pop songs made us feel *****
so we coerced ourselves into penning curse words
and eating them in a closet we thought
had been Anne Frank’s- only that war had been across the
Atlantic & our grandfathers now only knew military agents
of strange orange colors.

we’d pin up torn-out posters & record some daily static to replay
wondering if our laughter could insulate us forever
or if our mother knew it hurt us too when she would sleep all day.

now I just eat apples (you tell me they make your mouth itch)
& when I worry- its just a thought of you, hating your thighs and
feeling lonely.
now we talk of how evolution kills off too many
unable to weather clamoring silence; empty mirrors.

at bedtime, our father would read us Aesop's fables with pensive eyes
& an antique ego he kept from his ancestors’ childhood
so we learned long ago that
clarity comes
(but at a solitary price).

his laugh-
a continuous tsunami over
the under-privileged third world of my body.

(I think I fell in love in the back of a theater
foreign languages on the screen-
mourning dew in your eyes.)

Empty bars encourage the best conversation
in the dead of winter
when nobodies feel the most alive.

they order Irish coffees and Old Fashions
to remind them of the
grandfathers they never knew, while we talk
and covet the ****** hair of exotic men.

(I always awake feeling close to you
and then go to bed
disintegrated by distance- by need

love is always easier when your face is numb
having mistook the blemishes its supposed to hide
for forbidden fruit within the promised land.)*

there's a depressed bartender talking to
a manic patron,
reminding me to visit my parents soon.

I left work. Rode my bike home, but don't romanticize it- don't feel left out. The ground in this city is uneven and the rush of anxious minutes escapes no one- ticking fuel for everyone's consistent commutes.

Especially on a bicycle; no one ever sees you. So I ride quickly to keep  pace and avoid my self-imposed sympathies for holding everyone up.

A quick shot down gradient asphalt teaches you that riding your bike to work carries with it a perpetually aching ***. A living classroom experience that an object in motion, will continue in motion until an object of equal or greater motion inhibits it.

The streets are stationery and they rule, godlessly. So, just don't romanticize what it is you think I am doing here.

I had nothing to do. I laid on my roof shirtless and let the sun mistake me for one of its feline Maenads. On days like today, it's hard to not worship beauty. Or the feeling of heat. Eyes shut, I imagine writing- at one point I imagined writing this.

It sounded better then.

A helicopter files parallel to the horizon.

I think of a police state and what a sunny day in them must feel like. I think of the constants; of fear & the times in life spent missing the mark.. My thoughts interact like the clouds above my closed mind. Meeting briefly and passing ways with parts of them missing, yet with new formations attached.

I come to- from a lucid daze. The neighbor two row homes down is now on his roof, but it's a deck- a place where you can welcome other people.

The breeze begs my hair for attention; it obliges itself across my face. I breathe in.

I go inside. Lie down in the warm security of my bed. Breathe in its comfort, it's unforgiving acceptance. But it's too beautiful of a day to waste (aren't they all). I sigh.

Grab a pen, my notebook, a countless refill of still water.

I return.

To my mind's abode with its offering of a grounded bird's eye view.

I begin.

I like sitting on my rooftop, in a city that the one over finds
degraded and blue-collar. Its quiet and the sun heats the
tar- a soft lullaby on the bottom of a pair of feet that traverse
a life I’m always trying to get closer to.

I like things like ginger ale and lemonade; faded colors
& antiques. The belief that people still listen to vinyl
and care about our founding fathers. That they
still hand write love notes to themselves as much as for
Another.

People okay with the company
of an occasional fruit fly and a toasted bagel with butter
and honey alongside a sweet peach iced tea, sweating from the
thought of summer’s
sin.

I like sky lights & well-lit rooms; shadows permitted the freedom
to dance across exposed brick and structures
incapable of forgetting the daily histories of all their inhabitants.

My passwords are always about the planets or Greek mythology;
(I rotate).

Because I need a daily dose of the cosmos & humanity’s
attempt to better understand its purpose on this solitary fleck of dust.

I tend to bleed my existence through learning history and maintaining eye-
contact. Weekends are where people smile and emerge from their
carefully soaked-in showers, feeling clean and comforted by the silence
of a fogged mirror.

I like sentimental movie trailer music and bathtub tunes - whatever
can put to rest the parts of society that demandingly vibrate within me

(I leave).
my front door open because I appreciate individual curiosity
and creating an invitation for people to look in and see how very
much we are all alike. Needy and wanting to watch for signs of life
in others.

I like people who can carry sorrow in their back pockets & yet
**still offer to
pay for your check.

In this city, every morning begins with a Siren
one bright and brilliant Eastern Awakening
that doesn't carry with it a threat
to sing us lovingly to some romantically unknown demise.

Yet we've forgotten that our ears aren't the only part
of ourselves capable of hearing & we've forgotten
of how our eyes read each others long before language
could be taught with structure.

So we lay in bed and await
the cheaper sirens of bad news or an alarm
to superficially awake us and send us off to tally
another day towards death.

I overhear people in the bustle speak of life
as if it were paused in the present, so I buy my
black coffee and when you don't hear me say thank-you
its because you never looked up.

He texted me seven minutes after I had decided
to start calling my sexuality Coyote, because it was growling
half-way through a book about ***** feminists
and the hair on his chest had undomesticated me in a way that
the thinking part of my brain didn't even believe was possible
but reliving the sound of his laughter as he whispered in my ear
to climb on top made me travel through space and time
to kiss Lilith on the mouth and take Medusa home for one night.

I don’t sleep with random boys.

The truth is,
I am lazy. I won’t feel
like washing my sheets. And I know
within twenty-four, I won’t be
able to sleep. Thinking of the
radical chemical compounds
soaked into my Egyptian cotton.
like a foreigner’s blood on un-sacrificed holy land.

But even if I did, I think
it might offend.
Because I would remember your name
only five years down the road,
driving down packed dirt on autopilot where
twenty minutes ago I made a mental list
of all the men I have slept with and
you burst into my recollection with an adrenal jolt of
demanding acknowledgement.

and I’ll laugh to myself because
Society tells me I should be (ashamed).

She would put on lipstick at midnight,
because her favorite show was on
and she always liked to look good when she was appreciating something
as if the novelty could be French-kissed unexpectedly.

Her lunches were always spent alone,
with a used book from an online vendor
and her throat would always close up when someone asked to join
as if they had interrupted her touching herself.

She had a self-designated seat on the public tram,
because slave laborers are always penny-pinchers
and she needed to close her eyes in order to see the light dance
as if she were a paradoxical vampire feeding off the sun.

You know, she was always forgetting the past,
never knowing how everyone else could remember so much
and she would roll around cold liquid in her mouth
as if life was too surreal to not look pensive.

She never understood what people did with their time.
She never understood how they could fit more pieces into their 8 by 4 plots.
She never understood how classical music could not move them to tears.

I almost fell out of love
when I read your Tragedy and discovered your
Belief that poetry was no art.

That’s about the time I understood how
you could
stomach Kant. Your love of Dionysus.
You were
always so strict for someone with such
feeling.
Existing somewhere.
Alone in your dialectic irony.

But those were the early years,
before your father went insane
and you ran from a lifetime, with a
craned neck
only to slam into the shadow of your own Madness
atop that peak,
where you gave birth to millions of
dancing stars.

(Or was it millions of little sheep?)

I found myself meandering through churches of
political discussions-debating the ever stale rights
of each citizen dissolving into the crowded bars. Clinking
glasses with more feeling than their fingers on holiday.

Someone began to say “Life is…” and I stopped them
right there, because who wants to sit for bad ideas when
today is really for travelling to heaven and
I'm sick of sinking into the landscape. I am
already a hundred miles through the cracks in
the world; we’re really all just piecemeal bizarre
occurrences.

You appeared in my passengers’ seat while
before I thought I was just thinking about taking
a road trip to you and all this time I've been
driving through New York City with God.

For the first fifteen minutes all you could comment on the
was how shallow the lights seemed and I've got to
be honest, I never heard the rest because I was too busy
trying to decipher the Latin phrases that overwhelmed
your skin. Next thing I know, you had tears on your chin-
talking about how you wished all women could understand that
their blood is the same which pumps through wild geese.

jesus, are you my savior?
you're so light on my tongue,
I've sacrificed things I didn't even know
I'd attached to.

I called you the Old Man, but I
was always the one in bed
before nine. You've got an
aching back from pragmatic
dreams and antique sympathy for
the Civil War. Old Man, you’re
an idealist capitalizing on a far
too consumed past, I thought you
knew repetition is no means
of production. Old Man, I heard
you when you said “I’ll change if,
I ever get around to it” and I thought
it was the saddest thing this World
has ever whispered. Old Man, your
pockets are pinched, tighter than
an anorexic’s waist, saving up for
a future a century’s past with a
loaf of stale bread. Old Man, you
told me it was only okay to envy
laugh lines and stolen glances, on
drives out West, with sweat, Nature’s
air conditioner. Old Man, I see you
travelling over hills, knowing you've
always got to see whats on the other side;
Old Man, I wish you'd just explore
your own.

I'd like to butter you up, but
I'm on a diet and
You're vegan.

I've got eyes on every planet
weeping like watering holes, out of El Dorado.
only they're not golden nor heralding,
these eyes are wide and dilated
before a nameless, naked mistress with lipstick,
smeared between her inner thighs.

You thought that I was your special Siren,
a blind post script for your middle-class suburban soul,
with a girlish laugh and perfect teeth.
But, honey, I've eaten too many men alive in darker alleys
and I gave that up years ago because emptiness
only fuels the dead and I got sick of people
who never changed and always took the same way to work.

So please- dismiss those touching thoughts,
like some small school boy tardy to class
in the 1950s with knee socks covering scabs
and a case of fresh milk in glass.

Alas,- call off your self-designed verbal troops
for I am not your revolutionary cry, nothing you try
can protest the things I've been, willingly.
I should confide to you now that
Sisyphus, himself, already walked away,
with his head in between his shoulders and tears upon his cheeks.

Listen to me child,
I am no myth to be tempted,
Pandora opened my own box.

“I can’t make bricks without clay,” you said
but you had me walking into walls
with eyes wide open,
unbuttoning my pants in public to some
maenad beat in the foreground of your chest.

(You know, I've felt your calloused hands
Decades of times, molding my bone-dried shape.)

more than once I saw my looking-glass self
reflected in your hundred yard stare onyx eyes
ones made from medieval, fire-forged steel
bent back on itself thousands of times.

To me, you’re living proof that it’s not just the depths
of some ocean, where darkness can create.

we love each other like we don’t exist,
so I’m not sure if I do.

I can sense the vanguard of your breath
colliding along the rarely prepared front lines
parading across the nape of my neck.

Hovering above the black moon tattoo I got
when my eyes were filled with factory smoke
from times a grandfather only knows
and my mind had been chaotically mute for centuries.

Lovers in the young West
stalked by dust bowl witnesses
and men who have their own idea
of the Law.

Scatter ourselves upon the prairies
dandelion perfume among the wind
and pray our mothers never know.

you couldn't satisfy me
not even if you had fifteen hands

because I'm not so sad
that the only happiness I have
is wrapped around the likes of others.

I stared far too long into Nietzsche's abyss
and well,
it never stared back-so I spit in it
because apathy doesn't discriminate
(because emptiness is competitive).

& I don't know if I am more black
or more white
in this basic grey american t.v. stand life.

I am not in the business of being you
or him or her or they
we doesn't even really interest me.

you hated me within the first 20 minutes
like a shallow predator
experiencing virginal danger
you have the limbic system of a prey
obvious to anyone in touch with their senses.

you were threatened-
you cracked a joke and among
the robotic laughter and among
the generic thoughts
I stood back, blank-faced
a novel piece of art you haven't the ability
to muster up the courage to understand.

aloud, I said it wasn't funny
which I'm sure your emptiness already betrayed
in a booming, and terrifying fashion
(I'm an intellectual sadist-
I get off watching you squirm)
you know enough, that you have no basis
that the status quo is the stale stream you do nothing but soak in.

you're superficiality is so pervasive
that your thoughts are unfilled, plastic
discarded long ago by anyone with stamina
(you're a carbon-copy of a Xeroxed person)
looking the same as the others of your degenerate breed
with much less vibrancy than the original
and far less worth.

your boundaries have been in place for so long
passed down by
generations
of
generations
of
generations
great-great-granddaddy's barbed wire is the only thing protecting your prejudice.

you're not funny- you're scared
ashamed and lonesome.

ashamed of the person you wish you could be
but don't have the strength-or the guts
to morph into
lonesome because even yourself is someone you don't feel close to
you are so basically human.

I have no pity.
**for you are no Muse.

you're a sloppy stitch
the kind that amateurs create
so they can tell someone they sew.
but you're on that old pair of
grass stained blues
I know- I should have donated years ago

should have given you away
the moment you didn't fit

but I refused to believe
I couldn't manipulate myself
to once again absorb the contours
of what you feel like on my skin.

so you're pushed back, Back
in the back of that rustic oak dresser
and I forget- (well I never remember)
until, once a year, I decide to
clean out everything and trim my fat-

donate all that useless **** I hoard but never use,
and there you are...categorically.
I just can't- could never do it.

You're the material possession that makes me realize
I am just a consumer.

the touch,
taken for granted
time passes

unknowingly forgotten...

...unknowingly deprived.

then, out of nowhere,
it happens
and it all comes rushing back.

my pupils dilate
released from an eternity
of what I thought was
finality.

god--

...you feel so good.

I’m shaking in my boots
(oh my god, what a lame *** saying)
Anyway the ones with weathered leather
That some old maid died for
Once upon a ******* time.

I'm thinking, hoping, saving, grasping
More or less I guess-
Actually yes: my hypothesis
The “if…then…because” statement
Of my life
That defines my ID
(thank you very much Dr. Freud)

In all my life I have learned that
concealer only hides a blemish
How I wish I could cover my selfishness-
(your loneliness)

I never knew, I guess I just never knew.
Your eyes might have hinted, but I didn't bother to look.
Would I have cared? the world may never know...
I was already permanently turned off to the idea of you.

Ironic  (god I hate the irony)
The paradox, I thought I owed to you-
**I took so much more than I ever gave.

the drunken dancer
mingling between selves
a cocktail party for her pieces
her hips-
rhythm
her mind-
beats.

a bit of elixir
to smooth out the kinks
to rust through the chains
to flood through the pristine valleys
detached and forever
in(dependent) on the music
on her self
on her longing
for growth
only stars are supposed to explode like this.

not for the others
though they stare
impressively shocked
mindfully drooling
overwhelmed by her unknown
disconnecting disintegration.

she is a movement
she is a self
she is unwinding
her taste for freedom
hemorrhaging out
covering her
covering the night
in gold.

you have to know this feeling
for Dionysus himself watches and laughs.

I always though it ****
the way
your smile would habitually camp out
in the corners of your mouth
savoring an internal enjoyment
you so unconsciously expressed to share

you were new
never before had I met
someone so utterly organic;
so very very glad to be being.


Unknowingly, you have become an aching whisper
at my heart’s troubled door
ever so politely requiring
a long term shelter.

*(your smile now lingers in the parts of me that tingle
and dances alongside only the fondest of new memories.)

Feeling pretty unfulfilled
here’s a cheers to spending that
twenty-second year
over worked and under paid.
Unhappiness disguised as routine
mingling about with bursts of extremes
that I mistake for real living.
The grog, the sweat, the drowning struggle
to conform to that American bill paying drone.

I think in black and white
but I always create in color.
There’s a pounding at the door of reality,
unrelenting, it has claws poisoned with truth.
-- my idealism again,
begging, pleading, swearing up-and-down
that I have to get out--
that there is never a “right time”--
that to change--I have to
and its not a decision this grind can consume.


I sprint through the hallways of my self
hello, again World.
It was all that I needed.
I breathe.


*(I hope this happens a thousand times again)