is not knowing.
Change is going.
Change is wanting invisible things and looking for them.
and looking for them!
When you don't find the things, that is change.
Change is going
before knowing.
Oct 18, 2013
Oct 18, 2013 at 4:15 PM UTC
You told me it was wrong.
The magnetic pull of my body towards the need.
The way I feel it, the longing, in my chest,
how I place my hands absently on my neck,
sultrily telling you what I'm feeling.
Perhaps it's a ripple of something that has been brewing
for many years. Something always there, underneath.
Heightened by loneliness and summer heat.
Maybe it comes from a lack of normal things,
things which usually accompany
young boys.
Those things I didn't get.
Maybe it's someone's fault.
Maybe I should ask Freud, maybe he
could place his hand on my delicate cheek bone,
how it comes it a gentle hill.
He could stroke the freckled valley underneath my eyeball with his smoking pipe
and tell me pragmatically
the reasons for my feelings,
why I wanted a man to touch me without asking,
to make my face his baby in wrapped cloths.
You told me it was wrong,
like the smoking
done after the house had gone to bed at hushed hours
in the ***** garage.
like the tequila shot I did at the kitchen counter that summer
how it tasted like heat and pine needles,
how it tasted like the wooden chest in our home,
like the inside of it, the dark unvarnished interior
that could hold my tiny body if I had needed to hide
where my father kept his winter sweaters.
And how I ****** it down with the lime that I didn't bite hard enough,
my eyes were red and flooded.
It was wrong.
Jul 14, 2013
Jul 14, 2013 at 6:57 PM UTC
You would have seen me
and I would have been driving.
Driving down the road of the house,
the house where we all lived.
I was going there,
but as I approached with my champagne steel trap,
in a moment
I decided to keep driving.
I saw your car and with a flutter
my foot didn't graze the brake.
You would have seen me,
if you were looking out the window.
If you would have recognized my car.
Amidst the gathering of things,
the putting of books in boxes,
or clothes into bags,
between the hidden sips of beer in your bedroom,
and quick, terror-filled glances behind you,
did you see me? In those quick seconds when my car brushed past.
Did it matter?
You would have seen me keep driving,
past all the other small houses
and you would see me at the stop sign,
waiting
before a road clean of cars.
Jul 14, 2013
Jul 14, 2013 at 6:56 PM UTC
Reading the words of a woman of flames
gone up into the sky at her will
with greater forces inside her than in a planet
I feel quietly disturbed
sad that I cannot help her
make her happy somehow
but she was smarter than me to be sure
smarter than most.
She knew what she wanted,
I only wish that it had been happiness.
I read her words sitting on a rock by the lake,
the rusty green water licking the large white stones.
I take a long flat leaf and tie it inside itself,
once straight, now making it form an L.
I toss it with some vigor into the water
but it only goes inches in front of me,
oscillating in the shallow,
wanting to come back to it's creator.
I knew that she saw beauty in the world around her,
I wish ardently that I could know why it was not
enough.
What great awful power must have pushed against her.
That I am in the same world that once carried her unsettles me;
that a world may be ****** and cruel by one's perception,
and not by another's.
I see a dragonfly with it's impossible wings
trying with all of its self
to go against the wind of an indifferent lake.
Into it she plunged
I sit but on the edge, looking.
Jul 4, 2013
Jul 4, 2013 at 4:11 PM UTC
"Do you like wasabi peas?"
She hands me a small sage-green orb.
"It's hot, spicy," she says, nodding encouragingly. "Have you ever had wasabi?"
It tastes like horseradish and is not at all spicy in comparison to the chile-spiced mango I've been snacking on. I nod and smile to her approvingly.
Before I know it, she's handing me a chocolate sandwich cookie and without saying a word, going back to the duty of putting away the groceries. It's delicious.
Jivy, upbeat soul music blasts from an iPhone speaker dock. The kitchen faucet is running. Cabinets, the dish washer, opening and closing like a delicate rhythm.
He was building a fire pit outside, thick white smoke billowing up into the sky. But it started to pour a soft summer rain, as it had two or three times already that day. The world beyond the kitchen is grey, wet, happy. The shabby porch is used to being drenched in rain, the mason jars filled with dead cigarettes and the disarrayed furniture.
With more than one person in the narrow stretch of kitchen, it's a crowed party. I watch on from my chair in the breakfast nook. She chops vegetables on the counter for cold gazpacho soup.
She, in a delicate red rose skirt. The men except for me in cargo shorts.
I'm drinking flat Dr. Pepper from a painted mug, instead of something hard like I might want. The sip of black beer he gave me tasted like soy sauce. It fizzled on the porch a bit.
"Oh, **** he said, putting his hand with the overflowing beer out the door while standing partly inside.
/
Asking the cook for permission, he sits down across from me and begins to sing a song on a guitar. A sad song, one that he's played before. Maybe the only one he knows.
I sit in my chair and watch it all go by. I take out a book from my bag to look like I want to read it. I'm really just sitting here, like a fly stuck tragically on the fly paper he hung in the kitchen two nights ago. Lying there all sprawled awkwardly, eyes open to what's around me.
He finishes the song. "Beautiful," she says, gathering papery remains of an onion and tossing them into a plastic bin. He strums another tune. His voice is untrained and not hard to listen to if not a tad syrupy and self-aware. A bit like the way he carries his wide personality.
He answers questions from across the room, interrupting the melody for a few seconds now and then. The two men are on separate wavelengths. But the singer didn't seem to mind being interrupted. They must have grown up with this dynamic, the men. It's a story they tell easily.
/
"Buongiorno!" she says, slicing a lemon.
"Hey, you have a nice accent. Arrivederci!" says the guitar-player.
"Arrivederci!" she responds, playing up the dialect with sweetness.
"Good deal." He says, striking up another tune. He puts on a different voice. Deeper, with more swing, like a caricature country-western singer. His voice fills the space.
Our mugs are gathered all together, mixed up in a menagerie of colors and shapes at the end of the kitchen counter. I brought several of mine from home and they mingle with the others unnoticeably. Multi-colored ones from Poland. Mine, purchased at various thrift stores. All of them stacked awkwardly and happy.
He asks me if I want to share a smoke on the wet porch. I say "Not right now. Maybe later, though."
Jun 30, 2013
Jun 30, 2013 at 4:07 PM UTC
A cigarette
sitting in a cliche orange prescription bottle
the tobacco-stuffed tip
peaking out half an inch from the top
on it
scrawled in black ink:
miluji tě
it's author,
gone for a week and a half in a rehab center
left that morning with wet hair from the shower
long black tights around her legs
and a huge hiking bag which consumed the back of her figure
as she was walking out the door.
i imagine she wrote these words in her mother tongue
after she rolled the cigarette herself
to her boyfriend
a Texan
depressed, anxious, lost
then plunked it into the small bottle
which bore her name on its label
into the flourescently orange plastic,
symbolic of her dependency, of
the missing pieces
a flower in a vase:
miluji tě
and then she was ready to go
Jun 30, 2013
Jun 30, 2013 at 4:05 PM UTC
attracted because believe close
don't everything feel feels felt
gimme god
good her
his just kind know
last life like
love man me men
more my myself
need not now poems poetry read
scared see ****** something
stories thing think thought true
up very wanted
world
writing.
Jan 10, 2013
Jan 10, 2013 at 11:56 PM UTC
things happen
people get forgotten.
the worst part is
people sometimes forget themselves.
sometimes we need others
to stop us in our tracks
and look at us in the eyes and tell us
you exist.
Dec 30, 2012
Dec 30, 2012 at 2:08 AM UTC
a man is standing on my sweater
the rubber sole of his boat shoes
just brushing the hem of knitted stripes
only moments before,
I lay in my bed
on the white sheets
posed for sleep
and the room was empty
save for the scattered bits of clothing
and shards of private moments
crumbs of food eaten in solitude
but now there is a figure in my doorway
he has been dipped in the midst of all this
and he lightly places his foot
through the threshold
onto me
Dec 22, 2012
Dec 22, 2012 at 2:23 AM UTC