02.07.08

1.July.08

in milestones, poetry at 2:33 pm

It was in everything that I heard you
the first time
stepping into what looked like
the deepest cave,
where you stood
and cried,
hoping that the echoes
would become blankets to comfort you.
As the sound travelled back, the blankets found me,
and I carried their shining covers to you,
bringing only my motives to make you warm.
It was in the stars behind those tears
that I found you, and I shined the
ones in my eyes, too.
Only the blankets were sheets,
and we tangoed beneath them,
searching for ourselves all the while.
And when it came to pass
that I lost my legs and
we found no answers,
you and I, we suffered all the while.
No matter the softness of sheets,
the billowing pillows,
it was not I that could patch your holes.
We would neither sink, nor swim,
nor grow together
as I learned to walk again,
walk again.

05.04.08

in thoughts at 2:31 am

What are we to do when

old faces speak as if no time has passed; when dusts are shaken off with no regard for the dust, but the old feelings there still gleam; light from places where no light has ever been blinds; to remember that which has never staggeringly happened; we remember, remember, remember; we sleep too much because we are in love with dreams more than reality, and our shifting fabric is pulled clumsily as the magician’s trick botched; dispensing advice sounds like a reminder to the self; outside forces suddenly silent force peace; wandering used to keep me so in touch with myself; music fades away into nothing but the sounds of traffic, sudden daring breezes, and the distant murmur of talking people; we long to shake this relevance from my bones.

valuing the spontaneity and spark of living in the moment against refusing to forget because of the value in all that has happened in all that you have done and wished you still did because you will, some day, do it and do it right because you never did, thought you never will, and aren’t at the moment from the shadows of intent, doubt, and laziness looming taller than the buildings that expensively hold our time as paper captives in holding cells six inches thick with the deafness of industry and selfishness driven by the shivering-in-the-cold-rain flashbacks of being six years old and hated by your father for the last time, screaming in your head, “For the last time, it’s not my fault.”

21.03.08

in milestones, thoughts at 12:37 pm

It’s unusual to be in a place between myself.
Aside from my body layered
in clothes, I show
little else to the world,
but beneath me, — inside and through me –
there are raging rivers,
deep roots of trees,
and swift,
cutting gales. At once,
I am both tempest and stone.
I know the grace of being outside of myself now,
but the corners of my mind are interestingly safer.
Without risk, I learn nothing,
but sheltered, I do not hurt.
Do I deny myself rainstorms, fearing the lightning?
Do I deny the quake within?
It has been said that when one seeks one’s roots, you grow stronger.
Should I dig down?
Should I remember all of the things that I feel stir,
but don’t touch?
What would happen to me if I
dug up the ground that I grew upon?
Would I still be able to stand?
Would I find answers or more questions?
Are answers merely more questions?
Even if I do find an answer, who is to say that I’ll like it?

24.02.08

anywhere

in poetry at 7:47 pm

I wasn’t born until I met you.
Yes, I love my mother, and my father disappeared, but
I was an ice age begging for a sun before
you pried open the grey with your big yellow fingers.
Now, I’m digging through my pockets for what I might
be able to give you in return, and every finger
is covered in lint, which coincidentally
feels like you.

Every windy day, when the sand would cut our faces
and the blankets inside were shockingly static cling,
we’d go to bed early, but I’d lay there, awake, pressed against your back,
feeling how, even when you’re mad,
you’re still so warm and soft,
and glowing, and …

Every time we talk about how things aren’t working,
I hear it when you tell me
what I’m not saying,
when it’s really just that
the tip of my tongue held it too tightly –
I hear it behind your words that you’re just
as afraid as I am
because we found something that actually works
and something that finally got me excited,
and something that I worry about when
it gets a little rough.

And when all of the glasses in my house
are empty, and the cupboard bare,
I think of a life without you
now that I know what it’s like
and I hit snags and inconvenient stops
like how I can’t make pancakes right without you,
or how the our small bed is too big without you,
or how sunlight isn’t bright enough without you,
or how I can’t write a poem that’s better than you.

So, I want to be the person in the ambulance
with you
when it’s family members only.
I want to watch us fall apart when we’re eighty,
when my missing teeth make all of my words sound the same.
I want to learn sign language
so I can talk to you when I’m sick, and when
I lose my hearing to blasting the beautiful song
that is you.
I want to be the flour that holds your bread together,
your flowers that bloom at midnight,
your power to face every day
and still come back stronger.
I want to call you beautiful and powerful,
but still remind you of how I’m in love
with your softness and your tender parts,
of how your vulnerability
stops me every time
and have it be new every time
so you smile even wider.
I want to give you wedding bells
so I can have your hand
for the rest of our breathing life together
because living anywhere with you makes everything there
so much more magical and worthwhile.
Even places I’ve never been to are
wondrous, captivating, and
‘that place,’ the one we always talk about falling in love with.

So, whether it’s Brooklyn,
Cambridge, Blackpool,
Brighton & Hove,
Kenton, Exeter,
or right here,
can I just say
that I don’t have a fear
as long as I’m
not without you.

09.01.08

in poetry at 10:57 pm

Stray cat feet are cautious, like the rains that won’t come.
No matter the amount of trees, the size of the fields that hold the
lush green hair of the earth, all is desert when discontent lays rest.
Recipes of person-to-person exchanges rise slowly
when kneaded with cracked hands, so dry from trying so hard
to work the misgiving hands of the fragile smiling faces.

Desert, when the faces of many turn when eyes meet.
Desert, when the hi and how-are-yous aren’t really questions, but run-on sentences to here’s-your-change and have-an-nice-day.
Desert, when the world screams for attention, but it’s in a frequency so low that only the high can hear it.

Tortoiseshell cats stained orange by the sunrise that inspired
shock and awe
take to the roads blackened with rubber when the
alleyways rustle with picked through garbage cans
for something to eat
that isn’t food, but the idea of a table and chairs,
of seated conversation, of a night with neighbours and their uproarious laughter behind closed doors.
And through all of the digging, the desperate digging
for matching hand-me-down glasses,
mumbles and slurred speech
asking,
“Will I reach a point then this will be enough? When will this be enough? Will this be enough?”

And all of the crumbled newspapers meant to be recycled,
and all of the tabloid articles etching into stone
what love should and should not be,
all of the things that someone else no longer wanted
breathe the answer as they are:
the endless story of desperation, of longing, of never knowing
when this will be enough.

18.11.07

in poetry at 10:01 pm

Morning light, pour as liquid through the blinds.
Make me forget depth.
These sheets reek of the secrets that we’ve told.
Dizzy with your lips tugging at my ear,
I turn to find you clumsily,
a wrist
your hand on mine,
a thigh. Outside sleeps comfortable autumn, but
here we speak only your name and of April.
These sheets frame very beating of the drums beneath our cages,
and we open their doors in silence when
words won’t do.
Breathing reminds me of closesness,
such that when you’re gone, I listen
to my own. A tapped rhythm
keeps me calm when one drum
can’t keep time
and each time I wash these sheets, I hear our secrets,
our time bubbling to the surface,
and I remember your breathing, soft and warm.

15.10.07

in poetry at 4:47 am

we were reduced to shadows of ourselves
when we questioned the infinite, –
that which has happened,
and will happen again –
when we questioned the loop
of questions, when the leaves
and the busses hurried down hollow streets,
words and roads either paved
or cobblestone.

shadows
staring blankly at the sun
when all
light, too, were forsaken
to circles.

rain came predictably.
abundant when in abundance,
absent when the absence was felt so deep down.

time,
fleeting or crawling
ate at our heels — beside or of them –
until we could no longer balance ourselves,
balance the needs of ourselves.
cobblestone and flesh met
after years of refusing to sit
and so became the infinite,
accepted without question
love and abhorrence
altruism and thievery
peace and trepidation
came together with the silence of the verbal dance
and with the infinite came nothing,
and when they collided,
so came everything,
and the reasons for it, too.

29.08.07

in story at 4:10 pm

The flame of the candle has caught the draft in the room, still lit from late this morning, before the sun. A small circle dances on the ceiling. I see dawn’s influence on the night who pretends it’s going away, and the blue outside is deafening. Not even the birds are moving. I fell asleep last night long before I expected. The sun does that to me. Stepping out into it again is not something I greet with alacrity, but I can say that what happens on the other end of my sunburn-upon-sunburn journey is what I feel so anxiously that my teeth are even sensitive to the air.

The day is pregnant with possibilities. I make a sort of slithering out of waking up. The sheets make that sound that you think you’ve ever only heard in films against my skin, and even with the purple-redness, it somehow feels good. My neck is still stiff from two weeks ago, pillows or not, and I’ve tried every way to sleep, which is really just a sleeping pose, because my eyes being closed is the step outside of sleeping — and that’s as far as I get. I stretch, and every muscle seems angry.

I’m not sunburned, I’m sun-soaked.

I find as few clothes as possible to still feel decently covered. Sliding them on feels like I’m sixteen and cutting myself all over again. Even shirts that I purchased for their softness now have obvious, scratchy seams and fabric that pulls at my shoulder blades.

Eye on the prize, I’ll say to myself.

I shuffle my bare feet to the back door, and I slide out to meet the sun with my angry gaze. The blacktop is hot, but I don’t care after the initial shock. Maybe I talk myself down each time, because I know it’s not smart to be out here without shoes, that the hundred feet could, someday, be littered with shards of glass just for me. Today, it’s just the tar bubbles and the scattered stones, and I watch them all closely, like an ex at a cocktail party.

It’s afternoon. The rest of the world is alive and well. It finds itself buzzed by the traffic in both closeness and sound. They hug the turns at their remarkably illegal speed, and brave miscalculation for just a few seconds. One of those new, oddly-shaped trucks tears its way into my woods. Yellow and searing, it sneaks through, the upper road’s trees, and I see it before I hear it. Its curves, like the shoulders of a cat, are arched, ready to pounce, ready to continue creeping after the miles ahead until the time has come to overtake them. It waits for them everyday. The pickup tears past my mailbox, and I remember.

It could be right here.

I shuffle the rest of the distance to the mailbox and I go to open the door with the conflict of reluctant and eagerness. Bracing the side of the box with my hand to make the door operate noiselessly, I pull open the little door and therein lies my beast.

It’s here.

The postmark is from Buffalo. Not far, but far enough.

I scramble to the house before opening it. Opening it outside would feel wrong. I slide my finger under the fold of its back, my skin bending to meet its outer edges or maybe the paper bends to fit my knuckles, but either way … I open the envelope and tri-folded is my fate.

I’ve written to this address for years. I’ve asked for a reason why. I’ve asked for a reason why I was unimportant, kept a secret, kept away when I was told I’d be kept close.

But in my haste, I read the first line and it all makes sense.

“I apologise for not writing you sooner, especially since your words were so passionate and heart-felt, but I could not bare to write in my late son’s stead.”

I don’t know how, but I’ve fallen. It’s one of those falls where you feel it ten seconds after it happens, so the rush is only coming now. I feel it as if I know every capillary that just burst. Every uncomfortable piece of flesh that had to endure the blow, and all of the others that just shook because nothing else made sense.

Late son.

I want to read the rest of the letter, but it took a bit of a flight, like paper always seems to whenever dropped — it finds its own unique, inconvenient way to fall away.

Why do my eyes hurt?

It was the sun. I’ll have to put more lotion on later so I don’t peel, but the eye-drops worked last night, so why –

The answer is staring at me just under the overhang on the kitchen cabinets, and I’m trying to deny it.

If only his mother knew the secret.

19.08.07

in story at 2:10 pm

I’m sitting in the park again. The benches line the road that bends around the lake, but I choose the fifth bench in from the main path, which I find to be most amply shaded. I’m reading a book of quotes, and I read them both on exhale and inhale. Ghastly on the inhale, secret on the exhale. They both are very haunting to the ear not saying them. An older man sits a bench away, and I can feel his eyes on me or my words. He stands and walks past me, but I quieted myself when he closed the distance of a bench’s arm. He stepped slower after that, as if to think I couldn’t still see him. He looks to the water while walking and I take his lead. The lake mirrors the sky, and the tips of buildings peering over the trees. Even summer’s vestments can’t hide the sprawling metropolis. I look to him, and he is dressed entirely in browns, a lighter dress shirt and darker slacks even in the unforgiving humidity. He looks at me finally, looking at him, and his smile remembers why he took steps over.

“What’s that you’re reading there?”

“I really have no idea.”

“… but you seem very much into it.”

“The title suggests that these are quotes that will change my life. I thought that if I said them, it’d be real, because reading wasn’t adequate.”

He steps back, not in footing, but stature. He smirks a bit, nodding lightly, and this is usually when people chuckle nervously, remark about the time, and leave. Quickly.

“May I sit with you?” emerges from his short white beard. It’s the kind of beard you see when people say ‘Panama Hat.’ I nod and gesture beside me. I put the book face down in my lap. I wish pressing it against myself would make it a part of me.

“Y’know … “

I think he’s about to start a long story about how when he was my age, but suddenly, it would make sense and be more than welcome if he did. I’m not sure why, but I trust his eyes.

“… I used to think that reciting something that once sounded so powerful in the mouth of another, a character, or a famous person that it would suddenly change everything. The actual truth was that it took making those words yours to wield them.”

“I like that. It’s sort of like mastering an art, or a defence. It’s like hearing someone say something, but then realising later in the night what it meant.”

The man laughs.

“But you can’t exactly call them at midnight, can you?”

I shake my head and smile easily. Odd.

“The moment’s gone.”

17.08.07

in poetry at 3:49 pm

Rain in the desert;
we are recreated
in sleep, when my senses, like yours, are abandoned.
Sight, imagined. Touch, imagined.

Love
after so many nightmarish trepedations
gave flight to the flightless birds
of joy, of settled peace.
A grimace comes to one of us,
and I reach forward to suspend disbelief,
to willfully bridge the gaps of time, distance, and withered hearts,
I reach forward to give grace to a memory
as I wake to find the misgivings of
empty space beside me
once and again.

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