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.

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

Flying through the sky with you
Anything was possible

Lichens swirled around us
And we swirled around one another

Tree bark crumbled and fell
Though maybe it was just old reservations

Two tabs of acid
Two sets of lips

One afternoon
And one unbreakable friendship

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

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

Sad Winter music plays
In the background of my life
As I sit in an empty doorway
Writing empty love poems
All across my skin
And I think about the potential
Tattoos I could put there
To one day look at
And see nothing

This weather
Of things slow to end
And things slow to begin
Makes me think that maybe
One day soon
These empty poems
Could have meaning again

We usually
Make tea together
In the mornings
And I just wish
We could still
Find the time
To hold hands
And slowly drink it
Together

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

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.

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

A tattoo is just a scar;
A person is just a human being-
Not much more than a Wendy’s bag
That looks like road-****;
Not much more
Than a series of frames in a film
With a blackness in between
That our minds remove,
Creating an illusion of motion
Similar to the illusion of effortlessness
Created as we drive up a hill,
Pumping fossil fuels into the air
As everyone breathing outside the car
Rings like the aftermath of a gunshot
Or a screaming plea in an unfamiliar ear
“Stab me some more, dear,
Let the ink flow,
The film is running out
And I can see the blackness finally
Of the space that’s in between”

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

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

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.

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.

I felt your ghost sitting in that chair with me today.
I don't know when I took to sitting in it too
But I mean, it makes sense that I'd like it.
People develop the same tastes as their best friends,
And as their fathers.

When dad left you were their to make it
Not so bad.
And you didn't like dad very much
So you had no reservations
About adopting his chair as yours.

But then you left too
And six years later
The scars both of you left behind
Have only just now healed enough
For the chair to gain me as its occupant.

I reclined it it all the way today
And as the silence engulfed me
You and I cracked up together
And played video games while my dad
Sat there too: snoring,
Unable to stay up with his kids
To watch The Rugrats
Before putting them to bed.

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.

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

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

So on that paradoxical duality
The actors settle.

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

As they must.

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

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

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

No harm
Will come
To
Them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would like things to be not as they can be
But as they were.
Today I'm climbing a tree in another act
Of pure potentiality, but the dialectically
Bright shadow that hangs,
Even at eighty-five feet, is still yours.

It's cold, and my fingers grow numb.
As I speak, voice echoing across and through
The branches, the ice melts
Where my rope rubs,
Bringing the friction I need to forget.
I fear what was just as warm.

I would like to climb forever but
I can't die up here.
It would be far too fulfilling so
I'll just come down.
Give me a minute, please.

From a needle,
As from a fountain pen,
Pours ink
Into my skin

A promise of
Eternity sealed
And very few
Will ever know

(I wonder why
Those I love
Are those to whom
I only lie)

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

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

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.

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

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

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

We threw stones at an ancient cliff-face
hoping that the whole thing might crumble.
Thousands of years undone by us
because then we are a part of this.
Then we aren’t insignificant.

We threw stones at a wall of stones,
and we were at if for hours
searching for the perfect projectiles—
bricks when we could find them.
It was cathartic and exhausting and good.

We threw stones,
and when we were done, covered in mud,
we all went to our separate houses to shower
and put on new pants to get ready for
our dates that night. We threw stones
at nothing really.

We were just throwing stones.

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

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

Sitting at the edge
Of the dock
And looking at
The water below,
A little bit of nausia
Creeping up my throat,
I wonder how you feel
About all the lies you told
Before remembering
That it doesn't even
Really matter

(I also wonder sometimes
If you know
How many spiteful poems
I write about you
While you're laughing with me
From the next room)

A train howls through the distant summer
again tonight. Eighteen years now
I've spent lying in this bed and how
can I not yet place that howl to
any track other than Howl
by Allen Ginberg, still resting on my nightstand,
its sentiment about alarm clocks one wrong
(all mine are broken and
there it is again, chugging along
through the darkness that dances) simply because I
cannot see it?

If we were the kind of friends who unironically
raised our glasses in toasts,
I would give one to the generation too comforted by the ease
of a honeybee in the plaintively nonexistent mind
of a tulip

To the generation, or at least its subset
that wrongly feels representative, who stumble drunkenly
or maybe just tiredly out of tents
to **** in the view of their friends, who are still at the fire
because the tent was too cold

To those who did raise their glasses in a toast
on New Year’s Eve at what felt, with the ball drop
not screening in luddite protest, enough like midnight.
Beginning with “dear friends” and a couple laughs;
concluding with “now let’s get ****** up” and
a couple more

To those who proceeded
as directed, clinking their shot-glasses
and swigging them back. If only because
they were not tulips.

I could've gone to bed
Two hours ago
But there have been
So many better
Things to do
Like mostly
Talking to you

I remember playing the ukulele
A year ago
With you in my living room,
My fingers showing yours
The chords you still had to learn
(A perfect excuse
To hold your hand)

Sunlight pouring,
As the rain does now,
Through the windows
Illuminated
The carefully moving corners
Of your lips
(An imperfect
Yet somehow reasonable excuse
To kiss them).

This morning
As our noses pressed together
And our breathing intermingled
In the bed where I lost my virginity
To the girl
Who taught me those same chords
(To the girl whose lips
Mine found an imperfect excuse to kiss
This afternoon),
I wished that I still had chords
To teach you;
I wished that the sun
Would shine through the rain

the rows of roads and skyscrapers are rolling like
breakable hills above us
and under us
the waves are crashing
into
silicon valleys
made of thick
rubber
which carries no charge. but

here we are in the middle.

y’all make me feel outside of it and
inside of myself, cuz i am not
thick rubber and i am not
a breakable hill.

i am a body
sitting in the front seat
of my car,
driving down the highway,
and singing
at the top of my lungs
to nothing in particular.

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

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.'

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

I pinned those wilting flowers to the wall
And a month later
I still smile when I see them

We'll see what December brings

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 pulled open
The balcony door
To find that a spider
Had built its web
In the frame

I knew
That if I didn't
Destroy the web
Someone else would
And very soon

But I left it alone
And I turned around
And walked back
To my bed-
Far too ashamed
Of my species
To do anything
But sleep

(Though I was
Far too many cups
Of coffee
Into the morning
To even close my eyes)

The four of us wrote each other fortune cookies
And the sad part was that even though
The cookies we baked together were sugary and warm
None of the little squares of paper inside
Made much indication of one another.

You remarked that it had been exactly a year since
You were where we were:
Lying in a snowy field and watching the grey clouds rush
From the horizon to the moon
Illuminated by city lights too.

You protested those lights, throwing doorknobs
For the darkness but you couldn't break that streetlamp
Until the sun had already risen and the LSD
Had already worn off
Such that there was nothing to do
But read our fortunes quietly and sadly reminisce
About that night we'd spent
Melting the snow beneath our bodies.

I wonder if it's
Self centered
To say that
One of my favorite
Things about you
Is that you like me
Genuinely
For who I am
But you smiled
When I told you
So maybe you need
No explanation
To understand
Exactly
What I mean

Ever since, I've been afraid of the telephone ringing:
That metallic chime intruding at any second
Drawing us from our ornaments to "have you seen her?"

"Have you seen her?"

Maybe if they hadn't told me to get the phone that day
It wouldn't be quite so bad still
But every time I see that tree in our living room
Standing for family, love, hope
Everything that was smashed that day
All around me and entirely within me
Replaces again all that's been slowly healed

That red little ball falling
From shaky hands and weak branches
Shatters on the floor with a sound like a telephone
And those red little pieces linger just to be stepped on
Just to draw blood
And there is
Still
Blood

Two dead and however many phone calls
Shattering ornaments at every little decorating party
Where someone is stupid enough to say "I'll get it"
And everyone else is stupid enough to care,
Like humans do,
About all the things they can't control.
Like the snow falling, I mean,
There's no need to scream at the sky-
Your god can't hear you.
Just go back to the Christmas tree
And pick up where you left off.

There's probably 800 dead in Syria today anyway
And I can't seem to make myself give a **** about that, so
Why should I even really care all that deeply if
There's one less ornament on my tree?

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

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

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

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

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.

In the bagel shop
By the Barnes and Nobel
In that corner of the shopping center
That's barely winter walking distance
From the hallway in the high school
Where we first met and first kissed,
We shared the warmth
Of an electronic fireplace
And the pages of the ****** books
We were both racing to write;
The ****** books which would very soon
Be written over with permanence
In new handwriting

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.

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