it started about a year ago,
starry-eyed,
lost on a campus and lost on a
cerebral field of land mines.

i didn’t expect much,
you were haloed and far away,
something specked on
the distance. lust.

but you were more,
a neon angel in the rain
and a yellow light
in a bus plaza i knew so well.

i can’t look at it the same way again.
the rain didn’t phase me
like it always did before.
i like the sun, i love you more.

i didn’t expect much,
probably awkward, bumping teeth
and feet,
but as if a painting from the RISD

stepped out of their frame,
and i was not the same.
and you were soft, soft, soft,
in words and hands and i

was safe after i stowed the
scared little girl away,
comforted her in a way,
i’m not scared to grow up

or be in love
or leave home
or be me
anymore.

if i keep the receipts i can pretend
that we’re still going out to lunch together,
that your phantom arm is around me at night,
that you’re still here.

i can pretend that you’re not in new york,
and me, i’m not here.
i hoard the receipts and the tickets and
the programs and the take out menus.

i sleep with your sweatshirt under my body
and i, i remember each breath we took in unison.
i imagine that you’re not away
because we are both universal, anyway.

i never cried at the bus stop,
or the train station.
instead i hoarded the tears until i was so full
of water that i broke.

because we can pretend that this is easy
and worth it, it will be,
but at the end of the night
i’m still clutching papers and cloth

with all of my might.

Ladies and Gentleman, esteemed friends and collaborators, we find ourselves beset once more by a particular individual's overwhelmingly perverse actions of self-aggrandizement. Yes indeed, there is a stranger here among us, a purveyor of hate and dismissal, lauding his own horrifying mimicry of poetry as the makings of a legend. I will not foul my words by speaking his thrice-accursed name, and in truth, there is no need. Any one of us who has found our heart-wrought pages smeared by the childish, aristocratic and may I say it, disgusting blabberings of this ill-begotten rake shall know exactly of whom it is I speak. And I speak in ernest, terrible ernest, against this self-proclaimed genius against whom we worthless ants are compared as to a god. And in the name of humanitas and libertas we tolerate his vile ravings and insensate curses thrown toward us as if we were nothing but cattle. Why? Because we believe in something that he will never be able to understand or appreciate, the very concept of a community throws him into confusion and fear. People are dying in the streets in the name of everything that we here stand for and he has the audacity, nay, the pompousness to assault my friends in the only haven some of them have ever known. Some of you may retain your hope for him and your patience in light of his narcissism. I however, have lost my patience and will tolerate it no longer. I consider it my duty to counter his message of hate wherever I find it. I urge you all to do the same.

There are two rivers within my heart
one flowing toward the future
and one toward the past.

There are two worlds I live in
one of the everyday materiel mundane
and one of something I have no words for.

Did I not bathe in the sweet waters
of both rivers flowing?
Do I not live within both worlds,
paying bills and yet loving with all my soul?

Following you all these years
thinking that perhaps I would
one day overtake you on this
wandering path travelled so long.

I never did make it to Bethlehem
nor kept any other of the
hundred promises that I've made
to so many, some spoken aloud
and some made silently.

Of all the lives these other
pilgrims say I have touched,
I never could seem to
touch yours.

I am old now, and weary
of the sands and the winds,
beautiful as they are I
am sure that they also
have tired of me.

Where is there left to go?
I know now that I will never
find you, will never
be found by you,
weeping on the edge
of some oasis.

I have no answers
to my own questions
nor do I think does
anyone else upon this
road that leads where
all others do.

You turn away from me sometimes in the night and cry silently into your pillow, not wanting to wake me. But I always wake when you weep like that, and I can see the outline of your slim ivory shoulders shaking with each stifled sob. Your dark hair cascading around you in a soft halo as some unspoken sadness carries you so far away from me, to places I can't follow. Once I would like to just cast aside the hesitation and enclose you in my arms as I do when we make love. But I know that I would be invading a private moment by doing so, would somehow hurt you more, even if I don't understand why. Is it some secret shame you carry within you that causes you so much pain? Something you think I would recoil from if I knew? I would not, I swear. I would kiss away your tears as I did that day I found you in the bathtub with a bottle of whiskey and handfuls of oxy. I pulled you up out of the cold water and you clutched me like a drowning person. I never told you that it was I who really was drowning before you found me and brought my dying heart back to life. It was that night that you baptized yourself in my bathtub which gave me the courage to really love again. I played Szerelem, Szerelem and you pulled me into the bed, just wanting me to hold you. It was you who were really holding me, though you didn't know it. And when we make love, your hands in my heart and myself moving within you, it is you who are pouring your strength into me. I know that we can't last like this though, with secrets and shadows between us. Whichever of us leaves first doesn't matter. Only that it was beautiful while it lasted.

Ain't it what it mean when a girl
tell you she like you an all she
really mean is she wan you to **** her?

Is that what I'm really scared of?

Am I writing garbage, still awake
at 5:23 in the ****** morning,
worried about what kind of a man I am?

Do I wake up and go to work,
with this secret fear that
all my beliefs and all my hopes
amount to jack ****** ****?

You bet your *** I do,
because I was taught and accepted
a long time ago that love
has jack **** to do with who you
are, and everything to do
with how well you ****.

Some few things you should know about me
if ever I manage to capture your love.

To me, there is no such thing as casual ***
nor casual relationships, nor casual love.

It may not seem like that on the surface,
I may be able to act the part of what society
has told you to expect of a man...boy...thing.

But in truth I sit awake writing about everything
that touches me so deeply that it hurts.

Things that make me happy come with a price
called guilt, and that guilt drives me to abandon.

Stupid reasons and stupid logic born from
things done and almost done that I watched
so detached from myself that I couldn't believe it was real.

If you love me, don't ever tell me
don't do that to yourself.

I wish I knew why I stay here,
knowing that I should've quit
a long time ago, should've
thrown that ***** towel in
and taken off for someplace else.

And yet, maybe I've drawn the line
here, maybe gotten sick of packing
up and moving on whenever the urge
takes me to be a nomad again.

In the same vein though,
God what a good feeling it is
to just pack up an take off into
the sunset or sunrise, depending,
either way it's the freedom of
starting over that I know I'm addicted to.

So many times I've needed to just
collect whomever I'm in love with
at the time and burn off into the
night with nothing but a hope to
act as navigator toward the future.