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.

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.

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 remember a time
Last year
When I'd wake up
Wanting nothing more
Than just to go back to bed

But then I met a girl
And I became happy
And I loved her
And I didn't even
Have to wait for my alarm
Every morning

Eventually,
My happiness spread
And I started getting
Out of bed
For other friends;
Other things

And that girl
Became jealous
And worried,
Evidently rightly,
That I'd stop needing her
And I'd want to move on

And somehow,
Ironically in large part
Because of her fears,
Because of her worries
Both of those things
Became true

And now
I almost dread
Getting up again
And I always
Just want to be asleep
Because I don't want her
To keep being sad

I can't help but feel
Like this rain
Is foreshadowing something
And to be honest
I'm really not looking forward
To having this conversation

But maybe,
Though all my life's goals
Contradict this idea,
Metaphor in the real world
Can't really stand
As much as I'd like to think

Maybe this time the sun
Is still shining above the clouds
And I can be happy
Despite how this conversation goes

Today it fell
Like stars across the land:
The unfixed permanence
Of Earth's ceiling
(Just a dome with
Little pinpricks of light)

Ask: what's the weather like
Outside?

My hand raised over my head
To hold my father's.
I skipped across the blacktop
By the playground
Thinking that those red streaks
Looked like the meteors
I envisioned falling
Through the solar system.

It's interesting:
It can be both a blue pill
And a red,
Taking me away
But leaving something more honest
In my place...

Walking through the parking lot today,
Drowning in the sea of smog,
I open my mouth and stick out my tongue
To taste the rain
Like I once could-
But now instead of a smile
I send the sky
A whispered apology
And walk away, still trapped
Under this irreparable
Dome we've ******

On my last day in Columbus, which
didn't feel
like my last day in Columbus
we sat on the stairs outside your apartment
overlooking the courtyard
as you chain-smoked cigarettes doing everything
very quickly. Saying
we're on the verge of it, I could be Kerouac and you
could be Ginsberg or Cassady, and all of this could be our
dharma bums.

What an uncommon and unmistakable howl that was, Joe.
The clouds moved towards us so quickly, but
until we focused on the stars, more fixed in the sky
those clouds didn't seem to be moving at all.
It was something about the courtyard you said.
It's all very prosical, you said.
I nodded because it didn't make sense.
You put out your last cigarette for the night and I
walked away from you sitting there
in the rearview of my life.

(Sal Paradise never saw Dean Moriarty again.
Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady were lifelong friends.)

I guess there's a lot of comfort in the fact
that if I don't still love you in ten years,
I'll be happy about it. This road
looks the same as it did when I drove up here in August
but now that I've come full circle, I've broken
out of my own gravity, and this road
is pointed in a new direction.

Everything is barren now.
The leaves have fallen and the bugs have all
Retreated into the warm houses.
I saw one in my shower this morning
And as I turned on the faucet, it flew
To the next wall. I worried that
The water bouncing off my body
Might drown it or make its wings too wet to survive the winter
But I did nothing to move it.

I understand that the only reason
You don’t like riding home from school with me anymore
Is because you can’t smoke cigarettes in my car.
But now I have to drive by the twin oaks alone—
Those twin oaks where I sat with a girl I was sure
I would soon come to love.
Staring up at the leaves with her, I’d thought maybe
That girl and I were just like the oaks:
Two separate bodies joined at one point.

Now the way snow hangs makes it clear.
Those canopies could only spread and grow
Once the oaks had parted, leaning in opposite directions.
You used to distract me as we drove by,
Keeping my mind from the haunting reminder
Of the future that failed to pass.
Without you with me there, I’m left to question
What I’ll see when this pristine white landscape
Finally melts.

That bug on the sterile white porcelain
Seemed to scream this morning as I idly hummed a tune
Written by some friends who moved to Athens.
It screamed with the smog of unsmoked cigarettes
And leaves that can never be unfallen.  
My humming
Was screaming too.

“How long do these bloom?” I ask her,
Standing in the night,
The nascent springwarmth fading around us.
As the moon plots its course
Across the thin line of sky it will occupy tonight, she says,

“For a very very short time.”

We lay in the wetgrass for a bit then,
And once the moon has gone and the sun is close to rising
We part. It feels
For a moment
Like she is all the places I never went,
Still ringing loudly in my mind with obsolete importance—she is
A bandaid on soft skin,
Covering numbness.
Not pain.

Three days later
The blossoms fall from the trees in a storm
And the ground is littered with shards of pink.
Walking back along the river,
My bandaid torn off such that it ripped out all the littlehairs,
I smell them:
The tendersweetness mushed against the pavement
Under runningshoes and bicycles and myfeetnow.
Wafting through the air much more fiercely
Now that each flowerfiber is torn.

All year I stood amid a forest of cherry trees, all in bloom.
And I got so used to the smell.

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.

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

We ventured into the hills today
Somewhat by accident, and encountered,
For the millionth time,
The irreality of past experience.

We wore summer sunglasses under the clouds
To block out the many snowflakes,
And over the course of our many conversations
That were screamed through scarves and wind,
The ground went from bare to covered to
Glistening.

"I used to write a poem every day," I told you,
When asked, and you nodded but
I don't know what you heard. There was
The wind, for one thing, but your attention was also focused
Not on my words but on their harmonic frequencies--
On the trail of footprints leading forward.

Somewhat by accident, we stopped in at a friend's
To warm our fingers and
Be made coffee.
In the comfort of that additional company we found,
I think,
That a recent memory
Of crunching icicles sweetened by sap
Preserved some trace of our two-ness.

When I'm driving,
Too often lately,
I've been sitting in the passenger seat

A whirlwind mosaic
Of all the parts
So impossible to relate
Flies by beyond my windshield;
A visual symphony in tune
To all the music I love-
To all the songs you hated

I've looked forward
To this time of year-
The start of a winter
Threatening persistance,
The rain changing to sleet...
Even the freedom to leave the windows up
And the reminder of you in every breath
For months

Perhaps I just need
To sit in the driver's seat next time
(Or any time)
And begin stringing my mosaic together
So that maybe
Spring will come quickly this year

Perhaps
I'm just
Poetically
Exhausted

Everything
I've been writing lately
Has seemed the product
Of one too few cups
Of caffeinated tea

I've written a lot-
About loss,
Autumn,
Syria-
And I think
I've now used tea
As a metaphor
For just about
Everything

But what's done is done
And the seasons are always changing
And the U.S. will attack Al-Assad
No matter how many words I write
And I'll never be able to get
This ******* tea-stain
Off this ******* page
In my ******* journal
And maybe

To get through
The hopelessness
of it all
I should just
Keep writing-
It seems
To have worked
So far

Ink from my pen
Leaks from pages ago onto this one
And even as a joke I can't believe my lips
Touched yours tonight.

Also, my hair's been getting longer.
I know I can cut it off at any time
But I'm not ready to set the bottle down and part
With the person I was six months ago

But it's time. My skin is dry,
Those lips that touched yours are chapped, and
When I'm being honest with myself I know that if,
At the end of this persisting winter,
I have a single ******* atom left in my body
From the day I was born,
It'll only be explained by science I'm unfamiliar with and
Not metaphor.

I wonder what books I bought
at that old woman's garage sale when I
had just graduated elementary school.

She wore her hair in a ponytail of grey,
and at my age I'd imagined that her garage sale
was surely the result of her impending death.

"You like books?" she asked me, her old vocal chords straining,
as her old chapped lips parted to form the words. "Yeah,"
I replied, handing her my crumpled ones.

I figured the exchange must've made her happy
because it must've caused her to re-evaluate her generation's decision that
America's youth were declining in literacy and manners

but that thought was as delusional, I think, as the one I had
sitting on my front porch, a block away, that evening,
that perhaps the old woman had already died.

I guess I'd like to know what books I bought from that old woman
so that I might finally read them
and ensure that those crumpled ones I'd handed over
hadn't been wasted.

I wonder if it might have been easier
For you to let go
If you’d just known:
I wasn’t in the process of loosing myself
But in the process of finding myself

Sure, I was on this road for hours
Before I felt like I’d moved
More than just one minute
From where I started
But somehow,
Sitting by a little lake,
And fishing without a fishhook
I finally got a bite
And I began to reel myself in

All of life
(Just a coming and going
From the house
Where I smoked a couple cigarettes
A couple months ago)
Conspired to let a few rocks fall
To the bottom of a river;
To finally let a little bit of water
Flow over this dam
And keep rushing onwards

Your nails
Drum on the frame
You stand in,
Calling all eyes
To the blue paint chipping
Into clouds of colorless
Like the wood on the door
That peeled polish
Serves to form-
Separating my creaking
Wooden porch
From the motel lobby
Of endless strangers ignored
As your nails still drum
With stories still unheard

At the end
The sky is cloudy.

All my friends
Have moved away
And the love of my youth
Has been lost
To a reluctantly emerging
Adulthood.

Rain threatens
But does not pour.

My three month hangover
Is finally
Subsiding
And it's at last
Being replaced
With the headache
Of an impossibly short
Autumn.

The first drops fall
Bringing a few leaves with them.

I wonder if there will be
Any green
After the storm passes-
You grab my hand tightly
And tell me "of course".

But at the end
It's hard to see the sun
Through the clouds.

Tripping on acid the other night
And staring at the clouds, the trees
I realized that I just wanted
To be seeing the trees as they were
Rather than as a shifting pattern
Synthesized in a lab somewhere
To separate fully
What is seen what is there

And after the day was done
And I climbed in to my bed,
Realizing that it no longer smelled
As much like trees as it did
Sweat, *****, and smoke,
It took me quite a while
To fully fall asleep

A hammer smashing through
A bright blue wall
Showing reality’s ultimate grey:
A journey more like hell
Than anything I’d known before

Sitting on top of that dam
Which flowed like the river did
I tried to talk to you
But the words got lost
And somewhere in that mess
Of dilated pupils
And impossible patterns
Of light and sound
I remembered what is was like
To be in love.

After my high subsided
And I changed my clothes
I sat lazily at your counter
Doodling and thinking back
To the few words we'd managed
To push through
The nightmarish vacuum
Of pink and green swirling trees
Which haunted our stone blockade

You asked if I was okay
And I told you “yes”
With half
Of my too-quickly beating heart

Maybe you put your hand on my shoulder
Or maybe you didn’t-
I can't really remember-
But you said
“It’s okay to say you’re not”
And definitively I assured you

“I’m not”

The last time
I drove up here
With these people
You were with me too

You said you liked
The farmland- it appealed
To your sense
Of order

I tried to explain to you
How disorderly
It really was-
Because it's really
The natural world,
Uninfluenced by man,
That's orderly

Because us humans,
With our self-destructive
Monocultures which exist
To support our self-destructive
Industries,
Produce 98% of our corn
For just about anything
But human consumption...

But you didn't understand that
Of course,
So we sat in silence
For a few minutes
As I failed
To understand you too

And I should have known then,
As you failed to see the world
As an oncoming apocalypse
Revealed through  shades of corn
And I failed
To see the world
As anything but,
That though everything was fine
On so many levels
Beneath the surface,
At some fundamental level
We, like the corn industry,
Were unsustainable

As our friend
Is helped to *****
Into the toilet beside us
We take off our clothes
And climb into a bath,
Me smelling too much like cigarettes
To say anything
About the violent red slashes
On your upper thigh

I wonder if it ever still crosses your mind
When we stay up too late writing poetry
(Together, but separately, as it’s always been):
Those time we kissed or how nice it felt
To sleep together in my bed-
Because sometimes I’m still half-tempted
To want to fall in love with you

I slap my old flip phone closed
As I hear a honk behind me:
The light has turned green
And I guess I have to keep moving.
I hope I remember to get back to you

your lips hung, slightly parted,
as you slept through the morning.

your face was smooth
and your tiny nose ring glinted
in the light that passed through the pine trees
and into our tent.

i stared at you, over there, for a long time
from where i lay in my sleeping bag, over here.

i knew that, just as it happened two years ago
when we lay in the bed at my mother’s house,
having spent the night together for the first time,
your eyes would slowly flicker open to meet mine
and i would somehow have to account
for why my gaze was already fixed on yours.

i prepared a hundred different good-mornings,
some chipper
           (“good morning!”)
and others saddened
           (“hey, good—um… good morning.”)
or only a little bit saddened
           (“hey there. good morning.”)
just to seem more natural even though
they were all still going to be a little bit
too chipper.

but i looked away at just the right moment and you muttered,
in your tired voice,
“how did none of the rain get into the tent?”
so all my preparations were obsolete.

i told my mom tonight,
that we’re no longer whatever we were
and it was only the fourth time i can really remember
tearing up in front of her,
although it surely happened quite frequently
when i was younger. after
scraping a knee, for instance, or
getting scolded by my brother.
the skin on my knee has healed now though,
so i’m thinking i’ll just try
not to be so concerned.
about anything, really.

The grey sludge on the sides of the roads
Has really been there
Since the heat of July
But only recently did my focus shift
From the glistening white
Of our summer snow

Maybe I just need another
Attitude adjustment-
Let's go have a snowball fight;
The seasons don't seem to be changing
Any time soon

From hungover breakfast to hungover breakfast
the collection of words escaping from my throat in that diner
has remained pretty much the same. This afternoon
I went there healthy and for lunch. I found
that they have a pretty good lunch menu, and
across the way, those echoes of all my former selves,
most haunting in the sameness of their
"I can't believe what I did last night"s and
"I wish we could just work things out"s, seemed
a little foolish, I guess. It was spicy, the veggie burger.

Sitting on a rock
In the middle of a little pond
With a girl I met just once before,
I looked at the treetops
(All ash trees;
All ash soon)
And thought about kissing

But the weight
Of all the lips I’d kissed before
Kept my mouth from hers;
Kept ‘her’
From becoming ‘you’

And as the first drops of rain
Began to fall like thunder
And I fled that little swamp,
Leaving the almost ash
Ash trees behind,
I felt a twinge of sadness
Despite my better judgment
And I thought
More about kissing

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?

Some of these books
I wouldn't remember reading
If they weren't on my bookshelf

They say you're not supposed
To wake up
A sleepwalker
But more often than not
I want to remember in the morning
The moments I fell in love with
The night before

I want to really remember
All the books on my bookshelf
And some of them
I haven't even read yet

Wake me up.

I miss the smell
Of the cigarettes
Whose smoke danced
To the stars
Which were always
So much clearer
In your back-yard
Than anywhere else
In the city

We speculated
That it was maybe
Because your yard
Had no fence
But that wasn't it-
For now that you
And your cigarettes
Have moved,
The stars
Are no longer
So clear

Maybe
It had nothing to do
With your smoke
Or your yard-
Maybe the stars
Were only so clear there
Because you yourself
Had no fences

"Write while you're drunk,
Edit while you're sober"
But words are words regardless
And the initial intent might pale
In its ultimate juxtaposition but you-
You mean just as much to me
Still.

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.

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.

Just beginning to start to begin to
Come to terms with
Where I am and how,
I walk away suddenly
From those old dreams, those
Rev-lations of sound,
To meet you--
My consistent stranger--
Under guises and veils and a subconscious resistance
To the idea that it's now been a long time
Since the title of stranger
Was really appropriate.

All we have
is a rhythm of stepping feet,
splashing water
and bobbing flashlights.
The tunnel walls don't need to be bright
for us to walk within them
yet our shadows still splash
across those walls, keeping away
the veil of insanity
that would surely sweep in
with the darkness and
             (The madness!
             The sameness!
             Moloch! Moloch!
             We too are in Rockland!)
consume us. A nagging whisper says
that I never really entered here
and never really will leave.
But
the echoing drip
of a leak in the tunnel's wall.
But the echo
of those tiny drops breaking
the infinite sameness of our infinite trudge
through the tunnel-- breaking
this ghastly haze of smoggy still air--
breaking even
the monotony of our slow footsteps
through water
and settled sediment as we pause
and say
             "Shhh, shhh,
             do you hear that?"
             "Why, yes
             it's a dripping sound!"
             "Keep walking,
             let's see what's ahead"
so out we then burst
into the starry dynamo
of the night

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.

Blue spirals painted on my body, we sailed,
cataclysmically cascading in your spaceship
through the little towns which, in their
infinite stillness, see only movement.

Your voice brought me back for a second, Joe.
You spoke as if you might be reading a poem
you wrote two years before, saving, all that time
just for that moment.

You chugged ***** when we got there,
features illuminated and distorted in the candle-lit cold,
as I lay with your girlfriend in bed
and watched you to stay warm.

All the cars but ours had gone in the other
direction, but we'd stayed true to our course.
The void of the morning, reminiscent of the previous warning,
let the blue spirals seep, in the snow, through my skin.

On good days my dreams are the blackberries
Hanging from a bush they cut down
Where the little kids used to go
Six years ago
To get their hands purple and chew nervously,
Fearing their parents might walk down that little path to see
Their kids had left the pool.

On bad days my dreams are the white squares of paper
We put to our lips to change
The aforementioned 'their' from an 'our.'
Hoping our parents don't walk the path again and connect
The size of our pupils to the
Purple of our ancient fingertips.

It's the same wind that knocked down the black-berry bush
That writes these words and holds these white squares
To lips. We had a good dream together
Not long ago.

The snow wasn’t beautiful
Until I noticed the snowflakes
And the way this blanket too long associated
With the cold and the sad
Hangs on the branches,
Draping itself over every twig and tiny piece of bark
That keeps it from the ground
And up and glimmering ,
Miraculously,
In the upper canopy,
Whose complexity
It also takes the snow to see

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.

As the sky fades,
Remembering a sun
Lost to time,
We're drawn in darkness
To that place
Where our heartbeats
Form one rhythm-
The only thing left
In the vast expanse
Of nothingness
Stretching
From what used to be
Horizon
Onwards to infinity

Neither of us
Like to lead
When we dance
Forming a pattern
Of basic step,
Basic step,
Eye contact
A moment too long,
Brushing hands
That linger

We stood between the two doorways
In a little room that was outside of inside
But not quite outside.
We were there and the cold was there but,
At least in terms of God and of War,
We were alone.

It was with utmost neutrality
That you spoke of all you hoped to change and I,
Like that night we laid drunk on the dock
While you outlined all the times you'd almost died,
Was silent.

We lingered in that little room
A bit longer than we needed to,
Already engaged in the sort of pre-emptive nostalgia
That I know will tear these last few months apart.
But soon enough
You walked through one door,
And I through the other.

The cold bit at my face in all the places
I'd hoped it might not, and I thought,
As I walked to my car,
Of how cold the water had been
When we'd jumped,
That warm summer night,
Into Lake Erie.

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

I needed to tell someone else
Because I couldn't let
The only person who knew
All (or I guess almost all, now)
Of me
Fade into a ghost

Somehow though
Today's sharing didn't relieve me
Of quite as much burden
As I thought it might

Driving through the darkness
The Wendy's bag
On the side of the road
Can start to look
A bit like roadkill-
Which it is
In a way,
Because no matter
How many broken people
I cram into the front
Seat of my car
And no matter
How many cigarettes
They've all been smoking
The blindness
And the landfills
Which push the rich
Further North of the city
Will continue to push

My dog’s eyes are wide;
He’s more alarmed than I’ve seen him in months
Although to be fair
I haven’t really seen him in months.

He looks at me
Like I might be able to make the wind stop
But I’ve been too busy lately
Blowing through with that wind
To even pause and scratch his ears
Let alone change the weather

I listen to the November rainstorm
Blowing through with the violent intensity
Of a first kiss
Or a last ****
And though I know I can’t change the weather for him
I still take a brief pause during the storm
To scratch his ears
And calm him down