Sooner or later I'll have
to face the fact that
I'm not really good at anything
Yes, I dabble in writing
[the art of fashioning
buzzing thoughts into something
vaguely meaningful] and oh, I can make
the piano shout truths to the world
by hammering its keys and feeling
every palpitating sliver of love
and grief burst from my
callused fingertips
And yes, I can sneak candid
photographs of strangers laughing
or walking or dropping
their crumpled cellophane wrappers
into the street when they think
no one is watching
And here and there
I dance, twisting my
spine into contortions of human expression
wrestling with gravity until
my muscles spasm
and give out
flirting with the edges of my
endurance until I can't take it any more
and I go down,
gasping
But contrary to some people's
beliefs, this is not talent or skill
This is not mastery or ability
This is me stripping myself
down to the very essence of
my character
tearing the insecurities away like
an old Band-Aid
shoving my ugly fears into the light
before they can get the better of me
This is not vision or genius
This is a gloriously chaotic mess
of swirling thoughts and feelings
turned into something tangible
This is not art
This is just me playing with the raw
exhilaration
of being alive

Where do all the unsaid things in the world go? Do they end up in some metaphorical scrap-heap on the other side of the earth? Do they sink broken to the bottom of the sea? Do they swirl around our heads like nervous birds, filling the space between us with tingling anxiety? I imagine that, like an exhale, these unspoken truths disperse into the atmosphere, quiet and unnoticed. Silky, mirror-fogging anguish. Everywhere; everywhere. We breathe in each other’s unarticulated desire each day, each hour, without knowing it.

Example. Two countries over, there’s a woman who is watching a man, watching him walk away from her. Watching the place where his skull meets his neck meets his shoulder, that sweet parabola, and a terrible sorrow is rising up in her, her heart pounding fast and loud, begging her to say what’s needed saying for so long. She doesn’t. She exhales, and her exhale is my inhale. I breathe in the words she never speaks. My cells and blood are filled with her silent, undeclared want.

In another part of town, two people are together. Maybe they’re best friends. Maybe they love each other, have been in love with each other, for years, softly, without realizing it. Maybe they are watching a film, but the dialogue is spinning past without comprehension and the actors have become nothing more than a simple blur of color and anatomy. Maybe one of them has rested her head on the other’s shoulder. Maybe they’re each thinking to themselves of reaching for the other’s hand. Maybe they almost do, flexing and unflexing their fingers as they try to work up the courage, but stop themselves at the last moment. It’s infuriating, isn’t it? Someone should say something. Do something. Anything. But we never do, do we? We eat cereal after sunrise and lace our shoes and live our little lives and inhale a thousand others’ heartache without knowing a thing, and we fill volumes with all the things we will never let see light.

My dear, you must see why I don’t want us to be like that. God, I can’t bear the thought of it. I wasn’t meant for burying or suppressing. My spirit likes living aloud. It enjoys being bright with hunger and pain, and doesn’t mind being in love. If we part like two passing vessels without ever intersecting, it will crumble. It will burn. If we allow each other to slip away, we will be caught in a great tumbling mess of felt things that were never put to words, like rain or bodies or ash.

Don’t let it happen.

This is what say to myself, over and over, repeated suffering, hands on the bathroom counter while I lean over it and look my reflection in the eye, petrified: Don’t become another lost kiss, another neglected love, another pair of people that could have come together but didn’t.

Be the truth that escapes the scrap-heap. Be the I love you that makes its way out of the mouth.

in spite of everything
i want it to be
you

i have been a TV screen since the day i was born.
all static and scrambling dots, flipping channels,
frenzied with feeling, wringing myself inside out
for audiences who do not notice i am in the room.
i am a TV screen and i have been dark for so long.
but turn me on now and the world will see you,
your eyes, your elbows, your desperately beautiful
force projected onto me like billboard love.
the Broadway of my body covered in your face.
we gleam together. the two of us bending our prisms
until they make a new color, your pixels
pressing into my skin like the first sun
of a new year. like the air we breathe
after coming up, up
from the deep

your mother asks you to                                                    
make her breakfast

2. she has lived your life
two and a half times over
she knows everything about the world
and you know nothing
is what she tells you
when she is bending you backward with her voice
when she is loud and searing and immediate
an avalanche woman bringing boulders
to her feet

3. your mother takes up space
she attracts
she magnetizes
you are fighting your way out of her orbit
but it is hard
you perform elliptical rotations
around her and count the seconds
between your words and her rage
it is a bittersweet spectacle
beautiful in its torment
like watching a dying star absorb itself:
this huge white brilliance, this ricocheting sound,
the tears there is no gravity
to catch

4. you look at your mother
the way she mirrors you in reverse
her laugh is your laugh
but not your laugh
her hair hits her left collarbone
the way yours does your right
her pain is blue like yours
but hers is navy and yours looks like a blue iris
when light cuts through it
like the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg
surveying you as you excavate your feelings
all-knowing in their grief


5. your mother is you and she is not-you
so peel the grapefruit and cut it in half
plate the eggs
bring it all to her with coffee
the way she likes it
cream, no sugar


6. forgive her
even though