4/3/2016

i fear i will never get that year back,
that lying down on the grass
that turned into loitering on alleyway fire-escapes and
dont you think this town is a little too small for that hahahaha
i tried to recreate it, the futility drove me to
smoke camels i found on the side of the road,
i haven't smoked in a year and i feel worse

i felt a very real grease back then a very real
bad quality
and now it is just vague, glacous- a night without sleep,
a cliffside leap.
it has been six months since i sat on a shackled hospital bed

and i dont think i ever really left.
my mother threatened to bring lawyers,
to halt my detainment
and i did leave
but i didn't really
and i don't think i ever will

this is all because i tried to recreate that year
and i failed
and i tried so hard
but the scalpel and cauterize of live's uncouth events picked me
apart, a biopsy
to the bone,

accidentally severed my torso and killed me
so i linger a downy ghost in a grey colony of moss
wishing for better days
that are far away
and will always stay that way.

4/3/2016
"The hurt is not enough."
Robert Frost

i lay in a swathe of linen,
not having left the house for days,
not having showered since the 31st
oh, back to my old ways.

sitting up
i read a letter i locked in a box
when i was fourteen.
it was meant to be open when i turned
twenty

a paper grasped in the throes of
sticky fingers,
sticky with isoprophyl
i wished to clean off all the impurities
i remember i showed three times that day and then some

you told me
you know how i feel,
but no one deserves that

you told me that day
you didn't know why you didn't hang up,
didn't know why you were bothering to comfort me
you know i still think about that?

spent every hour trying to pick apart that week
i still haven't come up with anything and my friends get good marks and alexander understands his schoolwork and i still stare at the wall anatomizing that week

whoever said fate exists was wrong.
i was a girl who walked on unsteady feet,
trying to not make eye contact
awkward, but somehow

happy.
now it is as if i know too much too soon
nothing thrills me, no.
i have been reduced to a glacous experiment

for gods' spindly hands-
their metal prods scooping out my corneal matter
and my grey one.
i remember i once told you

that i felt like a grasshopper in a sixth grade science class,
bathing in formaldehyde
how ironic- i had considered that notion alarming back then.

i remember you said "no, you're not"
"how awkward, being manhandled by the tweezers
of liebniez."

you smiled and told me
how much potential i had.
those were the antediluvian days,

the letter went on to describe a man i had talked to some months
before
who really i have forgotten about til now.

he swears gatsby is the best novel of all
time and tells me that he is writing a novel about a
Brown Law man, 1955, who lies about his life.

this seemed oddly topical to me.
we would talk about writing for hours,
life seemed to me a roman a clef on its own,

like its plot was vaguely familiar but
i was not myself, but the names
were changed.

now i speed through the antiseptic tunnel of
apathy, i wait for alexander's calls and tell my friends
i am sorry they feel that way or this way

i fail my tests,
i try to sleep,
i don't.

i write another letter now
and i hope to be able to open it in a few years
and i hope that i will feel better
i hope i will feel anything but this
this blindfolded hike, this set fetter.

3/27/2016
Montreal

It was at the Peel street station,
i was late to something i forgot what
or it seemed like it.
my first time in the city and its
lack of rats had surprised me,
encouraged me even.
the city seemed to lived for you,
like no one else was really occupied until you entered
the room,
static little figures.
as opposed to new york-
where i feel
infinitismal

3/27/2016

teeter tottering on my penny loafers
down Nassau street,
I smelled a Newport and remembered
why it reminded me of the days full
of princetonian guile, that were no more

two years ago to the date,
I was meeting so many new people
finding out what it was like making a habit out of going downtown.
two years later I take the train
downtown

that is, in a different town.
My paltry self, forgettable as the days went on, fading quietly in my own personal, dark mess, crawled through alleyways and down stair cases and up them to rooftops.

Now my sense of self sits slobbering on a desk, the town feels surreal to me
I prefer New York of course.
I went to visit him, sat on that conjugal bed and traced ribcage,

Looked out the window
saw all of New York
the empire shining like a
big sparkly monster,

the staid windows that each held,
You know,
a different story,
or something.

The smell of hot trash- you know,
I miss that
I tell her
"Id spend a day in a landfill just to live
there."

As opposed to an hour on
the train tracks. well, at least it is
an hour.
I grab a hot chocolate just like the old days,

on Witherspoon,
and trace the route I took a year ago
down Stockton
when I went to pick you up
from the arriving section
of the station.

Now I'm hoping
I'll hobble over to depart
and you'll  walk a certain way
just in a different city
To penn station
two years or so from now, I suppose

"If I'm not dead by then," I laugh with her
I'll stay in New York for good- with you.
But I went from the permenant staid fixture on the Nassau sidewalk
to a typhoidic city rat in a year so who knows

I hope it does not happen again
for I didn't care much for Princeton
As opposed to sharing a pantry with
you
those tall grey monsters in the backdrop painting, in the Greek tragedy of life, our lives.

3/25/2016

probablamente estoy
viviendo demasiado

the New York skyline
looms In the background,
looming,

dark and imposing like
all those people that will always know
more than me

waking up to tall, grey monsters
kingkong figures walking through
town with their windows, so seethrough.

You can see the island from your
window, all the way down Harlem hill.
I raise a brow, cross my arms, hit my foot against the tile.

I listen to mariachi music
It is very sad
perhaps I'm living too much.

2/6/2014
the third poem I ever wrote

You were playing with a cloth napkin-
what was it you said? I loved you before?
Yes, I acknowledge that.
What was it you said? Back then
When we were young?
That you were sixteen going on seventeen with the body of twenty and the face of eighteen?
What was it that you said?

My sensitive romantic Byron soul's bruised like a peach.
You are a caregiver- Lillian to Gerard.

I am a person who cannot believe what they are seeing.
I am taking a drink by a window.
I am a sociopath looking for love

The unspoken union we held
in the past with shaky fingers
god, man, do you have to bring it
up in front of my friends?

It is the twothousand tens and it
is easy now to know the blood
behind the rind and then meet them for the first time.

"I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then I ate my own wickedness."*
- Aldous Huxley

i let my head hit the brachiaria.
cyan sky rolled past,
and it seemed to me as if

my past itself was dragged out of my body,
excorcised and pulled up
and traveled with the sky's current

the sky is moving,
impossible and slow.
the clouds jog with a rush.

sometimes i think i have never
felt at all
with my year ****** up,

on their way to Mongolia or
Philadelphia,
I tried to desperately recall

sullied at the thought i couldnt.
I thought about how i always embarrassed you
in public

how i'd turned into an embarrassment
at this point in time
my pure innocence

that flowed in the past gently
uncomfortably shifting and
wondering how certain things felt

i don't know
manhood devoured me like
an apple.

in the garden
i walked
tried to spot all the perennials

and i did
and i thanked mankind for taking up the
habit of finding wild plants

bringing them into our lives
i see a sign, the museum is holding an exhibit on
british pastorals and hellscapes

i tell her we should go.
she agrees
walks across the street to buy a wire.

my blood ran down my body
onto the linen
Egyptian cotton

like the princesses who
married at 14,
at 13 i laughed

when they asked me to go the square
and at 15 i felt it my responsibility.
the fetid collapse of my

sincerity and my serenity
flowed through my being
patrolled round

my purity like
a culpable
sentry

i closed my eyes
and i felt the sheets heavy with
plasma

i blinked and
everything turned to burgundy
the subway grates licked at my ankles

the poplar and elms
in firestone
laughed at me,

who had so eagerly
held on to a fray
consumed by mankind

gutted with
certain
toxicant.