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.

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

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

Autumn rushes from the vortex
Where a bottle-cap used to be
And as last drops run down dry throats,
Glasses now empty like the people who are,
Winter pours from the spring
That a pen-cap once clogged
And I sit in the bathroom wishing
A single variation of summer pleas
Would keep the modern world's fallen leaves
From manifesting themselves on wrists and thighs
But a collection of words can never be more
Than all the tattoos that are all just scars
Like the people who are-
And when the hell
Did the leaves turn orange?

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.

I love you
Especially when I
Drink.
If you feel-
The same way-
Maybe shots should be
Called: good

And if you
(Love me)
Maybe we should
Kiss.

More often.

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.

A pulsing electricity
Fuels your computer
Which takes you to websites
You'd rather not visit
But that you visit
Anyway

It's that same electricity
That fuels the cameras
Which we covered with boxes,
A last ditch attempt
To reconcile ideals
With the world
We really live in

And when you think about
What fuels our hearts
And concequently our minds
You  might
Come the conclusion
That we
Are not products
Of the modern world-
The modern world
Is a product
Of us

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

our circles of right and wrong,
fractured in absence of fickle zen,
stand now across the sky
diagramed on clouds in venn

and smiling the grey
blobs block the meteors;
it’s love of life that may
chain our bodies in the center

of that shifty airy water space
where waffles are gentrification
and the hands we hold are separation
and its happening everyplace

we go. so to talk and act
separately, is to deny that cloudy venn;
to go where mind is scarcely fact
and establish a dangerous distance

cuz yesterday I meditated
but today I must’ve particulated
cuz  I see we’re one big contradiction
inside love that’s bound to mediation.

friere would say this occupation
is precisely our ontological vocation,
but to subjectify ourselves at the very
center of the venn is to carry

a weight upon the column
of my spinal cord unknown
even to the days
of my very best posture.

yet, your resistance to the slump—
it guides me to listen for the thump
thump of distant drums:
a revolutionary battlecry

through which I extend my hand
to hold yours across the waffled
space which we’ve so ******.
our heartbeat races through my mind.

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

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

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

Sometimes it seems like I'm not sad enough
About the fact that I've never seen a passenger pigeon,
So I tried to write a poem about one
"The bird that's lost from the skies,
I wish I didn't have to see the smog behind your wings"
But I couldn't conceal from myself
That the effort was half-assed.
And I knew that if I wrote one more line,
The pigeon wouldn't really be a pigeon anymore.
I know I'm wasting too much energy
And pumping too much gas into the air.
Even though I drive for hours I'm always
Just one minute from home,
Trying desperately to fall out of love with the idea of being in love.

The real sadness hasn't been in love though. Not in the illusion
Nor the loss thereof,
But in circling around the block again and again.
And in failing to write a poem
About that passenger pigeon.

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

The flickering fluorescent
Places accent on the life we could've shared:
Laughter creeping through every drunken little recess
Of the ****** apartment on West campus

As my sister sneaks off with her boyfriend,
Leaving me with the continued potential energy
Of everything I've known lately,
I can't help but allow the thought I've been
Repressing for half the year
To worm its way,
Like the first decomposers into a buried coffin,
Into my mind

Maybe you are really
Happy without me but as I sit here,
Forcing smiles and drinking beer, eating guacamole,
I miss you anyway.

Somebody turns off the lights, saying that
The flickering light hurts their eyes.
Somebody else screams at the dark, in jest
And I'm thinking that at least
The darkness is consistent.

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

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

Inside we drink tea and eat steaming waffles
While outside a white blanket drapes itself
Even over our minds
Painting things in a sweeping grey
That glistens in the sunlight

It’s a little too cold out
So our noses are a bit runny
And the heat’s on a little too high
But the maple syrup never goes bad
And neither does your laugh

Your thumb moves across my the back of my hand
Like it did in the summer
Gently; without much pressure
And in between my fingers I can feel your heart beat

If you wanna go outside though
I have a really nice hat
And some really nice gloves
And if you wanna go sledding
I have a toboggan too
So we can go down the hill
Together

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.

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

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.

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

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'm trying to see the world
Through these glasses
But I just see
My own reflection

All these glasses
Empty around 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.

Every cigarette,
Every addictive inhale
Of warmth
And nicotine,
Keeps me farther
Away from you
And father
Away from myself
So-
“Can I have another cigarette?”-
And my friends laugh at me
Knowing that
I notoriously
Don't smoke
But I'm handed one
Anyway

We once spoke,
A long time ago,
In wordless poetry;
Every glance
A stanza
And every movement
A line.

You'd trace
Three freckles
On my neck
Making a constellation
As from your mouth
Came whispered visions
Of forever.

You asked me today
In a poem of words
If I'm happy now

You were my heart
But in that endless pulsing rhythm
I got lost in translation

I filled my blood with nicotine
To keep myself as far from
The truth of you
As I could

But every buzz wears off sometime
Leaving us listening only
To a single near silent refrain:
"I'm sorry."
"I know."
"I'm sorry."
"I know."
"I'm sorry."
"I know."
"I'm sorry..."

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.

.              Part One               .

January
I wake up in a hungover haze that seems
Irrevocably unending. All the places I threw up,
That stiffness in my neck, the emptiness in my love;
There is too much to feel
So I feel numbness
And I feel remnants
Of ***** in my throat, only manifested fully
When my friends and I make fortune cookies,
Singing along to songs that we’re hearing for the first time
Amidst the chaos of exploding poinsettia plants and nascent tattoos,
All of which litter your mom’s otherwise bare counter.
I don’t make much mention, in my fortune cookies,
Of that girl who still leaves me hungover;
I fill them instead with cruel jokes
That send me cackling
Until my dehydrated headaches pass into

February
When I’m moonlit tipsy stumbling
Through a campus-wide coniferous forest in Washington State
With two strangers that I soberly think
Might be my future.
We arrive at the clear polluted waters
Of the Puget Sound, our boots all
Sinking into deep-mud as we walk past broken bits of shells
To low tide.
Even as the full moon sinks and I realize
That those two strangers can never be my future
(That Athens, Ohio is my future)
I still walk forward
Into the Puget Sound
Knowing that the water will stay with me
In my lungs, on my skin,
In my mind, and although I don’t tell a single person, I fear,
So rightly,
That the water from the Puget Sound,
Set to perpetually accumulate in my lungs,
Will one day come to drown me.
Even as I cry to my mom in our kitchen,
Relieved from that seemingly endless indecision
I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised
By the choice I’ve made, I’m not surprised
By the fears I still have, all that surprises me
About any of this
Is the immediacy with which
My conclusion’s future culmination begins, as I begin
And continue
While always feeling like I’m concluding,
An infinite

March
In spirals, spirals, spirals, leaving trails
In subconscious sands, someone paints
Blue spirals on my body, and when
I drive back to Lake Erie later,
To retrieve abandoned items and moments,
The road looks much different.
Less swirly, less threatening at first, and when we get there
We eat pineapple/onion pizza on my ****** cottage’s front porch,
Just barely shielded from the snow, and just barely
Shielded from one another. And even those
Slim shields between us begin to fall
When we stand on our melting Lake Erie.
Because the whole world
Calls to us.
The sky screams, the wind explodes,
The thin layer of water above ice rushes
Blissfully, almost hallucinogenically, towards you and towards I
And I am howling
Into the face of it all,
Fearing nothing—not even
The absence of that girl’s palm in mine
Or the water from the Puget Sound
Or the cold of the air
That is tearing at my scalp; that is tearing
At my whole being and

April
Is best described by a rampage
Home from a campsite
That I only ever saw
Drunkenly, in the dark, and under the pressure
Of Allan Ginsberg’s poetry and an ultimately failed ****.
On that rampage we steal tombstones,
We steal memories for ourselves,
And we steal crass glances
With crass jokes that sound sort of
Like the crass fortune cookies which somehow
Never went bad.
Someone notes during that drive
That the air is getting warmer
With regularity now,
And while I somehow can’t bring myself to cry when my cousin is shot to death,
I have to struggle to hold back tears
In our high school’s only classroom when you tell me
That you’re quitting that play we signed up for together.
I guess it’s cuz I’m concerned—
Cuz I’m deeply
Deeply
Deeply concerned—
That it’s a lack of dedication
To me, to what we do together, to everything
That will prevent my rampage from concluding quietly
Amidst the smells of Indian food and the soft light
In your future dorm room
Where I will hug you
And where I

May
Finally
Let all the tears
Flow freely.
I guess it’s the unnecessary intensity
Of this collective celebratory anticipation
That preemptively reveals to me
That the moment of walking across a stage
To receive my high-school diploma
Won’t be quite as transformative as I’d hoped it might be,
And when I make out with that girl who still has me hungover
In the bed at my dad’s house where I lost my virginity
Almost exactly one year prior, I realize that in fact,
I’m still marching the same march, and
Both magic moments of idealized transformation in that bed
Were just as illusory.
Somehow though
Your no longer nascent tattoos have not yet faded
And I can’t help but worry,
(As sweat pours from my forehead and drenches these bedsheets;
As my finger nestles itself tiredly between the folds of her ******)
That I have, and in

June
When all my anticipation is realized,
People clap in the audience despite the fact
That it’s the same stream of sweat
That’s trickling down along my spine
To reach my ***.
I stare into the spotlight
For just a moment, amidst those stale applause
And in my squint, I think briefly
That none of it ******* mattered. I mean,
Despite this perspiration, I’m
Dehydrated. Hungover. I guess
Drinking more alcohol
Isn’t the best way to get over it, but I can think of nothing else,
So even when I acknowledge
That all my attempts have not even been half-assed,
But, like, one-quarter-assed
The only resolve I find is in distraction, in
******* my other ex-girlfriend instead
And not until that distant

July
When I’m ascending through Never Sink,
Does my head finally
Feel clear, yes,
In that glowing blue pit
Of bioluminescence,
I feel the whole world slow to a stop,
Embrace my body with its taproots
And whisper
Playfully and
In a child’s voice,
“You are the whole world” and I know that I
Am the whole world.
I breathe heavily, the only sound for miles around,
And for a moment I feel that the Puget Sound,
Along with everything else that is so ******,
Has fallen away.
For it is not my body
That is climbing on-rope through the stars and galaxies of this great sinkhole
But my mind,
But my soul,
Because Never Sink
Is not a landscape
But a mind-scape,
A soul-scape,
And it is one which is never dark
Thanks to the blue lights of soulful- (not bio-) luminescence—
A glow that is strong enough to see
Finally
A singularity
In the form of an unlocked lock,
Appearing with grace upon my driveway
After I return home
From ******* my other ex-girlfriend
For the last time.
It is only when I stop the car,
Open the door,
And hold that unlocked lock in my hand that I realize the extent to which
I am being
Un-defined.
The ethereal being in Never Sink’s soul-scape,
Alone in the blue grace of the night,
With nothing in my breath.
The thought is terrifying.
So in

August
On the night of my eighteenth birthday,
The girl I’m hung over and I
Send magical, sparkling lanterns into the sky
With a wish so brilliantly bright and simultaneous
That even I am able dismiss the slurring drunk words spoken next to us—
“Here’s hopin’ that you two get married some day”—
As superfluous.

.                Part Two               .

The winds above Lake Erie carry me,
Along with that lantern, into the foreignness
Which Never Sink foreshadowed.
But with the lantern as my very being
And the Puget Sound in my every breath,
Athens, Ohio does not become my soul-scape;
Even its gorgeous autumnal rolling hills
Are just land-scape, and I don’t know
Whether things would have been different
Had I not walked into that stranger’s party
For that terrible beer
On one of my first nights there, but regardless in

September
I walk up endless hills and stairs daily
To get around this hellhole where the only genuine people I’ve yet found
Were prepared to leave from day one, like I
Wasn’t. I wasn’t preparing for that at all, but the Puget Sound,
Lingers like phlegm in my lungs and distorts my regular refrain
Of “I can be happy here, I can be happy here,” keeping it
From ever loosing its hypothetical but eventually forcing it
To loose its conclusion:
I can be…
I can be…
I can be anything that I want to be and I am still here,
Sitting on the top terrace of this weird-assed biker bar with some girl
I just met, with some guy
Who seems cool, but in both cases
I drink one too many Blue Moon’s because I know
That neither of these people
Will ever loose their hypotheticals and will only ever
Loose their conclusions.
Gazing upwards towards the stars in the fading summer,
I try to ignore the physicality of all that’s around me,
But the alcohol churns in my stomach like violent waves, like in

October
How I rock like tides between the shores
Of two continents, of two
Acid trips.
One, on the floor of my dorm room, staring at my ceiling
In an attempt to make patterns
Out of patternless white paint, all the while holding hands
With that guy who seems cool, who has been dancing
In and out of hypothetical.
And the other acid trip with you,
Who somehow in the face of everything
Became one of my only certainties.
You, with whom I stood on Lake Erie
Howling into the wind in an unrealized epiphany.
An epiphany
That is now realized
Because the beers on that top terrace didn’t matter.
The white speckles on my dorm room ceiling during that first acid trip
Didn’t matter.
Hell, that girl I am in love with
Didn’t (doesn’t, can’t, won’t) matter.
What matters to me,
As I’m dressed in drag on Halloween,
Lying in your dorm room that smells of Indian food
With 120 dollars of drug money in my pocket,
Is what’s ultimately present. Right there.
Right here. But then, lying there, the time
Clicks over into

November
And at two in the morning it becomes
One in the morning.
I don’t know which of those hours wasn’t real
But when I hug you and cry in the soft light
It is a moment too brief.
It is a moment from which I am pulled straight
Into a hotel bed halfway to New York City,
Where I lie with that girl who I guess I’m in love with
And I’m kissing her, and I realize
That blue spirals still linger on my body, but when she groans,
So softly
That “we shouldn’t be doing this”
I pause before saying “I know,”
And in that pause, my pixelated, televised, and falsified image of reality
Briefly turns to fuzzy grey static, its finite infinity like the trance
Of meat on a rotisserie; I’m waiting
For this turkey to cook
In my friend’s mom’s home—funny
Because I’m still a vegetarian
Who sometimes likes to think of himself, in quest for definition,
As a vegan, but man
I’m beyond definition, I’m beyond anything,
I’m beyond even my darkest imaginings of myself, so when I get wasted
At a 2am that doesn’t click back on Thanksgiving morning,
I have a slice of that ******* turkey,
Cuz the vegan chili my friend and I made at school was good and all,
But I had to bike through freezing rain to get the peppers
And even though I’m starting to feel
Like I’ve found a few people who I can take in with permanence
Nothing feels more like permanence
Than this home-cooked meal
Of turkey and cranberries and sweet potatoes at a granite counter
Where, on January 1st when the ball dropped,
We all took shots, leaving me drunk, stumbling
And eventually
Hungover.
And of course in

December
I’m still
Hung over it all.
Part one, part two,
The futility of that division is so obvious now.
It’s the same poem, same sentence,
And when two not-so-new-anymore friends and I sit on a rooftop in Athens
With a bunch of still so-new I-guess-friends
Right before exam week,
Right before this emotionally excruciating semester comes to a close,
Right before I prepare to head home,
I realize that even though this place
Hasn’t quite become home yet,
My ‘home’ isn’t really at home now either.
I am without a bed in which I feel comfortable,
Without a body next to which my whole life makes sense,
And I am driving to go swing dancing—
An activity I can’t believe I’m still trying to like—
When I finally tell her that I’m in love with her:
Words that don’t matter despite
How much they do. Ultimately,
To me, to her, it’s just
A quick red-light phrase
And this poem is, without too many layers of resonance,
Not even addressed to her,
But to that girl with whom I stood on Lake Erie,
Howling into the wind,
Imagining part two but preparing
For part three, so
With that lantern still floating skyward, “here’s hopin’ that”—
                                         (No. No. No. Start over.)
Here’s hoping that
At midnight
On this New Year’s Eve,
When the ball drops and when we all take shots,
Perhaps around that same granite counter-top,
These clocks
Won’t click back again.
These spirals
Will fade.

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.)

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

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.

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

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?

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

A couple days ago
I bought twelve cartridges of ink
For my fountain pen

"Guys," I said
A couple weeks ago,
"I'm a writer"
And you all nodded so
"No you don't get it
I don't just write things
I'm a writer"
And you all nodded so

I bought twelve cartridges of ink
For my fountain pen

In the warmth of your basement
We sat under sweaters and blankets
Kissing when we hit writer's block
And eventually
Writing over one another
In a startlingly permanent way

For the rest of the evening
We didn't say very much at all;
We just let the moment sink in
Under our skins
Manifesting itself
In the shivery feeling you get
When a hand
Almost touches yours

Our failed attempt at change,
Re-elected in a last ditch
Show of democracy,
Sits in his oval office
Looking at the ice left
At the bottom of his drink,
Wondering what he should do

Surprised that his half-assed attempts
At diplomacy are poised to fail,
He's already shown America
Where we really stand
Which is just about nowhere

We don't want vengeance
And we don't want death
We just want a voice
And what that voice would say,
If he cared to open those office doors is
'Wait; not yet.'

Because we understand the pressures
We understand what happened
Ninety-nine years ago
On a rainy day in July
And we want the skies to stay clear
For even just a little bit longer this time

If he even so much as looked
Outside his window
He would see the picket signs
Of the storm set to brew
Upon his push
Of a button.

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

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 word home
as defined
by a magic eight ball:

try again later

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.

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

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!

As I smoke a cigarette
On the front porch
Where I once declined
I listen in my memories
To my sister yelling at my mom
In a crowded Mexican restaurant
That she should be allowed
To love both my mom
And my dad
But then our food finally came
And my cigarette
Finally goes out
Having mostly burned
Without help from my lungs

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.

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

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”