that said, i'm going to put some of my older poetry up here, as i'm too tired to attempt something original. enjoy or don't, but please no apathy. not-caring brings the world awful consequence, and i won't tolerate that.

prideful wedding bells
ring the smooth slow soppy-talk
of a '40s late-night dive
all escalator-notes
rising up like the collars
on a too-tall dizzy mix
of gangly interlopers
braying on a saxophone
& a trumpet
foxtrotting along piano keys
cutting the cords of a stringed bass
patting the drums
like the heads of naughty
two-year-old toddlers
sometimes i wish i was etta james
and i could suck my soul
into a song
run around the insides of notes
and come round the mountain
steaming to the end
wailing the brilliant
sunlight soul of jazz
just eating the Aflat
like a piece of rare beef
snapping off celery stick C's
dipping them in bleu cheese E's
coming round all the way
for a chocolate Bflat
just the smoothest little chord
under a hazy cool-whip high-hat
couldn't ask for anything more
play on you chefs of I-IV-V7
your kitchen is my soul

(a little side note on this one. i wrote it in merchants. many of you work there, or have been there, and know how loud it can be. but i was there one night, and it got quiet, and all i heard was a saucy jazz minx crooning her coffee-and-cream truth, and my head spun. she ignited the air, and made that fire easy to breathe. my ears combusted and i was back on solid ground. i tried to write that. and etta james being one of the only jazz singers i know, her name came to mind easy. i also had an especially good guinness that night, from an especially charming waitress, which probably put me in the right rhythm for that kind of language devolution.)

A 911 Call

"hello, new york emergency services, what's your emergency tonight?"

"hi! there's been an accident."

"where are you, sir?"

"101st and 2nd ave!"

"what borough?"

"...what...?"

"what borough sir?"

"oh..........................manhattan......................"

"you've been in an accident, sir?"

"no - i witnessed one......."

"what happened?"

"a baby.......A BABY CARRIAGE was hit by a car.....!!!-!"

"oh my god...............OK WE'LL HAVE SOMEONE THERE AS SOON AS WE CAN."

"thank you..........................."

that's pretty much how it went. screaming tires, a cold shattering of glass wood, and silence..................................................then the scream -

"OH MY GOD THE BABY!!"

and terror grips you. the phone was in my hand and just as suddenly the call was over, the scream of an angel siren, and i was holding the boy's hand. he wasn't a baby, he was a toddler. i looked at his eyes. he wasn't scared (and because he wasn't, neither was i). all he could say was, "baby." and then he pointed to where the ignorant offending minivan man stood, impotently staring at the overturned carriage. "baby," he said again. and i asked him if he was ok. "baby," he repeated, pointing. and i laughed. "yes," i said, "baby." and then he was whisked off by his grandmother, off my phone with her daughter, telling her to come down and take the boy to the hospital. her drunken tears made me cold. by then, the firemen, the EMTs and the police had arrived. i took a backseat, and left when we told the police what happened.

a screech of tires, a crunch, and a keening cry. even now it chills me. it rent the air open, drawing cracks in the very fabric of the space surrounding it. and the crack broke me open. even now, the right response to that situation escapes me. i did all i could, but still feel a sense of lingering doubt.

i suppose i saw in this moment a microcosm of the negatives of a hierarchy based on economic law. here was an alcoholic old hispanic woman walking her grandson back home with a friend, getting hit by a well-dressed middle-aged white male in his gold minivan. the man may have been drunk as well. i was surprised and disturbed by the man's actions. he got out of his car slowly, walked to the carriage, and said blithely, "is everything ok?" his phone was nowhere to be seen, calling for help that came anyway, despite his impotence. and here, i thought, was a perfect metaphor for the society i see everywhere in new york. a young hispanic boy, hardly walking, is knocked to the street by an ignorant white male. the boy is unhurt, can even summon up a bit of unknown satire, but it occurred to me that this may be his struggle for the rest of his life. and when i left, i heard the EMT having to convince the guardians to take him to the hospital, "just for a checkup?"

this poor boy, whom i touched for a brief moment, is utterly trapped already. so i gave a homeless man five dollars and walked home in the sleet, to maybe make up for such a trembling injustice. there has to be a better way to help, a better way to make it better. how do i look that boy in the eye in twenty-five years, knowing i left him with people who may not know what's best? how do i look myself in the eye?

The Exiting Empires

and so it was
that ought-seven (have we counted so far?)
was over
and there were we
under the influence of confetti-packed sky-light candy
rolling underneath the weight of the ship
the hull flipped over to reveal the glass bottom
and we
staring up at the reflection of ourselves
at the bottom of the sea
strode manful to the gate
rapped on the door
with st. peter laughing drunk
spewing gunk
into a paper cup
wrote FUCK
on his forehead
and YOU
on his chin
then grinned
and pulled the machine lever to reveal the glory of the fading West
while fathers and fathers sang their Sun into the ground.
and what was the view?
of ourselves, that's right.
of a many-colored static night
the losing virginity night
in the basement of our parents' homes
covered in all modesty by the native american blanket
the primary reds, blues, and yellows
mixing and matching
the northern/southern sky
racing across the endless moonhaven landscape
like green fire across the salty ocean-bottom sea
and it was a welcome (wellcum) feeling.
to share and dare
and dream and die
and do and see
and crowd and create
all make the world spin just as fast
as when it was spinning before...

...

there it was.
the moment into forever.
(a whisper's whisper)

Love at 18 Summers

There are times when i feel too much
when i walk in on the wrong conversation
when i stumble upon the drooping leaves over my feet
over the way summer is over
and you know it all comes to the end
when you know life has to start
and for the next while
you are gone again
gone into space
gone into life
gone into being
and recreating
and rewriting the script of your life
surrounded by strangers with glasses
and coats to shed all over again
the way it was way back when the coat
pulled itself off from the rain
and mother said "I love you" to your tears
who knew to disappear
Now they appear at 'love'
and disappear when pain comes.
it is the recital of life
almost a circus, never quite a show,
but always entertaining
always meaning
always growing and growing
and changing and changing
and stepping on yesterday
to get to tomorrow
My grand tapestry is a weaving
of love
of memory
of hardship
of beauty
of people
of passion
of song
of living
Now all i want to do is sleep and dream
a little longer with you
a little further and a little higher than before
And maybe if we fly high enough
no one will catch us
In fact, i know that.
Love is as inescapable as memory
and just as painful
just as beautiful
Somehow love with you eclipses memory
shouts at tradition
and follows me home at night
to write and dream of you
a thousand times before tomorrow
and thousand times since yesterday
and never enough of today.


it's illuminating to look back at myself then, knowing how things have changed. i'm not in love with this person anymore, though i was, deeply, for a very long time. i see myself in a moment, almost a photograph of pure consciousness strewn out in letters on a page. and part of me is jealous of that innocence, as i think anyone would be. now, thinking about love brings caution, though wild abandon will always be a part of who i am. i learned a lot from getting my heart broken. most of it i wish i could unlearn, and throw myself into the bosom of love once again, with full heart gleaming to starry night.

this is not the best poem i have ever written. nor is it the best address to love (in my opinion) i have ever written either, but it speaks to me simply. i think the best poems are simple, and even if this one is slightly jilted, my message is clear at the end. that's what i like about it.

Ruminations on Complications

"It's complicated."
That's all she said,
taking a drag from the ashen cigarette.
It's complicated...
He spilled his tea and watched it leak
all over the napkins,
making futile brown designs
like a wet fetid swamp growing on the table.
Or was it his heart?
(The bird that ran across the telephone wire,
leaping into oblivion
only to be snuffed out by
a passing jet engine -
Oh what a miracle to know the joy of flight!)
It's complicated...
over and over again
the flicker of a life-that-could-have-been
rolls through the back of his eyelids.
Spilled tea...have another?
Yes I'd like that.
It's complicated.
Undeniable secrets that float
across the plain to seek out hearts,
bury them in fields
where rain won't wash them up again.
Fill the ditches with the bodies of livestock
and literal translations of Chekhov -
It's so complicated!
Like a Rubik's cube
or a putting green or
a relationship.
It's the ineffable,
untouchable,
grief-stricken
death
of someone to whom you are speaking.
It's complicated.
The death-knell of a new life.

What A Loss

i'm going to be honest. when i first heard that heath ledger was dead, a sort of numb shock split me, as if the space around had actually been divided by a great meat cleaver, and i was left there to watch it slowly ravel into something again. when it did, i felt nothing but a terrible sense of loss.

if you listen to ben folds' itunes originals album, he talks about the cliche of saying "What a loss..." he used to hear his parents say it about old friends. and he said he never appreciated the phrase until he got older, when someone he actually looked up to was gone. all of the sudden, it wasn't a cliche anymore (what a horrible word anyway), and there becomes nothing more appropriate than those simple words: "What a loss."

it hit me on the subway tonight as i was riding downtown. i understood what that meant. "what a loss," i said to myself, and nothing else could bring me closer to what i was feeling. and i felt older for that.

it also hit me listening to band of horses' "the funeral." my sudden breakdown, of pure, unadulterated grief surprised me. i didn't know him, but maybe i felt as if i did. that is the beautiful thing about an actor - they reveal the most intimate parts of themselves, their most vulnerable inadequacies, to the entire world. when, in brokeback mountain, ennis collapses to the floor, holding his dead lover's shirt, overcome by his own sense of loss, i felt that moment of love more poignantly than any other i have witnessed onscreen.

and that was his gift. to bring us to tears, to laughter, to joy, and to terror, as witnessed by the dark knight trailers floating around the net. i feel this sense of loss personally, not only because of the circumstances of his death, but because as a young male actor, there is hardly anyone who did better work than he did.

and so i say, "what a loss," because what else can i say? i cannot write what i feel right now. i am in the cold light of mourning.

"the funeral"
band of horses

I'm coming up only to hold you under
I'm coming up only to show you wrong
And to know you is hard and we wonder
To know you all wrong, we were

Really too late to call, so we wait for
Morning to wake you; it's all we got
To know me as hardly golden
Is to know me all wrong, they were

At every occasion I'll be ready for a funeral
At every occasion once more is called a funeral
Every occasion I'm ready for the funeral
At every occasion one brilliant day funeral

I'm coming up only to show you down for
I'm coming up only to show you wrong
To the outside, the dead leaves, they all blow
'Fore they died had trees to hang their hope

At every occasion I'll be ready for the funeral
At every occasion once more is called the funeral
At every occasion I'm ready for the funeral
At every occasion one brilliant day funeral

Connections

and suddenly i'm unable to sleep
like a cold iron, lying prostrate across a little-used board
mixed up by fashion and fascinated
with fiscal year-end promises
so easily broken in the february cold rain.
if it was easier to simply stop
and stop doing what i've been doing
and start over again...all over
with a new body and an old brain
i would so easy right now.

i read tolstoy
and he writes about
the little pain before death
and i think sometimes i feel that pain
or something like it.
and maybe i really know what it's going to be like
to die and all.
i think ever since
i became a slave to my indefatigable, complicated digestion
i believe i might die any day
and still i do nothing
to preserve my own memory.

and now here i am
writing to my brain in the dark
waiting for me to wake up
and smell the nuclear fusion
sweeping the sidewalks clean.

but how can i wake up
when i can't go to sleep in the first place?

and what now?
what do i do with this knowledge of mortality?

but how are you?
i keep remembering to ask that...
how ARE you??
please tell me, because my loneliness
is a product of my feeble heart's disasters.
because maybe all i wanna do tonight
is listen
to you talk to me and i could be happy with that.
and we could not worry about (sex) and tomorrow.
what was that?
yes i am afraid of you.
i'm afraid of what failing with you might cost
and now...now you are but a reflection
passing out of a rain puddle across the street.
and i stare so deep into the back of your brown hair
waiting for you to invite me back into it
that it starts raining again.

but what did i do...besides nothing?
i waited, long under the expectant tree
with flowers in my hand, carving pre-empty initials
into now-dead bark.

(and my skin is so dry
and my armor is so thick)
against the rain and the snow
and the wind blowing
coating the city with separate-ness.

you reading this might think
of steely images
and lovelorn gazes lonelily
stirring up the snow geese heading north,
but i defy you to find sadness in this.
celebrate the awareness
of such ample emotion spread out
along the cracks of the sidewalks of the city.
for what is life but suffering the beauty of another?
and what is death
but a quest for eternal rest?

now i feel myself slipping away
to run across fields, leaping to touch the moon
naked and free from everything, even you.

please let me have this moment, deep in the night
where i can be free of all and imagine myself
running across these silver fields
loping into eternity
with dandelion seeds flung up from my feet
to become stars in the next life.

going home one night after

and with the ten o'clock wake-up call
comes snow
and the loud noise of bus engines bustling
through the crowdy streets of manicured
tinctured porcelain people
robed in fur and black

and walking home straight tears
form in my gut
to be thrown up out my mouth
to feel sick and sad
all at the same time
for no apparent reason at all

until

the rain-drop galaxies
form constellations on bare winter branches
and in the pale foreign orange
of a streetlight
become suns and stars
to eat up my melancholy
and slip into a promise
of life
that looks like a gorilla ice-skating
with an ice-cream cone atop its head.

to be well

what does it mean, the phrase, TO BE WELL? what does that mean to me, someone who is sick; sick in the way old people who are dying are sick, and (that's not me.) it means nothing. it means today, i'll be in pain, because something in my GUT isn't quite right. right? something is bugging me but i have no magic spray to kill the bug away. how i would wish for that - for that - for that - silly little pill to kill not spill the contents of my subtext onto un-metaphorical underpants, that, by the way, i throw away.

knock knock.
you done in there?
no i'm not you fucking bitch, just hold your piss a little longer while i clean this goddamned shit.

i'm not in hell, i'm a demon's wet dream, made for a purgatorial conspiratical cigar-bar stories, deemed clean by the quack who took a look inside and won't look back. don't talk to me about diapers, baby, because you got it lucky, baby, everyone jumps to change you, baby, while changing me means operations to remove the sick part of me, heal the bad heart of me, trim the rank start of weeds flowering the art of me.

so to be or not to be is not so much the question, but the place where i can reveal the impression my accession to indigestion is in fact a secession from painful expression so apt in repression but reeking of the medical profession.

i said wait, person at the door. your turn will come. my porcelain throne is nearly yours.

the idea that silence has a sound

and in the hopscotch lighting
of believability
i watched you turn in concentric circles
around a photo of polar bears
and i laughed to think of an image
so clandestine
to know it in some ornery corner
of the still night grasshopper summer.

you turned so graceful
like a ballet dancer on pointe;
a pointillated comet
showering the steely earth
with an unmended sense of disaster
and colloquial dreams.

it was the product of a summer night
that rode so peacefully
through the ocean of my mind
and grasped silently
the hurricano waters
sluicing them through a sieve
of flowerbeds and canoe paddles
rasping so still
outside the dwellings of turtle-necks
and frog legs.

in some far-off place
like an l.l. bean catalog
i saw you then
racing up a mountain
careening from ledge to ledge
mountain-goat-leaping
like a disturbed phobia
to match the runnels of water
pouring down a crystalline road map
filling gaps and hedgerows
in a quiet thunder of movement.

and what was so still
and what was so silent
about it
was the way you laughed into a glass of wine.

sometimes the only reason to live in this world is...

release the crease
that built my head
upon the back
of my neck
trill the silence
with a sharp
loving tone
disorganize
my hair
pull my eyes
out of focus
and trap me.




suggest theme music.




brush.




and in the space between
set up open mic night
on my tonsils.

3 Thoughts

1.
in the dusk
where the lamplight paces along the wall
i watch you through a spectral glass
with curly hair and heidi dimples
roving across the fields of memory
conjured by a future of uncertainty
and dimmed reality that so laments
ungrateful glances of masturbated moments.

where were you when the dog died?
is the sadness now in me
ever a by-product in your perfect image?

in the past
i would have loved
for you to know who i am.
and now
it reeks of registered regret.

2.
when the train pulls
into the station
and you are a little late
getting out of the seat
and onto the platform
i think of flamingoes
and picture you
standing one-legged
in your pantsuit
groping fish
from the brackish water.

3.
Dwell in the cloudy moment
of a rainstorm for just a second
and holding the newspaper
above your head, digest
the news as it run down
your hair. when you get
home, don't wash until
you believe all the words aren't
dirty.

[when in the quiet twilight]

when in the quiet twilight
mysteries leaven the dead mind
a sounding board
of twittering fibers
our hearts become
and will us
into action.

blank verse

1.
Dawn is an argonaut on a telling sea
a whistling bird killing the tiny brine
that sweeps away the sweeping deep and boils
the sun early to a temperate seat.

2.
Dwelling on the duality that speaks
to me when you tie your shoes around
your ankles trips me into the heart
of cuddling mystery and safe harbors.
Keeping that in mind, the mastery with which
you ate the scone defeats my finger rhythms.

so yeah...just a little experiment in writing like the bard. thought i would try it and see what happens.

to the woman kicked out around 8:30

who were you before you wrapped your head in a brown towel to protect you from the sun?
do you have children out there in the black discovery?
was that your lovely kiosk?
just a place for some company?
and who brought you in to this lightning-filled brain trust to be shunned like Lazarus?

for what was Prometheus but the outcast of the gods?
what fire have you discovered?
did your brilliance light the world?
or did it burn up with your paper dreams, now smoke-ash like your coat and your voice?

you are the speck of twilight on the golden horizon, reminding us too well of our failures, so you must go. but I must remain, to measure out my life in checkbooks and yardsticks. you are so free, beyond the melting sidewalks of manhattan. when we drown in ignorance, your significance will overwhelm US.

with words.

in body language
the boy pointed out
we often say what
we can't when we give

voice to our thoughts.
isn't that beautiful?
he said, rolling his
eyes. but you just

rolled your eyes
the girl said. that
is meaning you
don't take beautiful

seriously. i was testing
you the boy said eagerly,
nodding his head. you
have passed and now

you see my point. what
point? she said smiling
shyly. he smiled,
blinked and blew her
a kiss. she uncrossed

her toes and caught it
in her butterfly eyes.
the point i pointed out
to you with words.

i want a brown bread life

a fluttering of wings that melds with the coma-inducement
of a dreamless work day suddenly brings me away from finite
thoughts and yellow mustard faces - those thousand dimmed lights
that surface among the lilypads to croak their crunching number factory
across the pond - while i stare up among the rushes
to watch the rain pour down and the clouds gather ominously
to throw a sucker punch of wet light across the face of the sky
scarring it like the face of adam cracked and aged among the sistine quiet.
and reaching up and out of the ground
the fluttering becomes a beat, a drum of incessant needfulness
squealing past the sundering powderpuff to break through
into a night devoid of alien twitters. and the stars peek through
and the waffle-iron image of the big dipper
sweeps away the existence of commerce
and big ideas. and i am alone among the universe
in a packed house of florescence, smiling deftly.

A Little Zen

there is a tree lying down
somewhere in the middle
of the old dogwood town
that speaks of a people
sad to behold.

their eyes climb sundays
to the dogwood steeple
of the church in the middle
of the dogwood road,

kept sane and pregnant
and just a little
too shiny for the preacher
who sings the parishioners' weekly ode:

"a mighty fortress is our god"
he sings, regretting his bacon grits,
now speaking to him as an unwelcome prod;
piercing the quietus of his bare abode.

elsewhere, a bird is humming a tune
while it muses on seed and fruit and bug,
a mighty fortress it seeks to festoon
with twig and leaf, for a welcome home.

and the tree lying down knows nothing
and everything of the nonsense
that plays in the dogwood town
with his only friend the dogwood road.

Tribue to HL

there it was.
there it was that the boat was rocked
under a thousand seas
peering downward to taste the fresh salt
that floated up from the bottom
and we were terrified.

we were terrified to find in ourselves
the understanding of a soul
so needy and distressed
a soul possessed by his madness
his muttering incantations
a mixed-media multitude
of cries and laughter
that brought only
terrific terror.

the whistles that brought us home then
have a keening cry now
a sort of morbid underground dwelling
that a seeker may find
beyond all his wild fantasies
and swift wishes for death
and destruction
and rape
and mind-blowing orgasms

all of these things are now somehow related
in a way they weren't before
so if it was said, "you're a whore"
it might mean "i love you"
and it wasn't like that before.

the soul is a starting-gun
an ominous sound that signals
a race to a steady, rhythmic pound
and like the tick-tock of bombs
and the hopscotch of laughter
the soul is a starting-gun
and it doesn't matter.

SP

we were a dreamer's being
a whistle lifted to the mourning light
a soft-spoken urge to cry when dust settled
in the front of our mind's eye.

we were a dreamer's being
a nifty little teapot
boiling the ideals of a 60s generation
into tea-leaf necromancy
watching the steam rise
to waken dead rhetorico-politics
embodied by a knight less dark
than a caribou-carcass dawn.

we were a dreamer's being
we ebbed and flowed
like the tides of a feminist dream
a beautiful, undulating wave
of emotion, free thinking, and eve-olution.
a spanking that left hazy drifting lights
at the edge of vision

of a dreamer's being
that tossed about
a schooner caught in the maelstrom
a portrait of a retarded clown
a sequoia tossed on the money pile
a muscled ego playing brahms
crooning to his newborn puppies
a lullabye to swing them to a deep jazz sleep
where notes flutter about on the wind
mixing with the times
to become
a dreamer's being

of the endless swollen future.

a rush of blood to the heart

it was easy to think about love
in our mud-rusty
blanket face phase.
a whirling dream of misbegotten lies
a well-shaped organ of sweetness
of candy and cotton
and tumbleweed misdirection
that looped across the sky like the tail
of a comet brought forth
through countless hours
of exploration underneath
a blanket of stars.

a dreaming blue that signaled
a new kind of rapture
that enfolded and unfolded
and exploded
and then
corroded
like a raspberry snowcone
in a carnival park night time spill.

it was such a dream:
that dream of you and i
and the countless other people
that were witness to our public
masturbations of emotional lewdness.

it was a dream a dream a dream
of such magnetic beauty
like the head of medusa without the snakes
that maybe would turn nothing but our hearts to stone
and we would be cured of our dreaming

our endless sleep
of a willow pond in late summer
of dragonflies on a swimsuit top
of sex under the full moon
in a steamy backseat car
your pink silk dress pulled around your waist

the heat
of a sweat
stained
sock
caught in a doorframe in the rush
of blood
to the heart.

laying cool on a mountaintop
with windy conversations
and no nothings about us
but an evening in the blackness
of starlight kisses.

oh it was a dream of such
michelangelo greatness
that gods only
could tear it down.

and they did.

Thank You Note to BHO

I cannot be anymore silent than I am right now. A sated silence; the breastworks pile up like wine-valley hills around my distant wisdom. I am a creature of solitude among the clever spinning lights of the DJ booth. They are whirring in an ecstatic customary way. Won't you feel the back of my neck simply glowing with consternation at the thought of peeling back my onion heart to expose it to this rainbow of light - this modicum of sound - this ecstasy of fertility ritual. These altars of paganism that scream silently beneath blood that bubbles and boils with the sound, the sound, the sound...

Waves of energy are being released out among us, the fruitful youth. We are become the juggernaut, the grand inquisitor and the virgin sacrifice all in one motion - a sweeping from right to left that transforms the outer workings of our ritual into the inner workings of our last great hope. We are become the sole responsibility of daylight. We are become the dawn.

I am ensconced still by the trappings of night. Now, daylight is grown shorter. The hand that tucks the purple night into the horizon comes earlier and by its clock do we run the gamut of our day. Now is the time to bed down among the cotton and wool our mothers taught us, and say our prayers against the Cold: the aching presence of age so summarily gifted us by the whiteness, the blankness, the darkness of winter.

Sad it is we should be thrown Opportunity as the twilight dwells longer. But sing we louder into the depths of night, obsessed with the beauty of our skin upon each other; our touch informing the soft and violent language of love. We are up there, among the stars, just as surely as we are trapped holding each other under woven blanket dreams. So the rainbow fits, and my efforts to keep my own rapture from bursting forth seem futile amongst the liquid dawn we have created amidst a jumble of steel and mettle so hastily assembled by our fathers.

What Joy we have created! What monuments of our own destiny! These tiny flagellations of night-time seem nothing compared to our bright golden dawn. What Joy! What intimacy! What Freedom! Here we stand, tasting the metal air, the sharp acid intake of Air before the plunge To Be! The haste of man's survival is upon us! What Joy! What Joy!

-SJ