In my veins,
there is a little girl
shut away in a bathroom.
Because
there is more sense
in porcelain bowls
than any which exists
in other people's
mouths.
In my cup,
there is a broken soul
who stutters her hands
and slits her wrists.
She smells like butterscotch
and a regret that
seeps from every inch
of her blistered body
because of the inch long
squirrel thing
buried in her center.
In my bed,
there is a boy
with nothing to lose.
He smiles too wide
and loves too hard and fast
for anyone else to handle and
for that,
he is sorry.
In my head,
they sing a chorus
of hope and
redemption,
Love us, they said.
Together, we could be a family.
Jan 30, 2014
Jan 30, 2014 at 7:06 PM UTC
Do you remember,
two years ago
I wrote you a story,
bound with the string I could find
beneath the burned acre carpet
of my first apartment.
I gave it to you
two weeks late, on
printed cheap paper.
Chemically melted with the telling
of what I saw,
two hundred miles away
on January fifth.
I wrote about the cargo train
that passes across the street
of my university every day
at nine pm.
I told you that it drove at least two times faster
than the Amtrak, because people are more precious than cargo.
I told you about how when I was stuck
at the street crossing,
from nine to nine fifteen.
How I saw salvation
in the screaming, shaking tracks.
Tonight I heard the same train,
from outside my third apartment,
set on the opposite side of the train tracks,
a couple meters across
from where I stood two years ago,
when the smell of acid pavement
inked my memories of you,
and your eighteenth birthday.
Jan 30, 2014
Jan 30, 2014 at 12:42 AM UTC
I think you want me to fall in love with you.
I think you want me to breathe you in,
suffocating to keep any of you from getting
out.
I think you want me to caress your name on my tongue
like a thick smoke that I take back in
through my nose,
the whitest parts going nowhere
else,
I think you want me to revel you,
pedestal you,
please never leave me, you.
I do not love like the morning.
I do not happen every day like clockwork,
and I do not love, as if
it was meant to be.
I love as an infection,
spreading over every single fiber and vein;
If I take you in completely.
Bubbling over in crystal froth,
spiking a fever of one hundred and two
you will either die by my hand, or
be left with some aching disease.
My only fear of
wanting to fall in love with you
is that you will forget that I was once a vaccine
and that you will
chicken soup Robitussin cold compress me
away.
Jan 30, 2014
Jan 30, 2014 at 12:41 AM UTC
When we were young
we used to burn ants alive.
We would go to the detective store,
back when it existed
to buy listening devices
and itching powder.
Our summers were filled with
agent number sevens
and femme fatales.
We'd hide under the stairs
spy on our aunts and grandmothers
hoping to hear some of the
spelled out words
family secrets
hushed looks, that so frequented our presence.
I wonder if you would still snicker
hold your hand over your mouth,
face blooming red,
if you knew that the
spelled out words
and family secrets
are now about you.
Oct 2, 2013
Oct 2, 2013 at 8:53 PM UTC
You said that you could only understand things
in terms of logic.
So when you ask me why I am sad
or lonely
or anxious,
pestering me with the daunting whys and how comes
of a six year old; I can't help but feel trapped.
There is no logical way to explain
what keeps me up at night
the sharpness of my inhales as rooms grow small
why I don't want you to hold me
or touch me
or breathe my air.
There is no way to explain
the constant panic in my bones
to someone who can only see the lack of
threat,
logic.
Aug 10, 2013
Aug 10, 2013 at 4:22 AM UTC
She had told me, with water in her right and
obligatory waves in her left
that they all wanted to feel special.
They didn’t want to do special things,
or think special thoughts,
but they all wanted to be seen as something
Unique, or breathtaking, and
so so so necessary
that they could drive us mad.
The sooner I could realize this,
she said,
the better off I would be.
And now, with nothing in my left and
obligatory waves to my right
I wonder if this means that everyone
who has ever said that I am anyone
just wanted me to feel special.
Aug 10, 2013
Aug 10, 2013 at 4:00 AM UTC
Sometimes I look at you and wonder when
exactly, when
the beginning of your voice
started sounding like a scratched record
and at what point, exactly,
did your eyes change to being so dark
all of the time
I want to know at what point, then
had you learned to smile so factitiously
and **** in your gut
and pose at the right angle
I want to know, more than anything
when you started being so
miserable
all the time.
And the more I think about it,
about you,
existing,
the more terrified I feel.
Jul 23, 2013
Jul 23, 2013 at 11:21 AM UTC
I was sitting with you.
Edging the parking structure,
you told me that when you were young
you would lose your shoes and run away
here.
You danced atop the concrete slab,
and I wondered if I could jump
to the next building, if I tried.
I remember telling you about scents that night.
How everybody had one.
How they usually smelled like their families.
How your house always smelled sweet.
I remember saying that when I went into your house
for the very first time,
I could taste the cinnamon in the air,
as if your mother made cakes
for birthdays and Christmas
and coming homes and going aways.
I remember asking you what my scent was.
You said that I didn't smell like anything, really
and I thought that maybe you hadn't understood,
but now I figure you did.
You were probably trying to say,
in your cryptic way, quoting your own poetry,
that I didn't have a family to smell like.
I just wonder when, exactly
for me at least,
you started smelling like salvation.
Jul 14, 2013
Jul 14, 2013 at 7:22 AM UTC
The summer I interned in New York, I fell in love with someone I'd only seen from a balcony window.
I'd fallen in love with strangers before, on buses and in lines, watching their shoulders straighten and their faces grimace in half-sunlight. I fell in love with these people the way you could fall in love with a poem, finding personality in the way that their eyes flicker nervously from left to right, tiny instances where their stanzas throw you into a daze. But this time was different. For once, I wished to know a stranger without the brim of my sunglasses, for once I felt something when I knew I'd never see him again.
His apartment was cluttered, bottles of water and the empty cans of energy drinks piled in a corner where a conscious person would have fit them in a bin. There were clothes on the floor, and although I knew his high rise box was laid out just as mine, he must have used the expected closet space for something else - his clothes were everywhere, crumpled in heaps on the floor that were too erratically placed to not have some sort of lingering system. Posters of people were taped to the wall, covering the matte eggshell white, edges falling occasionally to show signs that he wouldn’t always live there. I hoped that if he ever owned a home, that those staring portraits would be stapled or pasted thick to his walls, just because he would be the sort of person who wouldn’t change his mind about what he liked or what he wanted.
I would watch him from the same eggshell white room of mine, with nothing on the walls and not a scrap of anything on the floor. From my blow up mattress to my suitcase of clothes, kitchen stocked of single servings and a solitary set of dishware. I had no curtains and no carpets, no television or pictures of friends huddled in an unexpected embrace. For all anyone knew, I could have been squatting. I would look out at him from the window spanning the entire north facing wall, aware that if he ever looked out, if his eyes ever darted south, he would see me cross legged on the tiled marble floor, hovering over an overheated laptop and cardboard coffee.
I would get home at seven forty-five, shower in the New York water that tasted like dust and gin, and towel off, walking to the balcony. He, just like I, had a long, narrow balcony spanning about four feet on the right edge of his loft, and I would lean on the edge of the concrete slab, smelling the foul city air, taxi music floating from the lumpy yellow marsh below. That was when he would unlock his door suddenly, sometime between eight and eight-ten. He would step with his entire body and move into his crowded room and stand still for a moment, as if to collect himself; restrain from tearing faces off the walls and pummeling fabric into the floor. Sometimes he'd shut the door closed with a twitch of his foot, untying the half apron around his waist with one hand and pulling the red tie strapped flat onto a black dress shirt loose with the other. Once, he did all that in succession and proceeded to slide against the shut door until he hit the ground, falling into himself like a dropped jack's ladder and rubbing his fingers from his jawline to his eyes, up into his hair and back over.
But most of the time, he would just force off his shoes, never untying the laces, and move to the balcony just as I did. He would go out to the balcony too, but he would always keep going, moving to sit on the edge of the short wall, socked feet dangling over the city. His legs would be splayed wide, hands placed right in front of him, flat on the ledge. He would look down at the golden sea below, and when he was done with it, spit a flickering cigarette into the glittering bank.
He would also smoke when he woke up. He got up at six, like clockwork, and would stumble back out into the smogged pilot's seat in a plaid bathrobe, hazy faced and staring down. I don’t think he was ever late. He would get dressed slowly and fix himself in the mirror for a good half hour at the left of his room, until finally turning around just to watch the door for a moment. Sometimes I could swear that he watched for so long that he must have thought it would up and race away.
He slept with the lights on. He never came home late. He didn’t go out at night, never blundered in at two in the morning with a lithe model girl, long hair framing icicle eyes. On weekends he would sleep all day, rising every few hours to go back on the edge of his balcony and smoke. He would stare at the faces on his walls, the callouses on his palms, the murmur below; but never, ever at the empty loft across the way, dotted with a blue plastic bed and a speck of a person.
I left New York in September, on a red eye flight vastly cheaper than the rest. I put my toothbrush and toothpaste into the front pocket of my luggage, squeezed the air out of my mattress, and left. I hadn't left a trace in that home of mine, and it didn’t leave any on me either. When I left New York, I felt nothing. It was almost like I had never set foot in the city, forgetting to socialize with the locals the way someone could leave their hat at a bar.
I never knew if the man across the canyon hated coming home to a loft like I did. I wondered if it bothered him too, the lack of walls or rooms to compartmentalize the space. I wondered if he didn’t like to eat at home, if he felt sick when he watched the sunrise. I wondered if when he looked at the tidepooled city, if he also saw salvation. If he wondered every day from eight to eight-ten about what a dangly thing of a human would seem like to the loft across if it was spit from the edge of a narrow, four foot balcony.
Jul 10, 2013
Jul 10, 2013 at 3:40 AM UTC
I had never thought about the repercussions, you know?
Living too fast.
I'd always thought that it would be cool,
like the stoner kids in high school that were always
at 7-11 during fourth period.
I spent my whole life waiting for someone to invite me in.
And then someone did.
All of a sudden,
my life was a whirlwind of
midnight city lights
induced euphoria
yelling from street corners
and jumping from rooftops,
just to see if we could make it.
It was great and perfect for a while.
I had friends in high places.
I found my muse.
I always had somewhere to be on a Friday night.
I loved every second of it.
But now I'm not so sure.
It's as if I waited too long to pull myself out.
All of a sudden, I can't remember what it was like
to be boring;
happy.
Jul 10, 2013
Jul 10, 2013 at 2:35 AM UTC