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

My mom welcomes me in from the cold fall air
With a plate of home-made french toast-
Maple syrup pouring like the lies I tell her;
Powdered sugar, the dots of truth I work in
When it's convenient to do so

The smell of *****, spilled
On that place on my jeans beneath which
I have tattooed every moment spent without her,
Is masked by the batter of a sleep-deprived morning
When all I want to do is go to my mom
With all the problems she doesn't even know I have

Over that breakfast of laughs and warm family smiles,
And over a warm cup of tea to get me passed my hangover,
She asks me all about my night that didn't happen
And I continue to paint for her
The lie I don't even really remember first telling.

And when I opened my eyes, the whole
of the night sky was white-washed—even one hundred
and five miles wasn’t enough to keep the lights
of metropolitan Columbus from blocking out
the stars. In my drunkenness, there lying
by the lakeside, I perceived the three-dimensionality
of space, and at first, I was awestruck by that vision,
but then one of the stars started shooting, as the astronomers
had predicted, and with my mouth still wide open, I realized
that the shooting star was just a moth, and not
the dust of a comet. The three-dimensional vision I’d perceived
an illusion, the picture dissolved, and there I was
again basking in the two-dimensional darkness
that even one hundred and five miles couldn’t make black.

How vividly the memory of your lips
Struck me in that cave of ice
As if one of those stalactites,
Frozen in perpetual motion,
Had thawed just enough to crack and fall
Directly down.
It didn't need to fall though, it's fall was implicit
And as you held me there, pressing my back
To where the ice met the stone I realized
That's where we were, too-
Trapped in the ambiguity of permanence meeting
Utmost transience.

The waterfall melted around us
And each second we spent
In the starkly unstable cave hidden behind it
Was a risk then uncalculated.
With the eruption
Cascading in the quietest places of memory
We willed the thaw, really,
Begging 'let it drown us;
Let all the ice melt and let it
Pull us under and from to river
To our corpse floating through the ocean,
Let it pull
All away
From the stone.'

I stared at an old tire swing
Thinking that even when we grow up and forget
The playgrounds of childhood remain

Then I walked a little bit south though
And found the playground
I used to go to with my Dad
Torn down,
Replaced with a field

It's okay though
Because for a long time
Those happy memories were just like the pasta
In the back of my friend's car
Rotting away
But never smelling bad enough
To actually clean up

We don't have to roll down the windows
When we drive anymore;
The smell is gone,
The playground's gone
And we can finally let ourselves be warm
If a little bit sadder

If I ever get addicted to cigarettes,
it will be because of you, Mike—
the screenwriter and smoker from Miami who I met
amidst the gentle crashing of the calm waves. It’s not
that I needed to smoke to accent the stars,
already so powerful in their summer sky without haze, but
I did need the smoke to accent you, Mike, to
hear about the time you climbed a mountain
where the air was so cold and the wind so fierce
that in your tent, your body created an atmosphere
dialectical in its warmth and surreal rain. When I
cough up phlegm in the morning, I’ll be thinking of you, Mike,
and as that brownish yellow glob slides
down the thin metal drain, I know I’ll think
that if I get addicted to cigarettes
because of you, Mike,
then it won’t be such a bad thing.

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.

"Come exploring with me, darling
Let's fall in love
By the side of a man-made lake
Which man has lost to time"

Letting gravity take us to its floor
I looked in your eyes
And you looked in mine
But the glances we exchanged
Were radically different somehow

"Hold my hand as I fall asleep
And remind me in the morning
Of how bad my lips tasted
So we can laugh about it
All afternoon"

Lying in that cozy little nest
I was off and on hard through the night
Never really knowing how hard,
As our bodies pressed together,
You were trying to love me too

"Let's ride our bikes
Still through that thunderstorm
Which somehow in all the time that's gone by
Has never ceased to rain."

Even as a writer,  the real world
Often seems too well described by metaphor
(You wrote on cotton candy clouds
"Rain, rain, go away
Come again
Tomorrow")

"And we can stay up late
Rolling joints; smoking six
Remembering all the things"
Through vastly different lenses
"That of course we could never forget"

I was so high that night
That I don't even remember all that happened
So I kind of hope I kissed you
Just to know I kissed you once
Not thinking it was a last kiss

"Maybe someday,
When the sun rises in the window,
We'll know that at the next sunrise
We'll both still be in that bed
Smoking joints and kissing
And falling even further
Into love."

I miss you
On mornings like this one.

"Come exploring with me, darling..."

For almost two years we’ve been sitting on a conveyor belt
Heading straight for the potato peeler, which will
Slice right through our thickened skins and puncture our vitals;
A cold cruel machine designed to sit
In industrial kitchens
Waiting for Sodexo’s next batch.

But we—
We’re from the farmer’s market and we are not
Four inches in diameter and six inches in length.
We are clunky. We are knobbled. We are
Purpleyellow and we are waterysweet.
We are not
Iowabland or a poem of rhyming couplets, yeah
We are free verse and we

Had *** because we’re friends.
Or maybe because
We love each other
In one way or another.
Or maybe because we’re lost
Or maybe all of the above, yeah—I don’t know, I just know

The potato peeler won’t accept us for a second.
That mechanical grip, slicing slicing slicing,
A fumbling tumbling in countless browntowhite progression,
It won't accept
Our color, our flavor, our beautiful swirling eyes,
And for a while I didn't either.
But whether we have two more months on the belt or twenty years,
I know that our knobbled progression to nowhere
Will have been one of everywhere.

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

At the top floor of the skyscraper that touches the sun
A man sits with his bourbon in hand, looking out over his creation:
The world in which people shine like glass

Something in that dark yellow of the bourbon reminds the man
Of that time he saw the world’s last tree
Twenty year before it fell.

It was when he was still young and naïve,
His visions of eternal life and glass people,
Still on the brink.

Some instinctual twitch in the back of his brain,
Passed down from the apes, guided him to climb it
But the first branches were too high
And so he cried,
Like a child who cries after stubbing his toe.

It’s while he’s still thinking
Of that first and only time
Seeing a tree beyond a screen
That the man takes his final sip of bourbon,
Though the glass is still half-full.

With the first gunshot in two thousand years,
The bourbon drops to the floor and
Shatters

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 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.)

We biked to the market
For too-much ice cream
And hot afternoons

We drove to a parking lot
For a couple joints of ****
And impossibly late
Evenings

We exchanged
Cheesy compliments
In my mother’s basement
Just before your first kiss
(Our first kiss)

We flattered each other
With beautiful poems
And genuine emotion
Just before
We finally kissed again

We picked flowers
From the garden
By the middle school
Becoming best friends

We picked basil
From the garden
In my back yard
Not knowing
What we were becoming

But regardless
Of whether we never
Get off our bikes
Or go upstairs
Or head back indoors
I’ll be happy
To be with you

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.

The fan spins
So quickly overhead
That the whole thing
Shakes and wobbles
As I,
In between blinks
That are more like naps-
Telling of a sleepless night-
Sip at my third cup of tea
Which threatens
To burn
My lips, my hands, my tongue-
But I think
Too much in metaphor
And if it hurt
As much physically
To kiss someone
Or hold someone's hand
As it would emotionally
Then maybe
I'd learn more quickly
The things that are
Truly bad for me...
But after another sip
I know that the threats of burns
Were empty so
I continue
To lay on this couch
And sip my tea,
And think about sleeping,
And wonder idly; carelessly
Whether that fan,
Which shakes in a chaos
Contained by the stability
Of the surrounding stone walls,
Will come
Crashing down

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.)

As we slept
In each other’s minds
Through the night,
Fearing commitment
Equally as much
As striving for it,
I kissed you
Thinking that maybe
I’d let myself pretend,
Having finally uncorked
That bottle of wine,
All hesitancies
Had disappeared

But I tried to kiss you
Again in the morning,
Thinking
As I think now
That if it may be
Our last chance
I want to take it:
I want to swing dance
Through thunderstorms
And sip our wine
With nothing
But the certainty
Of one another

But you pretended
Not to notice
My eyes meeting yours,
And filled
With all the reservations
That should have been in me,
You averted your gaze
And walked away
(As I still worry
You will one day)
From that surreal bed
Of whispers
And fewer tears

Though I’ve been ready for bed
Since the moment I woke up
I take one more sip
Of ****** sangria

One more “drag”-
As I’ve been taught to call it
By the older, cooler, kids
Who take a lot more drags
Than myself-
On a cheap cigarette

One more kiss
On one more set of lips

And one more fleeting thought
That maybe it’s all just part of
A single careless search
For the set of lips that kisses back;
A search with no regard for
Whatever face to which those lips
Could be mounted...

Though I know that’s not true-
As I finally
Close my eyes,
I know (I think)
That’s simply
Just not true

The dishwasher isn’t running
So I can’t clean these mugs for our tea.
I try to just use the ***** ones
But the moment of grand illusion,
In which seem like the stove might just light,
Is passing and the water just sits there
Awaiting that spark to boil.

Long after the moment passes, the gas still rushes out
With this rapid clicking sound that makes my whole body
Flinch in its rhythm.
I’m thinking: don’t clean them by hand,
Don’t go get a match.
But I can’t keep my feet
From dragging across this too-smooth
Tile kitchen floor,
To the sink,
To the cupboard.

It doesn’t matter though,
Because by the time everything’s set and ready
The water’s all gone- spilled across the floor.
I don’t notice. Even as the water
Seeps into my socks
I light the burner with the match;
Nothing for it to boil.
Sitting pointlessly on the flame,
The teakettle slowly starts to melt.
I watch that glowing red iron drip towards the flame
And slowly the dampness on the bottoms of my feet
Starts to hit me.

Ash from two cigarettes on the stone pylon beneath my feet,
I **** yellowbrown into the Hocking.
My stream meets the river on a riptide,
Carefully crafted from the funneled remnants
Of melted snow and torrential rain
Just to give off the illusion of chaos.
Forms of spectacular watermotion grace the noonday clouds,
And despite their haste, too high on molly,
There’s something hanging in the stillness beneath the mudbrown surface—
Some epiphanic moment that rapidity and angerwaves
Refuse to force out of sight; some
Strand of smoke, still floating upwards from the dampened cigarette ash
Abandoned twelve hours prior; some
Slurred-drunken word, tinged anyways with meaning.

The lips I kissed after climbing back onto the bridge the night before
Proved to be less than irrelevant (screaming later, as they did, someone else’s name
While I lay listening, still half thinking that
Maybe she’d just gone upstairs for some floss). But
The fact that there were lips there at all,
In the rain
Under the stars
Over the Hocking
Issuing with reverence the words “magical” and “perfect”
Through the darkness of the night and the echoes of Joni Mitchell’s voice…
It’s something worth noting, despite the angerwaves;
Something worth feeling
Despite the noonday clouds and dampened ash.

Now that I’ve screamed at the river and ****** on it with a harshlaugh,
I think I can also
Find a moment to give it thanks.
Because I’m off the pylon now.
I’m back on the bridge. And I’m walking South
With the flow of the Hocking, back into Athens.
And I am finally
(The rain beating against my face, my clothes, my mind)
So very here.

To Hushpuppy in the Bathtub
I’m sorry
That the best I can do
Is offer a meager apology
And say
“I’ll remember you”

I’m just a rich white boy
In the depths of corporate America
And my lone voice shouting out your name
In the cacophony of passing cars
Might not make it very far
But I’ll try anyway, Hushpuppy

I wrote you love poems
In a pink sharpie because
I was falling in love with you,
And the more I listen to this song
(Sixty four times tonight),
I think that it isn’t fading
Like the chords she played
As I held you
And as we swayed

I wrote you love poems
In pink sharpie
Not thinking of you
But thinking instead
That the four shots of *****
Maybe made it okay
For me to kiss you

I wrote you love poems
In a pink sharpie
And then I threw the love poems
In the trash,
Not drunk enough to forget
That showing you
Might make you cry

Those love poems
That I wrote in pink sharpie
Came out of the trash this morning though
Because somehow
I thought a few tears
Might make everything better

"Hello Olivia,"
My fountain pen
Drunkenly demonstrated
In my dad's kitchen,
Which the girl who sat
Behind me in math class,
Carefully collecting lists
Of favorite words
(Penultimate; ephemeral),
Cautiously observed
Was not my kitchen too

I step naked into the scalding shower
And almost instantly the dreams,
Which haunted my sleep the previous night,
Rise up with the steam,
Leaving behind a half-sadness
Reminiscent of the first frost, quick to melt,
Glistening and sparkling beyond the window-pane

Like frost turned to dampness of Earth
Are the footprints left on the bathroom floor
And the beads of water trapped in ***** hair
Begging as dreams do, to be remembered
Even as, inevitably,
They fade

The preacher turns to a clear blue sky
And begs for an end to the snow

We're all just scar-tissue of scar-tissue
By the end

Sitting on your back porch
My jaw began to hurt
Because I'd been smiling so much-
And I wondered how,
As a cold front blew through
Our dismal state and world,
We managed
To find such happiness
In one another

I heard you say
"I love you" tonight
For the first time in months
Lying in my bed
And pressing the recorded ghost of you
Harshly to my ear

But the memory of that grand perfection
Captured in your voicemail
Is more or less a façade
For when I could actually reply
Somehow things never seemed to go
Quite as smoothly

I almost cried tonight
Mostly out of habit

I almost said "I love you too"
Mostly...

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

Stainless steel **** spills
Out of my ****
As I hold my breath in restraint
Trying, failing to prevent my mind
From circling back in ******
To its constant

I drew a Baoboa tree tonight
And had the drunken thought that
If trees could bleed
There wouldn't be
Any more hate

I'm sorry that liquor
Always brings me back here
To sleep
Under a Baoboa tree

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.

The basil plant
In the window
Was dead
When we arrived
And I'm not sure
At what point
It was replaced
But over a glass of wine
I realized
That it was again
Leafy
And full

Every moment
Tattoos a web
Of ink
In the deepest
Seas of my mind
Floating like oil
And only in sleep
Can I dive
And swim
Edit
And undo
Until
Waking up
I'm once again
Just on the shore
Looking out,
The Great Pacific
Garbage Patch
On my eyes,
Helpless
To do anything
But keep walking,
Crossing countless grains
Of sand
Serving to keep my body
On the Earth
And imagining itself
Out in the sea
Sinking-
Pulled
By the weight of the ink
The past
The trash

We stood on Lake Erie while the sunset
exploded in the sky to someone's East,
and a storm system blew violently
though ours. There was such a contrast
between the two halves of the sky: one
illuminated with orange and red
and hot pink, and one black, dark,
and foreboding. The ice
was half-melted, and under our feet
was a shallow pool of water. Whenever
the wind blew, it looked as if the water
was rushing towards us, trying to grab us,
looking to pull us under
through the cracks.

I'd dreaded going to Lake Erie that day.
But the journey was good, sitting in my car,
playing soft music and talking. The destination
was good too, with it's opposite skies.
The only rough part
was the trip home.

Sometimes in fleeting moments,
Usually after you’d been drinking,
And often during those quiet, dark nights
When we’d lye in bed together,
Hands tracing only absence
On one another’s skin,
You’d look at me in this sort of
Fantastical way.

For me, it was always sort of like
Looking out at the ocean
And thinking for a second that you’re seeing
Infinite blue,
Though it’s really just the color of the sky
Reflected.

Even then, in those transient instants
Of eyes meeting for a second too long,
I’d sometimes think just that I’d miss you
As the subject of my poems.

Then the ice storm came.

The slickness of the roads kept me from you
Days before the storm and days after it,
Such that the sharpie and permanence,
With which I once marked the potential for our love,
Is faded now too.

My heart is a million different places, pieces;
A million different people,
Subdivided like America
To its breaking point.

But I brought my pen in from the car today
And the ink is thawing now
Despite the fact that the next love poem it writes
Will be for someone else
(Which is okay-
I think I’m okay.)

I color in between the lines
A darkened circle on a
Standardized scantron
Like the other numbers in the room
Wasting my life
With every stroke of breaking led

I color in a circle on a scantron
But I'm really coloring in
To America's capitalism
To the capitalism that acts as God-
The “Invisible Hand” made visible
By McDonalds and Burger King;
By my father's law firm
And the rest of the world

In coloring in this little circle
I'm coloring in myself
Marking myself
Right or wrong
Form 32A or Form 32B
98th percentile or 95th

And as I become applicant
Number 8574
I realize
I've become unable
To do anything
For the person
Beyond the number

After my parents got divorced
My dad moved into this tiny, ****** house
On Sunset Drive.
After a few years there, he decided
It wasn't yet his time to live on Sunset Drive
And so he moved again.
But that house still stands there
And each time I drive by
I try to reconstruct a home within my mind
That is within those four falls.
The exterior is the same, so in this reconstruction
The interior is too--
A shaggy carpet in the hallways,
A bunk-bed in the room looking out at the maple tree,
And a garden out back, exploding with tomatoes.
Of course, there might be tile in the hallways.
A couch in that room once mine.
And just a few lonely cabbages in the garden.

In each variation of the past
I have tried to find a home,
But home has moved with me.
Within old walls
Is new furniture.

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.

We sat at the melted granite counter
And your hair glowed a reddish-orange
In the light outside of the darkness.

You held my hand and you blew bubbles
As I laughed, as I cried
As you laughed, as you laughed.

I told you I'd misunderstood you,
The playful little spirit hiding
Under the layers that popped that night.

Your eyes, all to meet mine,
Looked up in an inimitable way
From your bubbles, now overflowing
Onto old drawings made by strangers.

You gave me the kind of moment
I can write books about
And poems too.

Thank you so much for holding my hands
That night and every night;
You kept those hands from popping
Like the bubbles did.

The fire-light flickered on your face
And reflected off your tears.
You were staring at our father with two police officers at your side
And the world in fast-motion.

Dad handled it well
And the officers left quickly
But the light from the fire flickered
On my face as well
And only eight years after I grabbed my stuffed animals
And retreated to a friend's house,
Too horrified to spend the night under the same roof with you,
It might as well be me
Standing on display by the fire.

That light's still flickering,
The world is still in fast-motion and even though
Your hair is irrevocably not as blonde as it used to be
(And so is mine)
That doesn't mean it won't still
Lighten up in the summer-time.

I was written over
Again and again until
When the pen
Ran out of ink
I was simply stabbed instead
With the dull ball-point
Forming a scar;
A sideways eight
Like my sideways heart
Scratched across the skin
Of every moment
I can never un-wear

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.

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!

The moon swallowed me whole that night
Walking between house parties at 3am,
And as the **** finally began to wear off
I was confronted with a harsh
Glimpse of sobriety: sitting
In my mom’s kitchen
Where my ex-girlfriend pierces my ears
And wondering
What color the walls used to be. Or standing
Alone on a New York City subway
Too afraid to ask the fat man gripping the pole next to me
Whether I'd yet veered off course. Or waiting in streetlight
Tired, exhausted, ready for bed,
Outside the first concert I ever went to
For my friend's grandma to pick us up. Or dipping
A cookie in coffee this afternoon and remembering the night
I drove straight into a train and ended up in hell.
It was that sort of glimpse.

We always thought
That the post-war generation
Might actually
See the end of war
But here we are
Riding the waves
Of two world wars
And I sit
On a front porch swing
Watching kids
Ride by on bikes
And thinking that their smiles
Might be as ephemeral
As the war
That will end the world

And after my country strikes,
A move it has to make
In this apocalyptic
Game of chess,
I'll just pray
To gods I don't believe in
That whoever is drafted
In my place
(Maybe one of these boys
On their bikes)
Runs and joins me
In Canada
Rather than fight
The Russians for Israel in Syria
In corporate America's
Name

Unmelted candle wax
From two hundred melted candles
Litters a granite counter top
The metaphorical resonances of which
Were lost three weeks ago
When the counter swam like water
In hallucinogenic bliss,
As through knowing each other more, not less,
We fell finally all the way out of the love
Which once seemed so much more solid
Than water

the stars exploded across every plane
of space, and there we were
below it, within it, holding
each other the way we would've liked to
a year prior when we tripped into somethin' like love
and before we'd tripped
on mushrooms together and before
everything, but now I finally know it's after, cuz
what's here with me now
is swirling-- the asphalt,
so often stepped on and so rarely
seen. until we collapsed
onto the curb with our
pillows and blankets to look down. to realize
that it had always been like that, but
we just hadn't stopped all our ******* long enough
to see how beautiful something so consistent and everyday
really was, and when we lit
those lanterns into the sky, how could there have been
a wish between the two of us other than
to remember that haunting, beautiful, swirling asphalt? and how
could I have ever wished
anything else? the lanterns float
magically into the sky carrying that wish, and we're still
sitting on the curb together, giggling and staring
down at the asphalt.

I wanna keep dancing on your stage
Please don't turn off the lights
Please don't go home quite yet
Because I've missed these notes you play
And I've missed
Each one of you
The drummer, the singer, the bassist...

Sometimes I'm just sitting in school
Thinking of those somehow long-
Passed summer nights
Where we'd pick up the tempo
Or maybe just slow down
Trying to lose track of time
In the back of your car and
Where'd the amp go?
Where did you go?

I haven't cried
Since that night at the end of August
When we popped bubbles and first kissed

But I've wanted to cry
Pretty much ever since

I sometimes wish I hadn't popped
Quite so many bubbles that night
Because I've really missed the thrill
Of a tiny little third grade crush
And I've really missed the person
Who's really "just" my best friend

I think lately I've been blowing more bubbles
Than I've been popping

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.

The world played me in reverse
every song I know by heart
and in that striking unfamiliar tune
my face was smashed down in the dirt
where I had a half-second thought
that maybe it's these bugs I like
and maybe it's not you, but then the
rain splashed down so loudly
that it made puddles in my shoes,
and my body's just an ashtray
whenever it's used. I feel my heart
pouring out my skin, and out my mouth
comes the swarm of words and mud
once locked so tightly by the thought
of your lips as the barriers to mine, so let's
roll these chunks of mud around my yard,
we can make a whole mud-man
with a rotting carrot for its nose,
the stench there to remind us of
all that we once knew.