I'm in Alex's kitchen alone
trying to make black and white
out of the most daunting grey
I've ever seen. I know
categories are pretty but I'm
so sleep deprived, I

As your hands became my hands
and your breath my breath--
as sweat poured down my forehead in a profoundly
passionate yet hauntingly animalistic way,
I had a memory of three years from now:
our dehydrated and smiling lips kiss again
in front of the bar where we just got tipsy,
creating our own cacophony of laughter.
Whispering goodbye even as our fingertips
(which are still the same fingertips) whisper hello,
I look towards Athens and you
towards whatever life you're leading. "Sorry" I say,
and you: "It's fine." And it is.

A train howls through the distant summer
again tonight. Eighteen years now
I've spent lying in this bed and how
can I not yet place that howl to
any track other than Howl
by Allen Ginberg, still resting on my nightstand,
its sentiment about alarm clocks one wrong
(all mine are broken and
there it is again, chugging along
through the darkness that dances) simply because I
cannot see it?

I wonder whether you'd be falling for me if you knew
how crumpled my body is
from taking that plunge.

I had my arm in a cast once, and
when it was removed the skin there was dry
and pale, and there were these
discolored dead patches of skin that
incessantly refused to wash off in the shower that night.
It took me over a week
to regain my full range of motion.

Now, I think this cast has been removed. And
I swear to you, I'm trying. Keep falling.
I will do my best to catch you, I just hope I
have my full range of motion back
by the time you reach me.

And then I too
am part of the silence
that casts its post-sunset stillness
throughout this swamp white oak's great spread.

It seems as though even the hive of honeybees
and the nearby nest of baby birds
have stopped to admire
the feeling of the world
tilting on its axis; sinking through space.
We all gaze further upwards,
those bees and birds and I.
And nestled in the remaining twigs above,
is the shockingly finite dance
of the leaves... of the stars.

The shadows that hang from the top-most branches
cast their way down around me
and coat their way all over the ground, making it
easy to forget the height—
the ultimate suspension. Because
born within my skin
is a swamp white oak,
stretching its branches through the
grey matter in my mind,
over-taking and over-whelming.
At the end of it all is me:
a tiny little acorn laid
by an impossible evolution
of people into trees.

Every cell becomes leaf and
the heart a listening ear. Amongst
the chorus of the frogs,
the owls, the coyotes—
the chorus of the woods around—
is that shift
so revered.
The shift of the Earth.
The Earth tilting
on its axis.
It’s time to admit that the maps and
man’s little green boxes there,
are nothing but products
of a continually
diminishing temper... showing
that when this swamp white falls,
it won’t just be a wood
that’s finally left barren.
It won't just be a body
left emptied and charred.

Please, I think, as the bark gets flimsier
and flimsier
beneath my feet. As the wind gets fiercer
and fiercer
howling in my ears. *Please. Let this lone acorn
standing here
sprout into something.
Let a swamp white oak
be seen.

The Earth dripped in through your body,
and there in you was the third fire, it
also about to fade, and me
also on its shore: subconscious and surreptitiously
begging those embers (smoking and cracking) to be
so much more than they ever were
in the form of a flame. Your thoughts
came out in poetry, dear. It was the way
those decomposers crept around
your frontal lobe that seemed
to say: “Remain. Smoking and cracking,
subconscious and ******.”

Sooner or later the world of clip-on bow-ties and bodies
will crumble—the society and class so high
that their calves'll give out and they'll stumble
through the blue T.V. screen light. They'll fall,
laughing and crying, on my carpeted basement floor.
And then, in a little moment of weakness,
light pouring in through too poorly closed blinds and
lips so close that those tiny little hairs brush,
we’ll all know
that that last hug goodbye
feigned its insincerity.

‘I hope I get addicted to cigarettes,’ I remember thinking.
‘What if I’m falling in love with her,’ I remember
just loud enough that she, through the window-pane,
could hear. Can hear. The Earth
dripped in through her body, the Earth
drips in through your body, semantics don't matter though
because here it is. And I
(Smoking and cracking.
Subconscious and ******.)
am still sitting here, on the shore of this third burnt-out fire. I’m focusing
my breath with my fingers,
not allowing myself to hope, but still waiting.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about
gasoline. (The Earth dripped in.)

My drug addict cousin
didn't show up to our family dinner tonight.
My uncle drove around the block in circles,
I think hoping that she'd gotten lost. But unfortunately
she'd gotten too far lost for the easy resolution
of a trip around the block.
Her name is Hannah. It's a palindrome,
I explained to my mom. It reads the same
front to back as back to front. There's darkness
on either end, and some people call the middle part
light. My uncle is like
the stereotypical cool uncle, always
telling jokes, making puns, but
he didn't even smile tonight, and instead of "knock knock"
it  was "well I guess I see who's there, and they punched
me in the ******* face." It would be better described
as a faint red glow, that middle part. Life. A candle
burning on both ends, palindromically pulsing
from 'H's to 'N's. And my uncle,
left dealing with the puddle of wax.