4/27/2016

It is spring,
and outside my window when
I woke up i found a bleachwhite dogwood creeping outside up onto the wallboards-
I was scared it would get in,
its vines creep through the cracks
with the green woods in the back cheering it on

My skin danced with the fleas of my
uncertain past, the thready stinging reminders of my yesterdays
and the one hour storms at night and late mornings that come with spring


I cursed my living in a forest
when I stepped outside, carefully
so as to not be seen by the woods
and the syphillitic robins
that sang disgusting little hymns
and the frogs that muttered at night.
the air was sharp, it smelled like a dripping faucet

My blood dripped into the laundry
sink, carefully twisting itself when it hit the water
it looked delicate, creeping and soft.

I read Salinger that day- I always
do in the spring- it is something about the disenchantment that brings me back to peonies and azaleas, tulip sales
ecetera-

I heard your voice on the line and breathed
that I hadn't heard it in a while,
I said this with my nose
and you apologized

but I did not want it
because it is not fair:
they all  apologize to me for  things that they should not
but I should be the one that is apologizing eternally

eternally for being this
like a cicada,
that comes out after years for one thing
and then disappears all over again
and perhaps even dies.

this summer is supposed
to be the summer the locusts come
to visit the east coast and
If the apocalypse is coming, I am not scared- it has arrived many times for me before.

4/27/2016

when we walk around the avenue
the air follows us and it looks like dessert wine

4/23/2016

"Speaking of batteries,
what's the positive in this? Negative?"
she threw out there, lithe little

extensions of her hand palely wrapped about a martini glass stem. It held seltzer and ginger.

Long Island City, Queens
twinkled cobaltly, covertly, in the
harbour

incognito, morphing into the sky
in the gloaming.
"All those people," I said, ignoring

the question. I always ignore the question. "So many. But this city
so cruel and brutalist and impersonal."

She shook her head,
stirred her cocktail stirrer
the mint sprig moved to the bottom

of the glass.
"As opposed
to what?"

4/12/2016
"Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
Ce beau matin d'été si doux:
Au détour d'un sentier une charogne infâme
Sur un lit semé de cailloux?"

"My love, do you recall the object which we saw,
That fair, sweet, summer morn!
At a turn in the path, a foul carcass
On a gravel strewn bed?"
Charles Baudelaire

I sat on the mossy footstool
that lied by the brook-
I had to really open my ears
to hear the soft regurgitation
coming from the clear muddy water, gliding over the slate,
piled up
the road, the one I drove on that one day we snuck out,
was placed gently beside it,
uptop a little cliff,
I felt this a beatific metaphor.

The air felt amorphous,
held a quality I couldn't quite
put my finger on.
and then I saw a tree,

a crooked one
who had seemed to grow
on the bank of the creek
because life, it seems, imitates art.

Its trunk dipped
until it ever so slightly grazed the water
its elm fingers
almost

almost.
I smiled when I saw this,
for it gave me hope.
I likened myself to the horseflies and new
tadpoles that flittered,

seraphic in quality,
borne with the quality of new life- the innocent quality
the one that just made me feel tainted, the more I surrounded myself with it.

The Friday afternoons on the avenue, with its port wine air
and this bubbling black slate brook

are the only places
that innocence lives-
if I had realized how quiet
the soft gargling of the cherub water was

I'd have stopped the car
and baptized ourselves
In it.

4/7/2016
tw, suicide

you were five eleven
i thought it so elegant
you hated it though

i still see you walking down the
linoleum, sad halls
with your gown

and though you swore you
were ugly i thought you reminded
me of one of those pre raphaelite

girls.
you're dead now,
so i heard

i knew that the system
had failed you before
you even knew

you were defective,
you felt the need to be recalled
back to the mill

before you even knew that.
i saw you for a week
that's a funeral i wont be invited to

but i can't help but
think what your last
thoughts were

if there were any
i wonder if you said
goodnight to your

sister before
you did it
but i also

don't want to think
about it- the fact i
know a ghost