You see I didn't know
What an asparagus plant
Looked like
Until today
And the fact that you
Would understand
My horror
When faced with
That ignorance
Is one of the most
Liberating things
In the world

And even if
All the meaning
We derived
From the other night
Was drug enduced
And maybe mistaken
I still can't wait
To show you
That asparagus plant
And watch your eyes
As they watch me

The last leaf
On the oak tree falls
In the tradition
Of the first
And now the branches
Are bare
And Winter has come
And Ubuntu
Means nothing

Sometimes
I write poems
Instead of learning
Because learning
Too often
Means too much
Of nothing
To me

Syria may be falling-
And though you'll be told
Syria's fall doesn't mean
Yours,
It means a fall
For all of us

And though I never wanted
To understand
Why you hurt yourself-
I understand you
And you
Are so much
Like me.

Her:
“I wrote him a letter
That he never got to read”

Me:
“Well maybe
That's a conversation
You now need to have
With yourself”

To move on
Maybe all
We have to do
Is move
Ourselves

It feels almost
Like nothing happened-
But maybe something did
And maybe
Instead of popping
We're still just exhaling
And that bubble
Is still getting bigger

After my first bubble
Of the evening
Popped,
I entered a new bubble-
One of the countless bubbles
Within the bubble
Of my person.

And, in this bubble,
I was alone
And sitting in the same chair
As before,
Even though the other people
Of the back room
Had melted,
Like the walls were then,
Away from me.

I pondered the bubble
Of my person
And its interactions
With the bubbles
Of everybody else

And I thought
Of my bubble
As threatened
With either merging entirely
With another
Or popping.

I sit in the soil
With a ***** driver,
Too coated in Earth
To ever fix
Anything again,
And I eat a carrot
Taken from the ground
While, like Adam,
Only with modern
Conveniences-
Like ***** drivers-
I wonder about
What would’ve been
If Eve had just
Liked carrots
And not apples

I saw your brother today,
And your mother too-
Your brother waved
And your mother
Pretended she didn't see

I wanted
To get out of my car
And hug them both

But after a little wave
Of my own,
Followed by a sad smile,
I drove away,
I turned up the volume,
And drowned my thoughts
With the kind of music
You would call
White noise

Through the store window
Of time
I watch you
Buying my first books

“I actually knew the author”
Enthusiastic.
“That's nice”
Waiting for her shift to end.
“I loved him”
“That'll be twelve, fourteen”
“He loved me.”

Author distributed
Or self published
Or non-existent
I can count
On at least
One reader

And I walk away
From that store window
And go on another walk.
Your use of the past tense
Had begun
To bother me

I almost kissed you
When I saw you
Yesterday
But then my left-over high
Left me
And I remembered
What I most feared-
So I pulled my chapped lips
Away from yours
And rolled over
In the bed of my mind,
Terrified
That I might one day
Unlearn
All the songs
I'd come to know
By heart

“You've been awfully quiet today”
My father said
“I just have a lot to do”
I replied
“You can go home”
He told me
And I
Almost broke down
In that moment
As I had already done
And as I knew you were doing
Elsewhere
But I simply said
“Okay”
Too afraid to tell him;
Too much
Still looking forward
To a lake side in September-
Or maybe not yet
Understanding
What I had done-
But regardless
Too... something
To tell him
Who might not be coming
To that lake side
In September
Anymore

(“See you Monday”
“See you Monday”
I wish I could still
Say things
Like
"See you Monday")

Even after I make choice,
After I put a decision
Into action
I'm still undecided

It could just be
That the grass is
Always greener-
Or the rain
Always lighter-

But maybe it's
Because
I genuinely made
The wrong choice.

Or maybe not.
Maybe
I should just
Go to bed.

Coming home
I was met
With a slightly different
Reality than the one
I left

Maybe it's because
You can't fix someone
Bent on breaking themselves

Or maybe it's simply
Because I need to
Let the past
Pass

But I just can't spend
Any more time
Avoiding the future

I've been writing poems
In my mind
All day long-
But like the little
Islands of dreams
Lost within the seas
Of my subconscious,
I simply couldn't
Put pen to paper
Before my little life boat,
Carried by the current
Of reality,
Drifted away
From my islands
Of metaphor

I didn't stop
To ask that woman
In that parking lot
Why she was crying.

And with so many
New memories
Floating- like smoke
From the six joints
We rolled-
Through my mind,
I didn't even stare
For very long.

You may have become
Central to my life,
But you haven't
Become an epicenter-
And nor has that woman
Crying
In that parking lot.

All I see in everything
Derives
From within me:
I am my own destruction
My own epicenter-
But also
My own regrowth.

So even if I couldn't
Help that woman crying
She may have helped me.

And so have you.

Within
The moon hits the tree
in such a way
that it's easy to forget
the height;
the ultimate suspension:
eighty feet up
in a harmonic slumber
resting only
on the closest thing
I've found to God:
a single organism
on which two
(or maybe three
now?)
men can rest
and gaze upwards
at the shockingly
finite dance
of the leaves
and the stars--
all the while,
listening to the chorus
of the frogs, owls, coyotes
of the woods around

Without**
After spending a night
without the comforts
of modern man,
in a little green dot
on man's map,
boxed in on all sides,
I emerged
from the forest
to find a man
in a forklift
with a saw--
and at first it seemed
as if he might just
be trimming the branches
but then
the tree fell,
and like man
and his little green boxes,
product of a continually
diminishing temper,
a yard
(or perhaps
a map?)
was left barren

Sometimes I stand
In the middle of the road
And see a car coming
But I don't get out of the way

It's not because
I want to die,
It's because I can't decide
Which way to run-
Left
Or right

I worry that someday
This thing which appears
To her like hesitancy
And to her like dedication
Will leave me crushed
Beneath four tires
A ******
And unrecognizable
Mess of road-****

Sometimes I stand
In the middle of the road
And see a car coming
But I don't get out of the way

It's not because
I want to die,
It's because I can't decide
Which way to run-
Left
Or right

I worry that someday
This thing which appears
To her like hesitancy
And to her like dedication
Will leave me crushed
Beneath four tires
A ******
And unrecognizable
Mess of road-****

I just wish somebody
Would push me
Out of the way but
It doesn't work like that
And so I now have to decide
Left...
Or right?

a snow fell across the land
like stars through the sky,
covering both the ground
and our minds
in a sweeping grey
of uncertainty
and failed attempts
at reconciliation

What could have been me
Floats within the grey mush
Of my mind as two blocks down
Not unhappy tears rush
From your eyes and maybe she
Could finally be free;

Positive and negatively charged
Atoms attract one another
But the metaphor fails time's test
Which always will smother
Any trace of poetic ambition or love
Not hyperbolized or enlarged

Like the sky through which
Meteors fall tonight
But everything is just far
Too polluted with light
For even the brightest to shine
And show me how to stitch

A lost love together again
'Cause it's like a heart upside down
And in order to turn it
All the way, clear around
I'd need energy I don't think
I can muster with my pen

I'm not sure
Whether to fill this first page
With visions of you.
Because even as
Your heartbeats resonate
Within each stroke of my pen,
To love you any longer
Would be like sitting here
Sunbathing under clouds,
Denying myself
The human necessity
Of truth

I drive away
From the front porch
Of my life
And I look back
Across the almost grey
Dying grass of that lawn
And I can't believe
That I ever stood there
Imagining myself in your place

But as my car
Idles in that driveway
Failing to reverse
Out of that old stretch
Of black pavement
Which used to lead to home
I picture myself

I'm walking across
That raggedy carpet;
Stepping across
That white tiled floor;
Opening up that fridge
And sitting at the dinner table,
Drinking red wine
But then

The gears shift
And I'm turning away
From the only house
You could afford
After your greatest lie
Became a truth

And now
I'm looking towards
A grey horizon:
My life an impossible pattern
Of re-occurring themes:
Yellow lines passing me by,
Stolen grey sweatshirts
Leading me home

And everything
Leading me towards
An uncertain variation
Of present blue

But the road is a loop
And soon
I'm back where I started-
Right back with you
Idling in that driveway
And wondering
How come I couldn't
Have just let
That glass of red wine
Be my last

Sighing slowly I walk
Back into your home
And I lie to you
Like you lied to us because
Across our generations
Lies an entirely
Too plausible
Palindrome

though you don't know it
we both think
of the same thing
when we hear
that song-
that song  that plays
in between glasses
of red wine
(which help
to get you through
your day)

every time
we hear it
i'm reminded
(as i laugh with you;
sip from your glasses
filled with your
red wine)
that you're

an *******

and i'm sorry
that this wasn't
what you wanted-
in fact
i know
that the first time
you heard that song
in the context
that we hear it in now
you were smiling
(the smile
of a man in love)

but when i hear it now
i'm reminded only
of a man out of love
(a man
who has lost everything
but pretends
to have lost nothing)
and i'm sorry
that that man

is you

In this little oasis
Of pizza and donuts
Dinners last
For four hours and
For seven
Glasses of wine.

Nested quietly
Between reality
And fiction,
The lake
Doesn't seem
Quite as polluted
As it really is-
And you can sit around
On your ***
For sixteen hours a day
And still feel productive
Because all you have to do
To be happy here
Is be.

I just hope
That this place
Where I've learned
To be myself
Will never become
The place where I once
Learned to be
The person
I used to be-
I don't want
These long summer days
To ever be past.

I want
An endless future
Of dinners that last
For four hours and
For seven
Glasses of wine.

the last time my mom
didn't see me
on my birthday
was years ago
and i cried
because she couldn't
put up with my dad
for even one day;
not even for a day
that wasn't about them
at all
not even for a day
that was about me

and my mom felt so bad
because she knew i had cried
so she saw me the next year
and the next year
and the next year

but this year
this august first
i encouraged my mom
not to come
because i can't put up
with her and my dad
for even one day;
for even one day
that's not about them at all
not even for one day
that's just about me

I don't want
To break anyone's heart.
And I am
By consequence
Incapable
Of mending my own.

I think I've almost written you
One hundred love poems...

And on this bitter and cold
Night in July
I want to tell you a million things
None of which would be fair to say

I want to say I love you
I want to say I want to hold you forever
I want to say you're the light in my life
But I can't

And I can't ever stop
Writing you love poems
Where I say all the things
That I know I shouldn't say
Because no matter what happens
I can't ever stop loving you

And that's the worst part.
That's the worst part
Because I know-
Even as I'm sitting here
Saying and not feeling
That a relationship is no longer
Best for us
I know-
That I'm going to write you
A hundred more
Love poems

Let's get addicted to cigarettes
Together, darling-
And running too,
Because somehow
When I'm with you
Bettering myself
Is just as fun
As destroying myself

But whether I'm on
My third cigarette
Or my tenth mile;
Regardless of
Whatever leisure drive
We're taking,
Whatever joke
You're making-

Let's be together

For that drive, that cigarette
That run, that joke
Because I love sitting beside you
And hearing your laugh;
Seeing your smile:
You bring out the best in me-
Even when we're focusing on
Cigarettes
Instead of running

I used to think that I loved you for
your near-perfection...
But there was just something about
the two of us
Our love was ingenuine, and later,
we realized, impossible

Ironically, it's been the revelations
of your imperfection
That have, I think, made it possible,
for the first time
For us to love- not that we ever
will, not that we ever should
Because, let's face it, it would
probably be awful, it's just-
It's just that your imperfections
Have allowed me to see, once again
Though so much more truly this
time
The possibility of you and of I

So let's get addicted to cigarettes
together, darling
And running, too
In a supreme dialectic of destroying
ourselves from within
While struggling to better ourselves
from without
Something that may be, I think
The ultimate story of ourselves

(Or at least of myself-
I wonder why
I've only ever been truly drawn to
people
By their brokenness...

But perhaps it's better
Not to think about it.)

These people seem
Like a vision of a past
That has yet to
Have elapsed.

All these awful singers
With their songs-
A sick attempt
At righting their wrongs:

They pray to a god
That's so far above
And not to the lake
For it's unworthy of

Prayer
Has guided them so far away
From all of this God
That's truly here to stay

Unless we destroy it
In a war.
Ask your God-
What that would be for.

He won't have an answer.
Because unlike this lake

He dies with you.

the word home
as defined
by a magic eight ball:

try again later

I am equally as invigorated
By the temperance
Of modern convenience
And the dominance of nature
As I am terrified
Of total dependence
Of modern man
On everything electric

The summer camp
Isn't what you love-
It's the trees
And the acceptance
That you don't find
Back home
Because back home
The air is filled
With too many chemicals
For anyone
To really accept anyone else

Because instead of
An occasional reminder
It's constant awareness
That we
Are the problem

So come here and pray
To your fictional gods
But know
That if there were a god
It wouldn't have created
Beings capable
Of only finding solace
In something so untrue
To the reality
Of themselves

I didn't even think about it.

My metaphorical
All-encompassing
Grey mist of time
And uncertainty
Was literally there tonight
Clouding the moon
And the hills
And the present

But I didn't even think about it
Beyond appreciating its beauty
I didn't notice
That my favorite metaphor
Had shown itself to me

Perhaps I've become less scared
Of all the meaning
In that grey mist

Or perhaps
I simply still struggle
To find the truth
In all my fiction.

I like reading old poems
And thinking
About how I'm different
Even though I'm still the same:
Just a four-year-old
Trapped in the body
Of someone who now has to try
To act like an adult
And sometimes
Messes up the charade

“It's all about consistency”
I said one year ago
As I walked into the same room
And put my suitcase on the same bed
As the last time the two of us
Had visited that
Remnant of childhood

My best friend from forever ago
Gave a silent nod
And followed my direction
Returning passively
To the bed opposite me

Now that bed
Is empty
Because he gave up trying
To make the past present;
Gave up trying
To be friends

But I still sit
In the same bed anyway
Because
“It's all about consistency”

A year later
The smell of black coffee
Will still remind me
Of a sad morning
Spent at Lake Erie
Hiding silent
Beneath blankets and books
And sitting across from a girl
I never quite
Got done loving

Embracing for the first time
Our ultimate future
And disdaining for the first time
Our previously unshakable present
We sipped idly at our coffee
And dared not look up
From the pages of the fictional
Forever
That we had created-
Trying unsuccessfully
To worm that ephemeral truth
Out of our minds

That wolf we saw
On the pavement
Used the stairs
To escape our gazes
Having adapted
Slowly and sadly
To a world
Designed and created
By the hand of man

The way it ran
Suggested an understanding
That what had forced it
Out of the forest,
Onto that black reminder
Of total human *******,
In search of food scraps
Wrapped in styrofoam
Was staring straight at it

Maybe that wolf resented
Its inability
To dominate the world
With suits and pavement
But maybe not.
I hope not.

Sitting on that
****** excuse for a bed
I dreamt of a world
In four dimensions.

A world in which
Every version of ourselves
That had ever sat
And would ever sit
On that bed
Were there with us then.

And I heard and felt your
Hundred different
Heart beats
From those hundred
Different moments

I felt all of your life
And pure energy
Pulsing into the hundred
Different versions of myself
And suddenly
I understood
Why the heart
Is such a powerful metaphor
For love

Of course there were
Two hundred different laughs too-
Four hundred kissing lips,
A thousand
Whispered secrets.

But then slowly
All those different versions
Of ourselves
That had ever sat
And would ever sit
On that bed
Filtered out
In the order
In which they came in
Until eventually
Just the two of us
Were left

I was unsurprised
By the lack
Of future selves
But that didn't mean
The fact didn't dig into my skin
And make my heart beat
A little quicker;
A littler more urgent.

It's that electric hum
In an almost consistent rhythm
Buzzing through the speakers
Of smart phones
And souls
That makes people **** themselves

Because you want so badly
Just to talk
But then comes
That moment
When you realize
The other line
Isn't going to pick up

So you keep waiting there
Listening
To that electric hum
Still begging for an answer

And then maybe
You leave a voice mail
Knowing full well
Nobody will ever
Listen

And then maybe
You call the next week
Or the next day, even
Occasionally convincing yourself
Someone has picked up
Only to be crushed
By the next
Blaring
Ring

A world without love
Sounds at first
Like a dark and terrible place-
Probably because
It would be.

I don't really want
To live in that world.
But sometimes it's nice
To think
That maybe
Somewhere in the universe
On a world without love
No longer having *** with someone-
What we here in the world
Where love exists
Would call
Breaking up-
Would never mean
Loosing your best friend

So cheers to all the aliens
That reproduce on assembly lines
And go home to empty houses
But cheers to us humans too
Because we put up
With the promise of sadness
For the promise of joy
No matter how misguided
That thought process
May be.

Welcome to the
United
States of America

Where a person of a different color
Can be killed
Because he looks at someone
The wrong way
And the courts
Barely raise an eyebrow

Where we can elect
A President George W. Bush
And then have everyone who stole
Those Bush yard signs
In 2000 and 2004
Vote for Bush 2.0
Because his only competition
Is some Massachusetts governor
With a stick pushing
So far up his ***
That he thinks
It's still 1800

Where the Supreme Court says
The age of racial discrimination
Has passed
Just cause we got ourselves
A black president now
That half the country
Wants to see dead
Like that word United
Which America
Thinks it used to be

The sun set
Out my window-
Its light bounced
Off your eye lashes,
Your *******,
And my warm blankets
Into my eyes

I thought I wore nothing but my watch
As we made love
And I saw you checking the time,
Just seeing
How long we had left

But I noticed later that

(“If a train came right now
Would you get out of the way?”
We were in the woods
Standing on this quiet railroad track
Where the birds chirped loudly,
Annoyingly unaware of the silence
We required.
We hadn't spoken
For several minutes
And I had been thinking about this
For a while
As we stood staring straight ahead
Both of us half hoping...

My answer came quickly:
“Yes.”

You turned and walked away
Unable to face
The most fundamental difference
Between us,
Laid out so blatantly.)

I had preemptively worn a moment
That day
As well.

I think it was the water
Coming in
And going out-
Never pausing
Never faltering
Just an endless
And perfect
Procession

Yes,
I believe it was the water
That drew us in.

It was cloudy
That day we took our
Swan dive
That day we made our
Cliff jump
And the waves
Just splashed and roared
Beneath us...
Above us:
Just daring us...

To plummet
Through that icey water;
Abandon
Both our fear of time
And our fear of ourselves

Oh it was certainly the water
That let me find her
And it was certainly the water
That gave her reason
To find me

Of course
It was also the water
That allowed me to betray her
And her to betray me

It was the water
That allowed us
To strip one another's humanity away
And leave each other trapped
Amidst that terribly consistent roaring
Forever

The water is thick
And I realize I’m standing in blood
And I wonder
How I let this happen
How I let this happen
How we let this happen
How can I stop this
I can’t
But I feel like I’m trying
Because I see the lie
I see the red hue in this cloudy water
I see the red blue.

We’ve come so far
From what we used to be
And nobody feels it.
Nobody has felt
The Earth shifting on its axis
The skies falling into the moon.

You can’t look out at all this corn
That’s not feeding you
And talk about the fields and the trees
In terms of order and reason
Because it’s all beyond your control
Even though it looks like
Permanence

It is unsustainable.
And something in the back of your mind
Whispers with society’s breath:
“All the trees will miss you
But will you even remember
To miss the trees?”

“Calm down,” they all say,
“Forget the red hue
Forget the red blue
That’s just water
That’s all we’re swimming through
Forget everything
You ever knew”
Remember that moment?

Do you remember that moment?
When you were a kid?
And you asked where your food came from?
And you were…
Just…
Horrified?
But you got past it.
You got past it of course
Because we all forget;
Because that’s what we’ve been
Allowing ourselves to do
For centuries
And centuries
Of falling into the moon
Which is falling into the sea
Which in fifty years more
Will be higher
Than all New Orleans.

I speak with such a call to action but
I can't make it blue.
I can't remove
The red hue
I know that
I know this
To be true
To be true
To be true
What must
We
Do?

That deepest blue
Cannot come
Just from saying

The word

Green.

I felt the three-dimensionality of space
Independently
From time
And the pull between all things

As the earth goddess spoke to me
In the basement of a girl I used to love
I sat alone just feeling
And imagining complex thought

Not immune from reality
But simply
Independent
Of all that's real and painful and unbearably true

Three dimensions,
Bound inseparably to time,
Closing in

The noise from the back room
Filters to the front
Flowing up the stairs
Seamlessly through the air
Passing from the actors
To the watchers
And eventually
Towards her ears.

For those in the back room
It can be both imagined
That she will hear
And believed
That she will not

So on that paradoxical duality
The actors settle.

They place their faith,
Their religion,
Their belief
On contradiction

As they must.

But of course
When believing in a future,
If an actor
Or when hoping for a future,
If a watcher
Those in the back room
Are quite often wrong

Maybe
She will hear
And maybe
She will know forever
What the actors did
And what the watchers watched
And the god with a lower-case 'g' knows
It will **** her

But as long as those acting in the back room
Believe
And as long as those watching in the back room
Hope

No harm
Will come
To
Them.

Inside drifts out
Spilling noise
And sometimes silence
Out your door
Which won’t be your door
In two more months…

Your eyes dance
With sad smiles
And you don’t hide
From your brokenness

Which makes the girl who you love
All the more
Worth loving.

She understands brokenness-
That girl who’s lying in your bed
Waiting for you to join her
Behind counters full of empty bottles
And hallways full of empty moments

That girl understands brokenness
More than anyone
I’ve ever met
And it’s so refreshing
Because rather than make me feel
As though everyone is broken
It makes me feel
As though everyone
Is capable
Of being unbroken.

I like knowing
That you and that girl
Wear your preemptive nostalgia
With no fear of judgment

It makes me,
A person full of preemptive nostalgia,
Feel welcome
And home.