No one born too far from Niedersachsen, said Oma,
ever quite captures their sing-song intonation.
Characterized by subtleties, like an umlauted vowel,
all non-native imitations sound inevitably as ******
as would a cry of “ello, guv’nah!” in a London coffee shop.

Her Plattdeutsch instincts neutered
by decades abroad, married to a son of Milwaukee,
her permanent, dormant longing for Salzgitter awakes only
to trigger hunger pangs of irreconcilable nostalgia
at the passing whiff of a Germantown bakery.

She taught me the word “sehnsucht” over lukewarm coffee
and a pause in our conversation: a compound word
that no well-intentioned English translation
could render faithfully.
It isn’t the same as just longing, she sighed— longing is curable.
Sehnsucht holds the fragments
of an imperfect world and laments
that they are patternless. How the soul
yearns vaguely for a home
remembered only in the residual ache
of incomplete childhood fancies;
futile as the ruins
of an ancient, annihilated people.
How life’s staccato joys soothe
a heart sore from the world,
yet the existential hunger, gnawing
from the malnourished stomach
of the bruised human psyche, remains—
insatiable, eternal.

Long enough ago, a reasonably-priced bus ride away
from the red-roofed apartment in which she babbled her first words,
a kindly old man in a pharmacy asked her
about her peculiar, exotic accent. Once inevitably prompted
with the question of where she was from, she responded only
that she was a tourist off the beaten track.

And when I pointed out, to my immediate regret,
that she gets the same question back here in Ohio,
I realized then that, not once, has she ever referred to the way
the people of her pined-for hometown spoke
as though she had ever belonged to it.

You finally roll over,
after downing the remainder
of the wine you said you’d share with me
and lay the bottle to rest
beside the bed, in a graveyard of clutter
I periodically nag you to tidy up

so now
I can finally assure myself
with more than tenuous trust
that you will not confirm
your gazing over my shoulder
at my laptop screen
with that irritating ******* chuckle
when you see whatever I’m
privately trying to enjoy for myself

because
now it would make more sense
that I’m doing anything
other than typing, typing
furiously about how I can’t articulate
why I’ve admitted you
into my bed. Why
we mutually burn through seasons
of wasted time on Netflix, and
instinctively, someone’s head
falls within the soft hollow
of another’s shoulder, yet I cringe
the moment you reach over
to make the embrace
intentional

and why
when the remnants
of the drunken, desperate stumbling
to my then celibate bed
that spawned
what we can’t seem to finish
have long dissipated, do we
insist on carrying our dead within us

and why
once you turn back and see me,
do you retreat to the living room
to strum hopelessly on the
Les Paul you spent too much money on
and had shipped to my apartment
because you barely spend any time at yours,
as I type this
groggy and reaching
for what’s as reachable as mist

with only a room
between us, separately
we decode the repercussions
of being haphazard nomads
somehow assigned
to civilization.

She’ll wander back to you again,
but drawn by the string
of ineffable instinct—kissing the sand
of your beaches still damp
by the routine of her departure.
Yet as she recedes,
you already ache her homecoming
as though longing for an estranged relative.

You count the years
by the bitterest point
of every winter, and
value your harvests
against the cruelty of the drought—
and even when she rearranges herself
nightly, by increments you’ve already calculated
by meticulous observation,
somehow good fortune owes you eternity,
even as it crumbles under the weight
of its own impermanence.

You’ve never dealt well with entropy;
all that came before you, which also happens
to survive you—an honorary god.
Stranded on earth,
you monitor your greying scalp as grimly
as you decry a darkening sky above you succumbing
to the certainty of winter, but
even she is ebbing, too.
You curse her departure like an abandoned child,
but she had never sinned against you—
that was your idea.

You mourn the day she repossesses
with mortal anguish,
yet you still find a way to forgive her
when she sends Dawn
to shine his light between the trees.

“Nature wins eventually,” mused my uncle David
as we drove past an overgrown lot
on a barren street, where a struggling Motel 6
had long crumbled under the weight of entropy.

Defying the ghosts of a business
drowned in the unforgiving current
of Dayton’s economy, among
the leasing sign marking their graves,
patternless flora prevailed
effortlessly.

Charlie crumpled up the script
that his mother left him as a note on the banister;
an ode to matronly passive-aggression
scrawled in haphazard cursive
on the back of a Meijer receipt when she was drunk.

While conducting a routine bedroom sweep
for any arbitrary evidence
to convict her son, yet again,
as the eternal family scapegoat,
Marilyn was far from pleased
to find his final disregard
of her bankrupt maternal instinct
clouded by inherited alcoholism
wadded up in his wastebasket.

Jaded by plot conventions, dodging foreshadow,
we scrapped our narratives and hopped in his car.
Untethered by destination, we drove through the rain
in the last hours to waste of a Sunday night.
Stopped at an intersection in an unfamiliar town,
he turned to me with an expectant smile:

“Where to now?”

With no surrounding traffic to rush our decision,
I glanced in both directions.

“Let’s turn left.”
“Where’s that lead?”

I squinted in the dark.
*“Wherever the hell we’re going.”

In your ’97 Mercury, that grumbles
like an arthritic old mare
at every cautious nudge
of her gas pedal, evoking the utterance
of “easy now, girl” at least twice a commute,
we’ll journey haphazardly
to wherever I-675 spits us back out.

With whiny indie music
harping cumbersome lyrics
aided by passion-silly guitar solos
blaring on ****** speakers, we’ll savor
the names of every exit
we pass by in defiance; accelerating through
sensible opportunities
to get gas somewhere and
turn back to obligation. Midwestern gypsies,
urban nomads, academically-disoriented
college students—whatever we are, reveling
in the aimless misadventures
of going ******* nowhere.

They raised us to pursue infinity,
we grew to embrace the absurd;
we press our handprints in the sand
and thank the gentle tide
for letting her shoreline’s scars
fade painlessly.

Only as they lie
flat with defeat
on a rain-slicked sidewalk
will we remember how dearly
we loved the autumn leaves.

The trees stand half-naked,
sparsely adorned with
red and orange emblems
of mortality, dropping like
the gradual sands
of an hourglass. They
stare down desperately
at the passersby,
warning us
of the impending winter.

“Remember me,” they plea,
branches gesturing
toward a greying sky—
resisting entropy
like every creature
who finally realized
his impermanence.

We are stories told
through carbon bonds and
the smoky trail of cigarettes—
the distant chatter
from porches and balconies,
caught out of context
in a moment of humanity.
The faint light of
illuminated apartment windows,
inches parted curtains
unveiling another segment
of infinity.

Overlooking the lackluster glory
of Fairborn, Ohio
from the balcony of a student apartment,
the smoke from her cigarette vanishing
like the sweet impermanence of mortality,
Alena stares. Too pensive
to tend to the nearly-falling ashy tip
of her Camel Silver, our conversation stagnates.
Bonded intimately by
growing into the stumbling result
of our respective ****** childhoods—aching
for the familiarity of disaster— we find ourselves pondering
the answered question
of why we’re repeating history.

The street is nearly empty; the traffic sleeps.
Sparsely spaced cars
cruise on by like gypsy travelers.
8am is for commuters—a sensible time,
but 3:30 is for the lonely. A time to uncover
what daytime banishes
to the subconscious—
the peak time for catharsis
too inconvenient for civilization.
When insomniacs stare restlessly at ceilings,
and when the desperate tearfully pray;
when procrastinators type frantic essays,
when the chaste *******, when the stoic weep.

And then of course, there are poets like me
half-drunk on seven dollar tequila after working the night shift,
cultivating my loneliness. I can’t finish
your story for you, Alena, but I will say this:
there is a reason why advertisements
repeat their names a mind-numbing number of times.
They don’t necessarily think
you’re stupid enough to assume
their product is superior for that reason,
but they’re relying
on that one moment you’re rushed
into a dilemma, too frazzled to think.
You’ll reach for whatever name has been
shouted to you the most
just because it’s familiar. Of course,
that’s a terrible reason and not grounded
on anything sound, but something-something
caveman brain that evolved to escape
a ******* mastodon rather than
perpetuating poor life choices,
itches for familiarity.

And though anyone who says we write
our own stories has never looked beyond
the microcosm of their own apartment window
(or realized we don’t own them at all)
no one was ever prepared
to make any decision with consequence,
so of course we **** it up. But at least resist
the dark temptation of habit
like a type II diabetic before a chocolate cake.
We are stories, and the rest of infinity passes us by—
it sounds daunting, I know,
but I’ll be willing to bet that the bulk of it
is just the familiar perpetuating itself.

The benefit
of challenging anything
too comfortably established
isn’t so much
some clichéd grand expansion
of one’s worldview, but rather
a well-warranted reminder
that anyone claiming to have found
any conclusions is very likely
full of ****.

I love you dearly, humanity, but
you discover the world
like a toddler discovers his own foot,
and cling
to obsolete sensibilities
like trying to justify your belief in Santa Claus.

And you hate what you find
when you look too long,
because
you say that you discover the world
but what you so stupidly, so humanly
overlook is that the world bears herself
with no inhibitions, and even though
you can’t see everything immediately,
it’s all there; she has
nothing to prove to you. Yet the mystery
you so excruciatingly choose to maintain
is that even though the earth bares her skin
unashamed, you find her ****** absurd and
clothe her blatant body
in preconception, tragically dedicating
the decoding of your existence
to finding out
what truly lies beneath.

So perhaps, humanity, you should
embrace those who **** you off,
because you cushion your soul
with every reason to distance yourself
from any realization
that there is no inherent parallel
between every finite question
and the eternal answer,
unsatisfied with
the tantalizing ellipsis
the universe leaves you, and that the very fact
I even formed a sentence
is punctuated
by my mortality.

I want to write a letter to everyone
who ever made me question anything, from
the nature of the universe to
what tastes best on toast, because
this is the only way I know how
to say thank you—thank you for not letting me
stay the person I was at
any moment when I thought
I had come to any conclusions.

And even though
I spend most of my thoughts
creating answers that are only to terminate
curiosities too abstract
to even be a question, I’ll admit
that I try to tie things together that
don’t even have strings— and I sulk
in frustration that I can’t even find them,
things that don’t even know
that they should exist. So I take my
pencil of imagination and draw
lines between everything and end up
with a blueprint
of some hypothetical reality—because
we say that we discover the world
but what we so stupidly, so humanly
overlook is that the world bears herself
to us with no inhibitions, and even though
we can’t see everything immediately,
it’s all there; she has
nothing to prove to us. Yet the mystery
is that even though the earth bares her skin
unashamed, we find her ****** absurd and
clothe her blatant body
in preconception, tragically dedicating
the decoding our existence
to finding out
what truly lies beneath.

I want to thank everyone
who has ever ****** me off, or negated
any idea I’ve held too dear, because
you get me closer to realizing
that there is no parallel
between my finite questions
and the eternal answer, and the very fact
I even formed a sentence
is punctuated
by my mortality.

You’re just the kind of person
some lost adolescent would go home
and write a ****** poem about
at 2am in hasty cursive
scribbled on stained notebook paper
wrinkled from careless handling, using your being
to bring some riddle of the subconscious
into an acknowledged existence— and then
destroy the evidence, rendering it
undiscoverable to humanity—like everything else
she ever kept
too embarrassingly close to her heart, because
when she was a little girl the adults in her life
told her that there certain parts of yourself
you always kept private
that are a no-no
to show to anyone, and those
perpetually invisible parts
are covered by your swimsuit and your stoic reserve,
the eggshell guarding your psyche—that if anyone
forces themselves in with enough effort, you’ll break
all over them
and stain their sacred feet
with your messy insides that never
seem to go back in
once you’ve released them,  which will
leave you eternally wishing
to retreat into that perfect little immaculate white shell,
undisturbed by your own humanity.

I deprive myself of glances
I would love to take of you, but that would mean
that at some point you would
grow suspicious and
perhaps conjure the ESP
I seem to think everyone has
whenever I have a secret about them I’d rather
they never figure out—but I have to admit,
you’re beautiful.
I wish there were words
precise enough to explain exactly how
I just ******* love
how you stare at the world
with a poet’s wistful empathy, peeking
discreetly through the one-way mirror
of well-guarded sensitivity,
eternally wearing a gaze reluctantly masked
with an adaptive weariness just
transparent enough to expose
brief silhouetted glances
of vulnerability.

You’re just the kind of person
I wish I had the courage
to let into
my psychological fortress
constructed with every accumulated brick
of accumulated cynicism
that materializes
from living in a world that
muffles every voice
it makes want to scream, even if
no matter how old I become I’ll
always be some lonely kid standing
outside of my own person, eternally yearning
for somewhere safe enough
to have a broken shell.

It’s empty
here—and I do not mean
empty as is usually implied
regarding the barren apartment of any
minimum wage-earning college student
having just stumbled into society
from her mother’s house.

Naked walls stare dumbfounded
at their lonely inhabitant, itching for the embrace
of some picture frame
to kiss their forsaken skin, and soothe
the subtle damages of time,
embellish their existence
with purpose
lest they confront the world
bare as they were born into it—
     but that is not the reason why
it is empty here.

I like to think
that time will collect itself
like my fondness
for useless knickknacks—and will eventually react
with experience to create the byproduct
of familiarity, and thus
I can finally call
my lonesome apartment
‘home’— but the reason
it’s empty isn’t because
of naked walls or unfamiliarity,
or even because you aren’t here.
It’s because there isn’t a ‘you’
to even be missing—I abandoned
the house haunted by every ghost
I have ever called ‘you,’
and let my walls bear nothing but
the naked plaster of
an empty home.

Dear Mom,
I know I shouldn’t have been
snooping, but when looking
for some socks on a day when I was
still living with you and had neglected
to do my laundry, meticulously paper clipped
in your drawer, I found a 26-page document
that made my insides curl
when I saw the name of Dad’s mistress
printed blatantly on the front cover.
Yes, I looked through it
(and I know I shouldn’t have) and I don’t know
what made me more disturbed—the fact
that you took the time, ink and paper
to look up the woman who
destroyed your marriage
on public records,
and neatly annotated the highlights
of her messy divorce
prior to meeting Dad—or that this
26-page monstrosity sat innocently beside
his old Valentine’s Day cards,
still painstakingly arranged by year, mixed in
with your daughters’ decade-old crayon drawings
captioned by the loopy letters of a child’s handwriting
next to little plastic baggies with worn edges
containing baby teeth,
the roots yellowed by age and decay.

You never let anything go, do you?
You hold time captive by the wrists
until the soft skin bruises, and even when
it finally jerks itself away, you still manage
to sweep up every speck of dust
its presence
left behind, and store it
perfectly labeled in your archives
like some neurotic historian,
where you think your daughter, who was
only looking for a pair of socks,
would never just happen to stumble upon
this hoarded material record
of every ******* thing
that torments you.

I want to write about *******.
I want to write about everything I’ve
ever been forbidden
from thinking—I want to ****
everyone, I want to be everyone.
I want to lick up the salt
of your sweat, and bite the supple skin
of your beautiful neck,
and I don’t give a ****
who the ‘you’ is in question.
‘You’ can be anybody, any soul
throbbing with the grit of
humanity, who’ll rip their decency
wide open and stand naked and
unrestrained by the starched collared
shirts of everything that civilization
has taught you about how
people should be.

I want to write
about something that terrifies me, and paint
it in permanent ink across my chest.
I don’t want to find clothes that fit, and ****
finding a moral tailor,
I want to be naked and free and feel the wind
sting my winter-chapped lips and
whip my hair against my face,
and I’ll burn every metaphorical rulebook
containing anything I’ve ever believed
while dancing around the fire.

And I realize this poem (if
you can call it a poem)
doesn’t make any *******
sense, but neither
do you and neither do I.
We’re all confused and ***** and tragically
beautiful little ******-up creatures crawling
this earth knowing only
our ridiculous little ******-up lives.
And I can’t really tell you anything
you should always take seriously, because
one day you’ll die and **** yourself afterward, and
so will everyone who ever knew you—so you might as well
not care about being naked because we’re all pretty ******* ridiculous
running around in suits we’ve purposely designed
to never fit.

She clutches a toothless baby,
posing stiffly before a tacky blue backdrop,
standing faithfully
beside my indifferent father—
a dormant madness
written subtly into
the lines of his face,
smothered
by suburban stoicism.

But her impeccably tailored grin,
which beams predictably
from the outstretched lips
of every frustrated housewife,
screams the words
forever condemned to silence:
“******* it, Andy,
for the good of our family,
couldn’t you at least pretend
to be happy about something?”

But what she didn’t realize
is that for far too long,
he did.

The whole concept
of adulthood
is one that seems to
trespass
from the ever-anticipated world
of the theoretical,
just to barge into your life
one night
like an uninvited drunken friend.

It will never really “hit you,”
but it’ll come **** close
the first time your aunt
offers you a glass of wine
as she and your mother
gossip frankly about
your father’s mistress—
you sip on cheap Chardonnay
and pretend to be used to the taste,
as they talk with
a middle-aged bitterness
of the man you were raised
to believe was too virtuous
to be in debt for some glitzy
engagement ring that he
bought to restart his life
with a woman he left your mother for
shortly after the pandemonium
of a guiltless affair.
The man
whose brutishness
you were told to overlook, cradling
the sparse memories
of when he’d tuck you
too tightly into bed, or
when he’d tell you that he loved you
even though half the time
you really didn’t believe him—
The man whose love confused you,
whose clumsy attempts
of fatherhood
kept the heart of a young girl
perpetually guarded
by a cautious skepticism—
The man who brought you into
a world he found absurd
as carelessly
as he raised you to face it,
torn apart
like every illusion that makes a child,
the ashes of which
that slip through your fingers
inevitably declare you
another bitter adult.

More wine will reveal
that your beloved father
is a controlling ******
and his relationship
with that *****
the whole family hates
only appears to be functioning
because she lets him have
all the control
he couldn’t exert on your mother,
even though you’ve had dinner
with the two of them a couple of times
and if you had met her
under any other circumstance (though
you’d feel like a traitor
if you said it aloud)
you wouldn’t think
she was all that bad.

In red, declarative letters
I want to write to any children I may ever bear
into this bittersweet game of *******
we play that we’ve since called ‘life,’
that when they first gaze with awe
at the unattainable grace
with which every grown-up seems to navigate
the world they created,
with all the pain of tax-paying and womanhood,
I want to scream
that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing either
and if at any point I try to convince you otherwise
you should tell your mother
that she’s full of ****.

I’ve always had certain
thoughts
that manifest as forbidden plays
performed privately only in
a mental stage
I always swore
to keep unspoken,
unwritten and
eternally unprocessed
in hopes that
keeping it ineffable
and far away from explanation
would shield it from the
soul-draining burden
of legitimacy.

But the longer
I keep these things
an embarrassing secret,
and the longer I insist
that in my every thought
lies shame best kept suppressed,
the more I realize
that maybe the reason that I,
like every animate creature
stumbling through their earthly existence,
have come to condemn an abrasive world
for never understanding me,
stems from every human’s destructive habit
of refusing to understand the parts of ourselves
the world will never accept.

And what we never realize
is that we are the world—
sponsoring our own
oppression and feeling as responsible
as every snowflake in the avalanche.

From the inception of our lives,
once sheltered
by the innocent warmth of the womb,
we wake to bright hospital lights
and our groaning mothers.

From the inception every day,
out from our hazy world of dreams
cocooned in the comfort of a familiar bed,
we rise with reluctance
to the frigid morning air.

Alarm clocks routinely ending
comfort we were never aware of
until we knew the bitterness
of being exposed to the world.

I think it’s the sickest
part of our wiring
that the things we
long for the most intensely,
with the deepest
and most poignant ache
of the soul
are always the things
we’ve already told ourselves
will never return.

you are
the puddle after the rain
the love that remains
the last animate ember
in a numb and unconscious soul
and I can still smell the smoke
long after you’ve been gone

We’re the glaring definition
of absurdity—everything
felt right when it wasn’t time.
Nothing
ever fell into place
under any sacred principle
of nature— we declared
our own laws
just to break them.
Like sadistic gods, we
established a beautiful world
and destroyed it, just to
fruitlessly reanimate
the salvaged ruins
after we inevitably
change our minds.

We dance to our own song
perpetually
out of time— and if any chord
happens to resonate, one of us
will always be
just one blatant
half-step away
from any satisfaction
of harmony.

You say what would fix us
is a metronome, but
you and I both know
that it’s awfully pointless
when neither of us
will ever stay faithful
to a tempo.

The whole concept
of adulthood
is one that seems to
trespass
from the ever-anticipated world
of the theoretical,
just to barge into your life
one night
like an uninvited drunken friend.

It will never really “hit you,”
but it’ll come **** close
the first time your aunt
offers you a glass of wine
as she and your mother
gossip frankly about
your father’s mistress—
you sip on cheap Chardonnay
and pretend to be used to the taste,
as they talk
of the man you were raised
to believe
was too virtuous to be
in debt for some glitzy
engagement ring that he
bought to restart his life
with a woman he left your mother for
shortly after the pandemonium
of a guiltless affair.
The man
whose brutishness
you were told to overlook, cradling
the sparse memories
of when he’d tuck you
too tightly into bed, or
when he’d tell you that he loved you
even though half the time
you really didn’t believe him.
The man who brought you into
the world as carelessly
as he raised you to face it,
torn apart
like every illusion that makes a child,
the ashes of which
that slip through your fingers
inevitably declare you
another bitter adult.

More wine will reveal
that your beloved father
is a controlling ******
and his relationship
with that *****
the whole family hates
only appears to be functioning
because she lets him have
all the control
he couldn’t exert on your mother,
even though you’ve had dinner with them
a couple of times
and if you had met her
under any other circumstance (even though
you’d feel like a traitor if you said it aloud)
you wouldn’t think
she was all that bad.

In red, declarative letters
I want to write to any children
I may ever bring
into this ******-up little game that
goes by the name of “life,”
that when they first gaze with awe
at the unattainable grace
with which every grown-up seems
to be navigating the world they created,
with all the pain of tax-paying and womanhood,
I want to scream
that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing either
and if at any point I try to convince you otherwise
you should tell your mother
that she’s full of ****.

There is no poem here.
I still hold onto your
words made
obsolete by time
and damage,
clutching onto them
like holy scripture
in a godless world—
reciting what now
means nothing, distorted
by the stains of sacrilege.

There was never a poem here.
We killed the prophets
weeping, kneeling
with a sinner’s grief
at the ruins
of sacred places
we’ve destroyed.

Don’t make me put a poem here.
I can’t create anything,
I only rearrange
the thoughts over-ripened
by silence
I can’t suppress.

I used to think
that those who swept
their issues ‘under the
rug’ were weak
and lacked the maturity
to address their problems.

Now, thanks to you,
I think that that anyone
who disdains
sweeping anything
under the rug—
is just lucky
to never have had any
problem
immense enough
that if their mind slips
for a second long enough
to so much as think about it,
it makes their insides curl.

Bitterly
I miss the naiveté
of not understanding
the appeal of living
at the mercy of the timer
rather than tempting
the bomb.

I have learned several
things I wish I never had to
know, from you.
Your bitterest lesson
being that only one side
of any outcome
can go about their lives
believing that fate is
deliberate enough
for any event to be
intended.

To drown out the murmurs
of doubt you’d rather dismiss
as unfounded paranoia,
you may say to yourself
that even though
you’ve recklessly left behind
a path of ruin
for everyone outside
of the delusion
to joylessly sweep up,
everything will eventually play out
in some sick game
of destiny—
naively overlooking
all the precious things
you’ve carelessly destroyed
to get yourself there.

No words will reach you. I’ve
reduced my one feeble wish
to hoping that one day
you’ll feel that same powerless rage
gut out every delicate tissue of your body
when you’re selfish enough to tell me
that there is any force in the universe
who manipulated the fabric of time
to give you one thing you want
that has thus far made
everyone else around you
needlessly miserable.

I am neither
a war trophy
and indulgence
nor a hobby.

Because I live in a country
where women are no longer
legal property of their husbands,
I am, as of current
unavailable for mail order
due to the radically progressive
notion, that took years decades centuries
to develop
that a human female is, as a matter
of fact, a human.

You can, for a vicarious experience
leer at me
like cheap jewelry
then, appalled, denounce me
as too ugly for your usage
when I give the implication
that I am sentient.
And of course, I must be modest
Lest my tantalizingly average looks
provoke some poor man
into committing a crime
against humanity.

I dated some glassy-eyed narcissist
a while back
in a regrettable period of youth,
who indulgently stated
that his three favorite things
in the world
were food, music
and women.
(Charmed to be a novelty)
And a privileged, modern woman like me
Shouldn’t mind being consumed
like a pain-staking meal prepared
especially for him,
Or replaced in his tri-annual rotation
like the discovery of a new favorite song.

I continue to be
a favorite
thing, as somehow in 2012
the term “feminist”
continues to be the social equivalent
of “kitten strangler.”
And because my father
can no longer sell me
for a flock of sheep,
I no longer need to be more human.

I used to believe
there could be somekind of
god, when I prayed
for someone like you.
Now that you’re not all
a prayer was meant to be,
maybe God’s as reckless
and as ungracefully human
as the drunk of you
and the misfit of me.

I thought I was being saved
by Peter Pan
until they evicted us
from Neverland.
We thought we could outrun
debts higher than numbers
we could count—
the bills we must pay
to Foreverland,
when childhood became some distant
part of space-time
that mocks your
hilariously brief existence,
Where life is a fluorescent-lit
doctor’s waiting room
where you twiddle your thumbs
waiting for death to get around to you.

And then there’s the fear of death,
that an optimistically counted eighty years
of ******* are annulled by the
billions of years surrounding the beginning and end
of everything in existence you will ever possibly know—
ensuring that a Nobel Prize winner and a drunk on the
street, have essentially accomplished the same ******* thing:
existence.
And so goes the life of Foreverland…

(I buried my optimism
to see what it would do—
I’ve grown no fruit
and should I be surprised
the ground’s as barren as my faith in you?
I sold it up and gave it a price—
my ignorance, my security,
And you can have the sacrifice
I make to exist in a world
I’m sure I lost everything to.
So what is it now?
What’s a mortal like me to do?)

I spent Thanksgiving
this year
not in the blue-collar comfort
of my aunt’s house,
nestled somewhere
within a well-buried suburb
of a quaint, but un-noteworthy neighborhood
with walls decorated with Budweiser signs
juxtaposed against portraits of the ****** Mary,
where a football announcer’s voice plays like
conservative talk radio
in the background.

Instead, to save the labor
of my weary immigrant grandmother,
we dressed in Sunday best
and drove ourselves in
three well-packed mini vans
to some elegant hotel restaurant,
ideal for people-watching
from the gaudy, art-deco staircase
while pretending to be in the Great Gatsby.

It didn’t feel natural, though,
that beside a modest turkey breast
with cranberry dressing, sat a beautiful
cut of prime rib, carefully ladled
with truffle au juis–
nor beside a humble dollop
of mashed potatoes and gravy,
should there be salmon to die for,
and berries slathered with brie.

The food I nibbled
with bites of nervous guilt,
as the impeccably dressed waiter
exhaustedly refilled our water glasses,
nodding his head reflexively
to my mouse squeaks of “thank you’s”

What monsters are we,
letting these people work on Thanksgiving Day?
Grandma said, calmly, that some people
are just happy to be paid,
recounting
her impoverished childhood
in war-torn Germany—
that to simply muffle
the aggressive rumbling
of a days-empty stomach,
she and her brother
would ****** a handful of
potatoes from a government farm,
not many, but just enough
as she grimaced
at the ever-so-slight mealiness
of her rosemary-infused pork chop—
the woman who couldn’t afford ham
until she became a citizen.

We nodded quietly and
swallowed our privileged guilt,
washed down with
politely cut bites
of perfectly cooked salmon.

I’ve spent time I’d rather not count
hoping fruitlessly,
by an impenetrable sense of obligation
that can only belong to the delusional,
with the last specimen of hope
whose blood I have drained dry,
just waiting
for a disappointment
that I now expect.

I wake up every morning with
hopes of you,
and rush out of bed as though I haven’t waited months
just to hear you say something,
     just something
          only once…

I come home every night with
erased expectations
that dutifully regenerate
in stubbornly constant dreams
haunted by your face

Wake up.
It’s a new day
Just like yesterday
and every day before that
were meant to be.

You uproot me from my convictions
and expose my skin to air,
dusting away
with saintly tenderness
the accumulated crumbs of earth
with which I have buried myself.
I breathe
as an organism full of blood;
with the vigor of life
and the comfort of purpose.

I wanted to thank someone
for you;
as though, just maybe,
there could be something
beyond us, cognizant
of my microscopic existence,
sending me with grace
a signal of hope, blooming
out of the impossible soil of chaos.

I think I could be a theist
if I spent enough time with you—
a perfect and strange little blessing
to an imperfect and strange little life.
Sometimes I wonder
if someone put you here,
but it’s simply too human
to think the world beautiful
and believe it was there for me
to find it that way.

You are mortal,
regardless of how you choose
to go about it. There will be
an infinite amount of time
surrounding the beginning
and end
of your hilariously brief existence.
The universe will go on without you.

You are one
out of seven billion
humans, inhabiting a planet
we are slowly destroying,
orbiting about
an un-noteworthy star
within a dull suburb of
the Milky Way Galaxy—
one out of billions, by the way—
which is expected
to eventually collide with Andromeda,
flinging Earth like a ping-pong ball
into oblivion.

No matter what you have done
with your life, or
how special you think you are,
we are all
born naked
and screaming,
and defecate when we die.
You will eventually be a corpse.
Your beautiful
     animate
          breathing body
will decompose into something
revolting.

If it’s any consolation, your mistakes
(like your achievements) mean nothing.
What have you got to lose?
Don’t discard the fruit
blemished only
by one unsightly spot—
Let its juices drip
savagely down your chin;
savor the frustratingly temporary
sweetness
that will never be tasted again.

You know I’ve been
far too scatterbrained
to write anything
reasonably coherent.
But frankly,
the word “coherence”
has no place
if I were to truthfully describe
anything that’s happened
between you and I.

I could sit here
and type fruitlessly
until I conceived
the perfect
soul-wrenching metaphor
to illustrate every
painful nuance
of our struggle.
But, unfortunately
there is nothing
terribly poetic
about absolute
*******.

I suppose
I could say that
we were “the dream
that eventually got
its rude awakening” but
that’s stupidly cliché,
and all I want to do
is fall back asleep.

The winds have retired
to stagnant air—a stillness
restrained by tension.
One that can only signify
a gnawing anticipation
of the unpredictable.

Anything that can be said
shouldn’t be, but the words
shunned to our minds
burn at our tongues—
and it only takes
one forlorn look
to remind you
that the storm will not
dissipate if you only
shut your window.

What have we become?
We died at the pinnacle
with the ruthless anticipation
of a stillborn infant—
a corpse before a body,
decimated by the arbitrary brutality
of nature.

I pray to a god I shouldn’t believe in
for some eventual day
of enlightenment—
where the dilemma lies, however,
isn’t whether this day
should occur,
but rather when we’ll strip out of
dignity, and stand in the nakedness
of how dearly we love
to torment ourselves.

We were the senseless
death of potential—
where the shadow fell
between every beautiful thing
that could have been,
and all the reasons why
we could not have them.

It’s a very conflicting feeling
writing poetry in high school—
the world overlooks us
as we sulk for recognition,
hoping that one day
long after we’re too dead
to get any kind of satisfaction out of it
that our words will be immortalized
and important enough to appear
in the worn pages
of some high school kid’s English textbook.

It’s a very conflicting feeling indeed
to hear every teenage voice around you
sigh in a collective groan of boredom
when assigned to read what every
grey-haired scholar calls
a poetic masterpiece—
the highest caliber
of anything you write could ever hope to achieve.

It’s the most absurd irony
that a poet’s world is a binary one.
If you ever manage to crawl out
of the black pit of mediocre obscurity, maybe one day
(long after you’re dead, of course)
your greatest ambitions
can be actualized—the literary purging
of your soul, the collective narrative
of your world view can one day be immortalized
as the dull assignment
some overwhelmed honor’s student
can suffer through.

I once said I’d die without you,
and you without me.
I’ve been counting the months
since I’ve heard from you—
and the silence is still painful
But it dulls
by every day that passes
where I eat the words I once declared
with such conviction
that I’d never be just fine—
Carrying on my own life,
A you without me; a me without you.

There must be a word
for the bleak realization
of the systematic inhumanity
on which our world operates—
which carries the
self-directed disgust
of how desensitized we’ve
been— up until the moment
the thought shakes us
that our ending point
is a corpse—
like a child distraught to realize
his body is a separate entity
than the womb who
created him,
How he curses an indifferent god
who has left him naked,
How as a race we suffer
by the cruelty of a creator
to give us the concept
of eternity, yet
the tantalizing confines
of mortality.

I wish
I could fill this
space, with something
more meaningful
than this ringing in my ears—
echoes of lost sentiments
that were never written down.

In high school
we learn of logarithms, iambic meter
how to balance an equation between zinc oxide
and excess hydrogen gas–
only to find there was no reaction to begin with.

We’re told that colleges get to know you
through three letter acronyms—ACT, SAT, GPA…
and our name is somewhere in the application.
It’s repeated to us to the point of meaninglessness,
like a perpetually chanted word:
Grades, scores and testing, testing, testing.
The students they want know everything
that will be forgotten by their thirtieth birthday.

I anticipate the day
that our Geometry teacher is to write an essay
on the individual’s struggle
against a systematically inhumane society
in Orwell’s 1984
only to receive a “D” under the scrutinizing eye of
the honor’s English teacher

Or, perhaps, the day someone in charge
is faced with some insufferable fate
the textbooks call chemical stoichiometry,
thirty years after repressing memories
of having to memorize the periodic table

Socrates once said that the youth today
will be the demise of civilization.
We contradict our parents, are smug in the face of authority
and tyrannize our poor teachers—
a youth who will ultimately leave behind a world
too damaged for our children to inherit.
Funny he said this
roughly 2,000 years ago–
I think my dad said something like that last year.

But, until the day we grow up to pay taxes
and marry someone we despise,
we’re just stupid teenagers.

They sent Daddy home
from suicide watch—
he was bound to lose it someday.
Mom locked up the
kitchen knives.
She comes back to me,
her quivering voice
delivers some deluded promise,

“He said he won’t hurt himself,
I’m just being safe.”

The house is still silent with absence,
he stares at the wall—
hidden in the basement
like the last twenty thirty years
of some void of a life,
guarded by an eggshell
cracked by decades of denial.

You aged ten years in a weekend, Daddy,
And I always feared I’d bury you
before I witnessed my first grey hair,
silver like the lining
of some magical cloud
I can’t seem to distinguish
in this homogenous fog, looming
in the bleak and inescapable sky
hovering over me
with careless indifference

I knew there’d be a day like this,
only now has it come true.
I knew you couldn’t love me, Daddy,
You never loved you, too.

I moved out in a backpack
of crumpled clothes
stuffed hastily in tears—resorting
to the bomb shelter of cowardice
so I won’t see us
collapse into eachother.

Maybe it was a better idea—I breathe
my own air, you breathe yours.
It’s calmer here, but I still
can’t stop hearing the silence
of that empty house
I know you hear right now.
I left with five pounds of baggage
on my shoulders, you shackled
two tons more to my ankle.
You know I had to leave,
I couldn’t bear the silence—
the last trace of himself
he left for you.

Dad showed me his new apartment;
we stared silently into off-white walls.
When he asked me
why I was so quiet, I muttered
“No reason.”
All I could think about
was why the absolute hell
would that ******* exchange his family
for some barren apartment
with nothing
to his name but a mattress without sheets
and weeks-untouched guitars
scattered across a hideous tan carpet,
accompanied only by silence.

I peeked in your medicine cabinet, too—
and painfully I read the labels.
Anti-anxiety, anti-depressant, anti-psychotic,
anti-everything they found wrong with you.

Mom still didn’t give you
your pocket knife collection back
that she locked up when you were
under suicide watch.
And I couldn’t dismiss the irony.
Dad, of all people you’d be the one
to end your life
with a hand-crafted Italian switchblade
previously under neat display
behind an immaculate glass door,
only to act in violence
no one could have anticipated.

I still don’t want to go home,
and I’ll give you any excuse
that sounds half-way rational.
But what I dread more than anything
is to hear that bitter silence—
ghosts of ugly words
we’ll never say to eachother.

I let them hollow me out,
(I didn’t want the insides anymore)
They gutted my heart, mummified my soul—
(So I will not decay anymore)

I have sanitized
my humanity, and now
I am immune.
(It’s lovely not to feel anymore…)

Life as a shell
is an existence surprisingly pleasant
but I almost miss
that defective little mind of mine…
(But the memories do not hurt anymore)

There’s a strange feeling of soreness, though,
that aches where I used to have a soul—
phantom pains of discarded passion,
but thankfully I do not hunger
(I no longer have a stomach anymore)

In summertime I waited for you
Longing idly under August heat waves
I carried my disappointment through
Autumn, and kicked the leaves
that piled like clutter on the ground.
Sometimes I’d get a word from you,
A drizzle of rain in my life of drought—
But the water didn’t last long,
And all I had were puddles of you
That dried all too quickly.
In wintertime my soul would freeze
and the pain would numb away,
I’d curse the wind and count the days
Until Spring Salvation came my way.

My most persistent friends
have become six hours of jetlag
and the fading buzz of airline coffee--
as black and unforgiving as our red-eye flight,
as we wander German streets-- Füssen,
where the air is always crisp
and graceful, even awkwardly emerging
from an ugly winter.
Neuschwanstein castle sits mockingly
in the horizon-- the locals pass it by,
as I, some baffled foreigner
from Nowhere, Ohio,
where the streets bear gas stations
and the shameless scars
of recent construction (always
building, nothing built)
stand in disbelief.

Our thirst brings Jenny
and I to a Getränkeladen --
I sip on my first taste
of Apfelsaftschorle
as a roaring crowd
of local teens barge in,
with the violence of
a tornado we'd see in Xenia...
They speak in a crude,
indistinguishable slang
that Frau never could have
taught us
in room 322

Jenny hovers mindlessly
by the door-- contemplating
a bottle of Coca-Cola,
as the teenage stampede
shoves her off to the side--
fleeing out the door,
having bought nothing,
as the storekeeper sighs in disbelief.

They tore through
such a quaint little shop
with such an aimless recklessness,
one wouldn't think
a centuries-old castle
looms nonchalantly in the distance...

I was thirteen years old
and clueless--
Ben, who I believe is now
in juvie, and Ryan
stand on either side--
dumpy teenagers
in baggy clothes,
speaking in a crude,
brutal slang
that was invented in its usage.
We loitered every street
that would tolerate us,
in these exhausted Ohioan
suburbs, we tore through sidewalks
bearing unremarkable houses
in a sleepy neighborhood
with no grand castles nearby.

Our lazy strides, our ******
banter-- from Füssen, Germany,
to Who Cares, Ohio--
whether there's Neuschwanstein
or a Speedway to conquer,
there's never anything to do at home.

*So wie ist das Leben...

My most persistent friends
have become six hours of jetlag
and the fading buzz of airline coffee--
as black and unforgiving as our red-eye flight,
as we wander German streets-- Füssen,
where the air is always crisp
and graceful, even awkwardly emerging
from an ugly winter.
Neuschwanstein castle sits mockingly
in the horizon-- the locals pass it by,
as I, some baffled foreigner
from Nowhere, Ohio,
where the streets bear gas stations
and the shameless scars
of recent construction (always
building, nothing built)
stand in disbelief.

Our thirst brings Jenny
and I to a Getränkeladen --
I sip on my first taste
of Apfelsaftschorle
as a roaring crowd
of local teens barge in,
with the violence of
a tornado we'd see in Xenia...
They speak in a crude,
indistinguishable slang
that Frau never could have
taught us
in room 322

Jenny hovers mindlessly
by the door-- contemplating
a bottle of Coca-Cola,
as the teenage stampede
shoves her off to the side--
fleeing out the door,
having bought nothing,
as the storekeeper sighs in disbelief.

They tore through
such a quaint little shop
with such an aimless recklessness,
one wouldn't think
a centuries-old castle
looms nonchalantly in the distance...

I was thirteen years old
and clueless--
Ben, who I believe is now
in juvie, and Ryan
stand on either side--
dumpy teenagers
in baggy clothes,
speaking in a crude,
brutal slang
that was invented in its usage.
We loitered every street
that would tolerate us,
in these exhausted Ohioan
suburbs, we tore through sidewalks
bearing unremarkable houses
in a sleepy neighborhood
with no grand castles nearby.

Our lazy strides, our ******
banter-- from Füssen, Germany,
to Who Cares, Ohio--
whether there's Neuschwanstein
or a Speedway to conquer,
there's never anything to do at home.

*So wie ist das Leben...

Sing the anthem of the lonley people, maybe we could find
eachother within a barren labyrinth
forged within our minds...
Say what you want, I still mutter your name
on these restless, silent nights, as I think I've forgotten your face...

It's a useless endeavor, to cure this void--
Born with a hole in my heart, I've stared like a ragged child
into vast and uncertain a universe
that will never hear my name, hopelessly trying
to learn its ways...

It's people like you and I, my friend, why seven billion isn't enough.
I've wandered to every corner, searched every stoic face
for an exception.
It's a loneliness that is incurable-- one that stares longingly out of windows,
stands silently in roaring crowds, sighs wistfully in empty rooms,
and weeps bitterly onto old bedsheets, watching and waiting as the world rushes by.

I kept your birthday
written in my calendar—
in a vague hope that by January,
we’d be able to speak again.
The naked skeletons of trees
bear the white virginal blossoms
of awakening springtime,
yet if you stared serenely
into the wind, you could still feel traces
of a bitter winter’s frost.

I try to search your eyes by
bashful glances, you withdraw
at every opportunity we could possible see
a trace of humanity within eachother.

You keep me well confined
within your silent tomb—freezing
away any warm-blooded soul
that dares to approach you.
Woman of ice, maiden of
annihilation— shrinking
into some faint white sliver,
waning into the vast night sky
of oppressive black.
Spring has come
for the rest of us, but
the ice never melted for you.
And If I weren’t certain,
you would only resist the light,
I would have tried to revive you.

The newborn leaves, the hopeful
blossoms—to you they are worthless;
your heart as bitter, and fatally
naïve, as the bleak winds of January,
your convictions as stubborn as permafrost.

I was an idle child, hiding silently
behind old curtains, concealing my gaze
to the rain-dampened street
that beckoned me beyond the window.

There was an unquenchable thirst, a burning,
Irrepressible drive, which had followed me
Whispering down the nape of my neck,
Provoking me, summoning me
To the uncertain depths
Of the flower-bearing forest.

It has followed me well into the age
Where the fancies of childhood
Are replaced
By *****, drunken nights—
hunting, scavenging, like some id-ridden
savage, for the fleeting taste of adventure
that was suppressed  with painful gratuity
as we grounded our souls, and our longings
into the confines of the world.

There’s a vague sense of longing
that provokes the heartstrings
of the soul, in an unexplainable combination
of warmth and bitterness. It begs for a name,
but no word has found a way
to render it.

I mutter the crude anthem
of a perpetual Lazy Sunday,
banking on the anticipated
accomplishments, that dissolve
in laziness, by the light
of Monday morning.

I tried to speak of society
(but my words of the world
have rendered themselves redundant)
I tried to speak of love,
but my body has grown stiff
and numb to any attempt
of endearing touch
(my heart much the same…)
And I’ve long and regretfully acknowledged
that I’ve been put at a distance from the world.

There’s a strange sense of longing,
tingling in my unconscious soul,
emerging, coated in dusty residue
from its time incarcerated in storage.
It beckons me to feel the provoking tingle
of the fresh and bitter morning air,
and all I can do is stare out the window...