do you ever wonder
about the difference between
looking at something
and the hallucination created
when looking past it?
if you look at your hand
it's all you can see
but if you look past your hand
there are now two of them
sometimes it's hard for me
to remember which is real
it gets me thinking
about how my father
used to wake me up
in the morning by rubbing
his stubble across my face
i spent my 11th birthday
under the assumption
that he might come back
if i drank his aftershave
like maybe if i could turn blue
if i could be his favorite color
on our bathroom floor
he would forget why he left
the paramedics were all sobing
as they pumped memories
out of my stomach
i coughed up the day the post-it note with your new address on it
burned a hole in our refrigerator
coughed up the day
the divorce papers came
and my mother
took a baseball bat to the mailbox
i've been choking on the splinters
for 17 years
it's been 17 years
since the last dinner plate
exploded on our dining room wall
17 years since my mother
started accidentally setting your place at the dinner table
17 years since italian night
at the restaurant on the corner
where the juke box
spat tired music
and like so many other things
it stopped working when you left
i guess it's no coincidence
since the juke box went quiet
that the cds in my car
only skip on "i miss you"
i've been hemorrhaging memories
for so long
and now that i'm looking back
i can no longer tell
the mirage from the truth
sometimes i swear
you showed up to my graduation
and last time
i was at your apartment
i can't remember
if the imprints of my hands
are in clay hanging on your wall
or if they were left in the mud
the day god had the audacity
to let it rain
or maybe it's like the time
i saw someone crying on a bridge
now that i think about it
i can't remember if it was me

i drink coffee
when the moon is high
and smoke cigarettes
way before dawn
i drink too much
never enough
and love too much, too many
all the time
and everything i do will one day **** me
there will not be enough space
on my tombstone
to write down every cause of death
and i will never live enough
and i will never be alive
never grow old
even when i'm eighty
with my knees and back forever aching
i will not have learned enough
to be anything more than young
and i will die forever young
unlearned, unwisened
decaying body
melting snow

nothing changes even if I sleep
three, four hours later than intended
when I wake up, the same ceiling—
the same feeling arises in my head
like the afternoon sun that's become
a foreign presence to my world

I lay in bed for several more minutes
and I forget everything that makes
me feel so worthless and strange

but even if I rise again and see my
reflection, I avert my gaze in shame
of both my appearance and form

disheveled and unbecoming I am
it makes me sick to my stomach to
see the result of my own negligence

it doesn't matter if I rinse my face of
dirt from yesterday or the day before
the same mistakes will stain me
the same empty shell will greet me
the same issues of several years ago
now a disintegration of the present

I should have been born
with a better mind,
a better spirit—
a human being
a better way of living
instead of breaking away in fear
from the owners of each grimace

maybe if I had the humor to
laugh at my own instability
but I'm a child without regulation
a child without connection
even if I pull my hair,
claw at my skin,
spill everything
to lay my soul bare
I'm far too difficult to know
and only a growing burden

with time, everything eats away
the termites burrowing, hollowing
nothing from before is left of me
just an endless feeling of regret and
desire for a final march towards...

—Or maybe I shouldn't
have been born at all.

have you ever believed
in something so blindly
so genuinely
that the moment you realize
it isn't true, something inside you
changes forever?
i wanna tell you a story, see
seldom do i ever
go swimming in drinks
deep enough to drown in
but when i do
i speak in tongues
about things that none
of my memories
are allowed to talk about
like that christmas
at the isthmus
where my girlfriend
plucked a conch shell
whiter than gods teeth
out of the sand
held it to her ear
and stopped time
that day she was a shade of blue
the could've made the ocean sick
see, she loved to play jokes
when she held
the sea shell to her ear
she gasped, called my name
and said "i want you to hear this"
i said "yeah, right, everybody knows it's just the same old sea"
she replied "no. not this one. this one is special. listen. theres music in this one"
she handed me the shell
like a promise she couldn't keep
and i held it to my ear
with all the potential
of seeing shore
after being stranded
at sea for years
only to hear
a tired dirge of silence
spill from its emptiness
i guess she didn't know
how desperately
i wanted to hear it too
because ever since
something inside me snapped
now sand pours out
of every post card i open
i hear seagulls
in telephone static
sometimes i have dreams
where i bury my hands
in every beach
i've ever been on
and exhume this graveyard of noise
every time i try to sleep
i spit up fishhooks
and i guess i'm obsessed
but maybe
if i hold my ear
to enough vacant things
then i could have back
the time stolen from me
since it happened
maybe they would get it
if they knew what i wanted
when i blow out birthday candles
maybe they'll find me
face down in a wishing well
i watch eternal sunshine
of the spotless mind every day
pretending i can forget too
because this sea sickness
has followed me for years
because yesterday
i walked into a music shop
and all the pianos broke
but the only thing
i can think to say is
*do you know how bad
a memory has to be
that you fantasize
about forgetting it?

i used to go to my grandmother's house during the summer
and in her backyard, behind all the trees
was a river
some days it'd be weak
sitting still without interruption
some days it'd be violent
crashing against the bank
and one day
i was laying by the river
watching it flow by to somewhere i couldn't see
and i stuck my hand in the water
and it rushed between my finger tips
i heard my grandmother shout,
"try to hold the river back"
and i laughed "i can't do that grandma"
and i pulled my hand out

a year after i went to my grandmother's house for the summer
and in her back yard some of the trees
had snapped and fallen over
but there was still the river
and it was gentle
i kneeled down by the river
and stuck my hand in the water
it danced around my finger tips
and i shouted
i can hold the river back grandma
and she smiled softly, "that's lovely"
and she walked out

today i went to my grandma's house
and in her back yard the trees
were rotting away and everything was silent
but there was still the river
as if it absorbed every bit of life that had once existed around it
and it was thrashing viciously
like a dog wanting to be let from its cage
and i stood staring at the water
and thought of summer
i heard myself saying
"try to hold your river back"
and i couldn't

some nights fold in on themselves
after too many years and decades
spent emptying oneself for others

like old letters re-opened accusing
from where they'd been laid to rest
found in yellowing files and folders

debris stirring from the shadows
unsettles the window ledge dust
irritating the membranes of scent

as memory floods with questions
tagging along like curious children
squabbling about whose fault it was

that we sit writing with brimming eyes
with the kind of solitary regret and shock
that comes when bodies in a silent house

wander around aimlessly trying to fill time
with their pointless pursuits and blinded eyes
imagining just another hit from some website

will stave off stories of their past they shelved
for nights like this when the spectres return
to bring the bill from aged secrets banished

where were you when the tree branches
were scraping against my window
when i was staring at the cul-de-sac
clutching the landline to my chest
one time i thought i saw a bear
in the woods across from the bus stop
but it turned out to be a pile of brush
you know i still see things in the dark
the other night i woke up from a bad dream
and saw teeth that weren’t there
i managed to blink them away but
there are some things that i can’t
like the shadow in the doorway that visits
every night and the open hand i am doing
everything not to grab
it pretends that it needs me but really
all i needed was yours

There is nothing but love, and now. Nothing but places that ring out memories, memories of learning to lose, memories of us. There is nothing but heartbeat and heartache. Nothing but night sky. Nothing but the gleam of our spirits, their sheer capacity to keep opening themselves against all odds. Nothing but soft eyes and warm hands. Nothing but breathless winter snatching our oxygen and making us taste of ice and courage. Nothing but risk.

There is nothing here but ecstasy and boredom and wonder, nothing but watching her watch the moon, nothing but light. Nothing but mistakes and forgiveness, tender uncertainty. Nothing but the accepting of what is. Nothing but stars falling overhead, and us lifting our hands to catch them. Nothing but resistance, war, the ache for justice; nothing but our poetry burning these walls down, nothing but chain link fences and snow.

Nothing but creation, nothing but sunrise, nothing but nervous first kisses shared in the back of a city bus, nothing but mouths moving together. Nothing but reverence, guns, a god we don’t believe in, the children making snow angels in the park. Nothing but breathing together, laughter and bare feet. Another day, another hour. Nothing but the revolving of Earth, the splitting of cells, these fears we nurse in the darkness, the loss we have chosen to accept.

Nothing but our longing, our need, our dying, our letting go; nothing but nakedness, this human vulnerability, the trust we give to others, the thunder of our feelings, the words we cry out; nothing but our souls rising and falling and growing and moving and touching and aching and knowing and leaving and loving and becoming.

There is nothing but this.

When I’m older, I’ll give more of myself to the yellow morning. By then, I’ll have a front porch where the honeybees join me for breakfast, and I won’t worry about the sting any longer than I should, and the day will be enough. But for now, I am still waiting for a flood, still waist-deep in the rain. I am taking communion with the things that hurt, letting them melt on my tongue like hot wax. The broken clock, and the hollow haunting, and the songs that say what I can’t. I think the winter knows me better than I’d like to admit. But sometimes, the heaviness feels a lot like being held, and so I let it crush me.