It's not where you'll go, but the path you'll take.
The friends you'll make and the hands you'll shake.
But what about the hearts you'll break?
The lies you'll tell and the demons you'll wake?
Will you ache in your mistakes?
Or will you grow?
Will you let the path destroy your fate?
Or will you go?

Yesterday, I turned twenty-one.
I was born in July, but I can smell the holly of winter
and graduation is a block away.
Two months ago, I was sixteen,
trying to figure out high school and imagining
the person I was going to be.
Twenty years ago, I was ten,
boxing up my life and meeting friends who took basketball
just as serious.
Once upon a time, I was six.
As biology dictates, at some point I was even younger
But time is a dream I cannot grasp
I am not the same person I was then
as I am not the same person I was five minutes ago
if only due to the way my actin slides
and the way my mitochondria only carry
my mother’s DNA.
Slow and passive,
that’s evolution, not revolution.
I still feel like an ant
with a barrel of gasoline
waiting for a spark to set it
ablaze.

In the corridors of the body,
In the halls of the jagged ribcage,
I milk the stars in her eyes
In a field of tissue and organs.
They fall from my memory
Into the hummingbird heartbeat
Which makes my body
Nostalgic warm.

I hated the way childhood tasted
Like sticky kisses from unfamiliar lips,
But I remember you softly,
As though thinking too hard about it
Would shatter the memory.

You’ve nested in my brain
And kept my small hands warm
With your big heart.
You are channeled into me
The way west winds
Whisper their messages in and out
Of metropolitan suicide suites,
Telling us not to jump,
To put the knife down,
Not to pull the trigger and
To get off the chair-
You are a lifesaver
In ways we can’t count on fingers
And toes.

My mood swings like a pendulum
In a long-broken clock
And I gently fray at the edges.
I can feel your hand on my face
And I am comfortable like a cloud.
I give my entire heart to you
Neck and all
And in return, you give me yours
Pale, pretty wrists and all.

Somehow, through the dresses,
The curled hair and the pink nails,
I felt you reaching into me
From some private distance
With eyes, hands and body.

Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
April soft in flowered languor,
April cold with sudden anger,
Ever changing, ever true --
I love April, I love you.

How far away the warm sun seems
How distant now the dappled leafy shade,
The breezes rippling Summer hay
And sighing through the drowsy woodland glade.

Now winds are cold and full of rain
The lazy sun climbs slowly from his bed
And trees are stripped of Summer’s crown
Which flutters down to carpet earth instead.

The Summer’s glorious greenery
All lies in russet tatters on the ground
The bleak black branches scrape the sky
And wait for Winter’s cold and dreary round.

The smoke from bonfires struggles up
As fires barely manage to consume
The sodden offerings from lawns
Now scoured clear of leaves by rake and broom

The luscious green of Summer’s gone,
The red and gold and brown of Autumn too,
The black and white of Wintertime
Has still to come before the year is through.

But Winter cannot last for long
The days will soon be lengthening and then
The bright green buds on Winter boughs
Will signal Spring - and leafy trees again!

'Tryna get to sunny Californy' -
Boom. It's the awful raincoat
making me look like a selfdefeated self-murdering imaginary gangster, an idiot in a rueful coat, how can they understand my damp packs - my mud packs -
„Look John, a hitchhiker'
„He looks like he's got a gun underneath that I. R. A. coat'
'Look Fred, that man by the road' „Some sexfiend got in print in 1938 in *** Magazine' –
„You found his blue corpse in a greenshade edition, with axe blots'

I never know how to start these things, but i guess i just did, so i can't back out now.
I can feel the smoke.
I can hear the lights.
I can see the walls of this city tremble from the motion.
what a far-fetched kind of notion.
that one could feel this city, in the kind of way that makes you aware of its
pulsing breath.
the streets crumble beneath my feet and suddenly this city leaves me.
the breathing stops, the lights go silent, and the smoke becomes stale, cold air.
I kept my eyes closed and just let it all happen. I felt a dragging in my stomach and a pulling from inside.
then it all stopped.
i open my eyes and actually return.
New York, I can't stop dreaming about you.

Must I admit: that
being with you was like
pulling out a single
strand of hair, daily.
Look—-
this fleshy white
button ferally crowning
To begin: with the scraping
of my own scalp off
lining brainwashed
finger nails as a reminder
to my heart still beating
upon this earth
so that you may take
the bottom piece to split
my split ends in half
leaving broken off
eyelashes underneath
the talons. Were they your
keepsake to search a shine
when combing foreign
locks? Your reminder
in the strangeness of
other bloodstained
women?