We used to drink tea together but now you
Talk about coffee breath in the mornings.
I guess I would talk about coffee breath in the mornings too
If my digestive system would forgive me for it.
I try so hard to ignore
This nagging problem that’s been following me around,
But it’s so internalized and so persistent
That even at the best of times
I can’t honestly talk myself into thinking
That I can control it. Whenever I even try—
Whenever I have that cup of coffee in the morning—
I end up in the bathroom
Struggling to somehow
Release the air from the body that I
Can’t even really trust
To get me where I need to go.

Last January,
Almost a year ago now,
My friend read me this poem that she liked
In the blanket fort in my basement.
I don’t remember what it was called
Or who was by
But it was about this guy,
Sort of like a modern-day Sisyphus, I guess,
And his job is to push these rocks
From one side of the road to the other
Endlessly.
Almost every day,
When I walk up that near-endless staircase to my class
And almost every day
When I walk back down knowing I’m about to go
Right back up,
I think about that poem.

Where I need to go is almost always
On the other side of the staircase, and I’ve gotten used
To addressing all of my poems to you.
I guess even if I can’t really empathize with your coffee breath in a literal way
I can understand the feeling of staleness.
Funny, given all the newness of everything around me, but
My body
Has been going through this same war every single day
Just trying to digest the sustenance it needs, and my mind
Hasn’t had much time to feel like it’s done anything
That's not been solely an attempt
To keep the rocks moving
Endlessly.

We sailed counter-clockwise
Through black water and pumpkin sprees,
Dangling footnotes of bookend conversations
The closest thing to clarity in speech--
But we understood the solar flares and the sunspots
And when our bodies sank into dank swampy muck,
There we were in cold moonlight
Naked and shivering and sweet, the whole balance
Of cosmic radiation flung skyward, like
It was all right then, it was all right now, everything is
Like in that movie we watched apart but
Somehow also didn’t, like how the time I tripped
On that drug you were on, my friends and I burnt our fingers
Making stupid fortune cookies
All so contrived, but the morning before the pumpkin sprees
I found a fortune on the ground that didn’t even come from my cookie
So, like it asked me to, I took a chance
And discovered that it wasn’t just my chance to take, cuz
There we were scrubbing our legs in bathroom sinks and showers
Trying to clear the muck away from skin and hair but the dirt
Was so persistent, and the persistence
Was so telling… Regardless
Of how many green globules of antibacterial soap
We squirted onto our legs, the world just wasn’t going to get clean, I mean
The world just lends itself to filth, and sometimes
You have to set the soap down and cry, or walk outside
To see the sunrise
Over the distant hazy hills,
The sunspots and solar flares
All suddenly laughable
Despite their previous profundity.
And even if it wasn’t just my chance to take,
Still,
I’m glad I picked that fortune up off the street and
Read it quietly to myself, standing there with countless
People passing by.

"We cannot step backwards," I said boldly,
venturing back.
My body mirrored yours, two inches away,
both of us with out legs bent just like that
facing the windows, which passed rather plainly
from darkness to daylight.
Your alarm was set for ten-o-clock,
and when it went off, pulling us both into on
I didn't know how to make it quiet,
and so waited for your body to rise,
the obnoxious mechanical chirping
echoing throughout your tiny dorm-room which smelled
sort of like Indian food.
My calves were sweaty
just like my lower-back, and I
worried that the smelly salt water
would soak into your sheets.
When your head hit the pillow again, in that 10:02 light,
you fell almost immediately back to sleep.
Checking my phone for new messages,
I noted the time at 9:02.
Thoughts of subjectivity and farcical transport through time, through
daylight savings time
danced through my head as I waited
through that ethereal hour
until you finally sat up again
at 10:02.

The new blends itself
So inexorably and so imperfectly
To all which is so ******, ultimately:
Skin, blood,
Pricking ***** fingers in 4am closed bedrooms,
All in a testament to some great Being--
A Being that is Being knows what, cuz
It's all just a good acid trip that's too far out on its brink.
A good acid trip still on its brink or just now on its brink or
Brink. Breaking point. Newness inexorable, it is
With too little blood that I ***** my finger, but
Still I will do it, knowing that I cannot step back from this ledge.
The threshold that reality offers
Is often too much for the mind.

Hyperbolic ceiling
Of patternless white paint:
Massive human herd.
Fumbling over itself: a mountain
Climbing, climbing, climbing, the bodies
The zombies
And super-imposed on the moving and falling
Of all of us Sisyphus
Are two faces, one mine
Teeth biting lip
Tongue in throat
Intimately, privately,
Darkness on white space.

“I’m an immensely private person,” Michael said,
His hand clasped in mine, the bodies
Moving across the white skin of his face, too—he
Stuttered—and then he
Stopped—
Remaining.
I nodded as things passed
From blue to red to back; as things
Throbbed, everything so ******,
Blood pulsing
Into my body from his, from

The veins in the ceiling.
Oneness, omphalos, the knife faltered
His
Chest was my chest, like his hand, and I
Felt his inhale,
His lungs my lungs expanding contracting,
The human herd still
Dancing dialectically
In sync with the moving mouths and kissing lips
Of super-imposition.

The perception is unlike mine,
Smooth fingers on bony ****
Third Blue Moon
Top terrace conversations near
Strangers asking for telephone numbers
Receiving denial in a way more powerful
Than ten numbers not typed
In the designated space, yes
We all have designated spaces
Left, right, no
Middle of the road, why
The fascination with labels: at
The third Blue Moon condensation spills
Slightly between glue and paper and glass, re-
Moving of course, the adhesive so
Powerful juggling out on the college green
Shirtless men in short shorts
That phrase evocative in it of itself
Third Blue Moon
Sleep comes bubbling from the depths of

My stomach, so angry the next morning
When everything is quiet
And the light peers in slightly through the windows
To vaguely touch the trashed beer bottles
At the top of that gross pile, their labels
Firmly attached, having dried
Back into place
Over night.

With you on that high sunny hill, the air
Smells like cheap baked goods
Spilling their scent across a whole city block
Through some Dunkin' Donuts kitchen window:
The fierce artificiality of donuts
On a lazy Sunday morning
When all the neighborhood kids come out running
Straight from there beds at 7:30, adorning the early light
And all I want to do, jack-*** eighteen-year-old that I am,
Is sleep. That screeching though, and then
The smell of those baked goods, leeching upstairs,
Having spread here now too like some sort of a plague...
That smell
Wafting up from the donut box, which is now cooling...
The steps
Creak under my each heavy stride, and even
Three cups of coffee later, my smiles at those screeching kids
Are still forced; my donut sits
Heavily in my stomach, like a rock.
Yes, the air smells just like that.
Up there on that hill.
With you.
My stomach hurts, that stone still
Sifting violently through my large intestine.
I take another bite-- that artificiality is so enchanting
That I'll probably have to **** like eight times later.
O, sweet porcelain!
Come to me!