I heard passion on the streets of New York City
the sea foam of the sky hanging on the Persian shield watching over us
the gloaming brings retrospect
the healthy green pendant of the six train matches the bushes in the square
in Little Ukraine
it is dark
we bounce as we step
I know when I move I will
be on my own
she tells me she hears yelling. is it happy exclamation or anger
I don't know. I say. I don't know

--

9/15/2016

the first confirmed case of cannibalism in the Jamestown colony has been identified as a 14 year old girl, possibly from a wealthy family

they found you with
lamb in your bones
and said you had a good diet

I am trying to think of
what kind of person you were
before they put a hatchet to your

skull, assembled you along with
skunk, peat moss, dog.
you were from a wealthy

family because of the
protein they found embedded in you
or maybe you were a servant

and ate well.
maybe this is why they got you–
the first two blows were shallow

and meek
the one that severed you into
cuts for meat

broke your tibia
like you would slaughter cattle
maybe, the archeologist said, if she had

someone to protect her
this wouldn't have happen
she didn't.

but then I read you were dead
before they even
started

9/11/2016

Feburary 2015

you were so tough I thought,
I always have this belief about men that they're not as tough as they think they are and I'm always right
I don't know who my friends talk to I think maybe I'm just soft or
and I remember you,
who'd come from poverty
and no father
would smile vaguely when we, all our friends
sat in your house and when we drove in your car with the windows down it was feburary but we didn't mind
you never showed me any feeling we never knew
what was going on with you
you were excited to get your life together and bring honor to your country
the week before you did I saw you and
it was a Sunday we were alone
you gripped the steering wheel we had stopped somewhere because you had to do some business whatever that meant
a man came to the car you called him ******* and he called you chamaquito you went into his apartment and came back two minutes later
the car was silent as we rolled past Westminster and the Seminary
you cut the air
"you know I don't want to go to the marines
I wanted to be a businessman"
I never saw you after that


you went away to Arizona
and I never forgot that
because it was the only part of you
I ever truly knew,
of this vague polarizing figure

the great horned owl outside my window
calls for its mate lost in the forest
and i understand.
our only difference is
he has found her
and has stopped.

7/30/2016

everytime I open my eyes
in the mornings or late afternoons
i begin to writhe in anger and contort
and my blood is roiling and I swear
I look at my pink skin I can see it steaming and foaming and I am manic again and ready to ruin some relationships again,
and I am awake again.
And when I wake up alive I feel the world has failed me
a little more every day

-

-

warning: suicide, graphic descriptions

"I forgive you for what you did not do."
Anne Sexton

    The sterility will crush me. The whiteness will **** in through my nose and ears and consume me when the room implodes, if it could. But it cannot. I wrote to tell you it is so lonely desolate and so cold. There are people here but they are as lost in death as they were in life. All the jumpers go to rooms where they are eternally falling all the squashers go to the crushing room where walls like the southbound 1 train during rush hour kiss constantly and the ribs are broken, contorted put together again and there is no clean up crew that isn't getting paid enough for this and no cynical commuter fathers telling their children they are sorry they were late but there was a suicide at the 66st stop.

    The drowners live in a soggy blue haze where they gasp for air and the pill takers have it easy. They always have a stomachache nothing more; and they faint over and over again giving them rest what they wanted anyways. I wanted to let you know you have probably walked into my room and seen the stupid polite carrion of myself. I trust you have read my note and I trust you have told your parents screaming on the phone and this isnt happening.

     I trust you've delayed to call the paramedics and ended up calling them 20 minutes later than you should because you knew I was dead- the cold paste of my wrist was just too true blue and it reminds you of that ring you got me when we were young and said it promised something.

    We listened to I Left My Heart in San Francisco that night in my suburban American Craftsman. Neither of us have ever been but I liked the line about being left alone in Manhattan because that's how I felt often I never told you this once I got there though. You've combed my hair that you always said reminded you of gold-leaf and you've punched out the wall because you said some stuff or maybe didn't that one time and you're ****** about it. The neighbors have heard your keening and wondered what is going on.

   You've stiffened my collar so as to hide the marks and put my body down but nothing will hide the marks even long after my body attempts to rot but can't by way of embalming as I sleep in the graveyard I told my mother I wished to be buried in when I was 15.

   The victims of garrote are constantly choking and our necks break constantly. Our throats gasp but we cannot get air. To get into heaven I must make my peace with the life I had on earth. But I will not. I  wish I had not thrown out my pills.

7/22/2016

yesterday
a buck moon
the pregnant off white rock
hanging heavy in the sky
everything on the ground painted luminous and grey
i accidentally scratch my self,
draw blood above my lip
the brilliant garnet roiling down my chin
leaving a sickle shaped scar with a story to tell
the velvet pushes through the skin,
growing off the skull
for competition and for ***
and we laugh together hahahaha just like humans
but it isn't really the case
and the human skull is so ugly itself
once all the skin has rotted away and melted
into loam
my buck moon will come
one day

8/15/2015

This girl and I, we'd settled
In the dark corners and grimy alleys
of Princeton (where? People would ask)
Sitting on our ***** yelling at college players
thrown onto the briar patch with the
force of a bird at flight
we'd delay death by persuasion
the cigar cutter had already lopped off
our knees.

The magentine and orange yellow garrote of the twilight has yet to strangle the youth of Princeton, but it soon will. Sun sets over stockton and delphinus sits on the shelf of the sky next to the half moon ready to maurade over Marquand. Most of the store fronts, they shutter, a year closes in like a train in a tunnel and most do not know anything yet. Cannon and Tower boys do not go to Town anymore they go home to their Bay and Gables, their saltboxes ready for suburban consumption, for the dirt world of finance and brokerage, ready to pray their scandals are quickly smothered and they will be- meanwhile here sits youth, which drools in a corner, never to be invited by a bickeree again, watching the low shrubs and mafia graveyards of Linden parade through the train window, a melded scene like a watercolor. The  limestone walls of Princeton sit up straight in vigilance, the heavy doors shut along with the adolescene and the stores. The sun sets over Stockton and rises over Beekman.

5/6/2016

     The doctors- they told me, said I was sick. But I told them you were sicker. That it your illness- it's too much. I tap on the wallpaper and hope you understand where i'm coming from. I adjust the tin bars that won't move on the window plates.  I wanted to thank you for coming over to visit me firstly. Secondly- I want you back. I guess directness isn't the best way to someone's heart or maybe it is. I don't know why we parted. You,  you are so sick- a sick little girl, you need a nurse or perhaps some care. I never realized this- I only did now and now i'm locked in this hospital, i've caught it myself. I'm as good as dead now. I am sorry for being such an important part of your life- maybe if I wasn't, it wouldn't hurt to see me like this. Maybe if i wasn't i would stop disturbing you-  leave you alone. But i need you back- I don't  know why we left eachother.

-and why?

            Why not? You don't  remember all the good parts of us? Do you remember how the Blackgum trees in the park  smelled like after a good rain while we walked through them and tried to get a good bench by the reservoir, you know, the one that always smelled like pondweed? I'd told you about how they're called Naiad weeds. I told you what Naiads were. You remind me of one, all pink faced and watery. You were always sort of ephemeral and wavering like water.

-why are you telling me this?

            Because it's you.  You're wavering jumping pondwater  and you're the kittens that old woman who lived near you kept. We used to feed the ones that wandered near your terrace. I thought they smelled bad,  but you said to not say that because it would hurt their feelings.

...

No- please don't touch me.

...

It's as if a corpse touches me when you reachout that hand.

...

Don't touch me! with your fetid finger, your moribund edge. You make me want to cry, you make me want you back with me- mostly you confuse me. How could you have so much respect for life? It was my favorite thing about you. You should've been a ****** Aryika. somewhere, in India. How could you care so much about a life, from a person's to a cat's feelings and even to a little mite's? How could we have sat and listened to Chopin's Mazurkas during that one big hurricane with my old battery powered radio, and how could  you have made me cake when everyone forgot my birthday? How could you? How dare you. How could you have so much respect for every life except your own?

short story  i wrote in 11/1/2014*

Decomposing sewer rat- that's the smell that will always remind me of her.
A tow colored ponytail, pulled back tautly with the smallish bobby pins holding down her page bangs, would greet me every time I walked into the cafeteria at lunch. She was a new kid, a sophmore, and I didn't know her name. She sat alone by the big red painted double doors. Everyone in the school wanted to get out-  but she seemed to always be smiling. It was my second semester of senior year, after winter break, after weeks of seeing the same girl sitting alone and never seeing her hair down that I decided to finally sit down next to her. The way she ignored my varsity jacket was striking- though it was my older brother's, the football team's logo always seemed to impress new girls who didn't know any better. She just kept on eating her yogurt. And then she looked to her right. And she kept on smiling. 'Hello, and your name is...?'
'Mike,' I offered my hand. And you? She just said her name was J.
I took it but wasn't satisfied. She went on to tell me she was new, from Burlington, Vermont- that she hated Scarsdale. And the bell rung. I went home that night endlessly calculating what the J could've stood for- Jennifer? Jessica? June? Jessica had me by the heels and she held me upside down. It took me days and days and finally a week and finally even a month to convince June that we should see each other outside of school. And then it took me that night taking out the trash to find out that Jennifer lived three doors away from me in a huge limestone manor. Then it took me the next day to convince her that- hey- tomorrow is a Friday, why not do something?
June said yes, put her sweater sleeve to her hand. I read once in a European studies textbook that in Elizabethan playhouses, they would sell orange rinds in little tea bags for people to hold up to their noses- the smell of all the people who didn't know about washing was so nauseating. It was ten pm when she called me that night and told me her parents would be in the Catskills and she hadn't seen my parent's cars in our driveway- so why not go to the city?
I took it in careful consideration that lasted approximately 5 seconds. I said yes si and da in every language possible. Something told me to go with her. I thought of the way she always smiled whether it was wide or wan and I could hardly wait for Friday night at 10pm.
The next day we drove to the city in her Audi cabriolet. I played New Order- but we didn't get to the city in the time we expected. The woods seemed to go on to the tune of the Perfect Kiss.
But by Face Up, we were in the city. We'd parallel parked in front of some bar  and made our way around. Then halfway through the sidewalk she asked. "Can we ride the subway?" I nodded. I supposed a Vermont girl had never seen New York City anyways. We took the R train at Rector until the end of the line. Then we went home. After that day, She went home after she dropped me off. I didn't find out what J meant or was and then it took three days to see that Jessica's house was actually just a forest. There was no limestone. It felt real, the riding the R train and the music in our ears  and even the yogurt she had eaten. But it took the next morning to monday to see there had never been a girl named J and the table was empty. It hadn't been a dream but I had to wonder if it was even real. But the other day I was on my way to Lexington  and I had sworn to god i'd seen her on the rails- on the rails! I cried for help but everyone just stared. Then I grabbed my briefcase and decided to go home instead of work for the day.

i found a draft of a letter i wrote 5/2015*

an embittered ugly facade covering a deeply hurting human. in this facade the wall looked like apathy and one day a crack appaered. she figured the best repair was debauchery- her hair was shorn and she lived like caligula. this only created more cracks among the buttresses. then you came. you knew how to fix the cracks and then

[fragment]

4/29/2016

I smile dumbly
and blink my grainy
eyelids.

The sky looks like a
Monet detail
of mallow,

grey and
baby boy blue
tepid and

As we make
our way down the
avenue with

lighters
I give her a
pallid glance

and it is not
our beautiful day
and they are far away

the peonies,
laid,
grow out of the ground

and the people out of
the town
I go home

and lie in bed and
I remember talking
to myself once I

recalled
"I love  New York
Because there's so many bridges to jump off"

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

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.

3/18/2016
rockefeller college, princeton university

i was staring down the
barrel, the bottom of it
petting my past, an ewe

men looked at us
found nervous excuses:
"sorry," putting down coffee next to us

we scoffed,
made 'em nervous
i forgot what we were discussing

but white noticed a
stare and swiftly turning,
said "i'll be dead in three years anyway,"

that turned him around!
neck snap
"this is just like last year," she spoke

"yea, that's stupid isn't it"
i stepped over a wrapper
recalled i haven't been to princeton

since the summer
she told me that night
she wished she felt that way every day

3/10/2016

"It was rumored that Lucrezia Borgia was in possession of a hollow ring that she used frequently to poison drinks..."

i 'oughta honour my posterity, namesake
i'm just the plainer version of the papess
nightshade? what's that?

i am the bad assassin.
either I let them live too long
or i don't know when to empty the hollow ring into the silver chalice

so i empty into my own.
here i am: lying in a gurney, which holds
my pooled throwup.

it seeped into my soft cloths, my white sheets,
it sought a purpose, removed from a place it held so dearly-
that held it...

i find we are similar
i never once thought of myself as *****
in the past

i smoked a cigarette i picked
up by the side of the highway on a dare.
"oh god, stop!" my friends laughed. "disgusting!"

they didn't know i
inwardly agreed.
i hit the flint.

hellopoetry.com/poem/1106978/witherspoon/
witherspoon
3/7/2015

I've met a few good men,
a few good men, this is why
I am so vexed.

The springing pantomines
of careful youth rings around
the green, as it always has

the campus store sells
cigarettes and muffins and condoms
as it always has, and

although the mood is different than
the one on early semester Halloween
night,

The grass is as green as it always
has been.
I need to learn to let people

and things go, but it doesn't help
when you live, when half of those memories

happened in towns where George Washington and Witherspoon got
drunk off their *****,

and Madison lied about men in the woods. Sitting dully alone in the stadium

the vast Powers,
I am one in 23,000
and I do not know how I feel

about that and the lost
days when I used to chain smoke
voraciously in the parking lot

in a car that smelled like
burnt tobacco
and run through

the rain in Murray dodge,
write on the walls at the Pyne
arches and smoke

drugs with friends
in the freezing rain on Wilson's
grave.

This is all gone now
and
I need new trivial distractions

now that all of mine are gone
and I see the summer sun getting
closer to my bruised memory.


i've met a few good men
key word:
few.

the quivering ghosts of our
salad days runs around the green
do you remember? are you sure?

i ran through the campus store
laughing til my liver hurt
posing with antifreeze, asking friends "anyone want shots?"

i don't know, wouldn't know
what princeton's like now
because i haven't been in six months.

i do vaguely remember
strips of it, the cheesecloth that wrapped around
the ides of april, freezing and shivering under my arms.

i still haven't learned how to let people go.
it is difficult when
you live in a town that is made by its history.

what town or person isn't?
constant talk of Stockton, Witherspoon and Washington's
crossing damns my existence.

i used to go down to the stadium
freeze my fingers off or pop open bottles with
White

i remember when i lied to Lacava about my first time
smoking cigarettes that is
he bought me my first pack

i sat in the front seat of the car that january
trying to coolly inhale
begging to god to not let me cough.

i didn't.
i remember i ran through the rain with someone i loved, once
through murray dodge

he'd told me he never forgot the way
i looked with eyeliner dripping down my face and
my soaking hair slowly curling into snail shells.

i'd written on the arches at Pyne
then i'd written on the walls with our spit
joking - why's it called PVNE?

I sat serenely with my friends one February day
that year, i must specify because one  has passed already.
smoking bouges on Burr's grave, so bougie.

i got new distractions
i don't have any way to keep them, though
i'll find a way in the summer

or maybe not
maybe.
maybe.

3/5/2016

it says here
'i feel so much like an old duke
tudor, you know
writing to my french inamorata
how are our *******? haha.
i hope school is going well.'

there is a certain ounce of truth to that
i lived under wraps
under blankets
you know, shock ones
hoping no one would discover
(my vulnerabilities)

you doubted the quality of marriage
but said you'd do it for me
i mean, now i've found someone
that'll not do it begrudgingly.
it was interesting though
our androgynous life
like that billy bragg song, you know?

the one i told you about in the letter?
greetings to the new brunette.
your ****** politics left everyone in a muddle!
i'm emptying my glass right now like when we used to debate
but it's not a pint i'm using to celebrate my love for you
downing more like to forget my hate for you.

3/2/2016

It's March again
and I'm lost again
wondering about the Delaware

Feeling like a child
who got more than she could
bargained for

colds bitter
good, it was a short winter
I'll never be that wholehearted

girl again,
but it was a short winter
My writing is disgusting,

Only good when I'm suffering
and the thing is I'm suffering now
and I don't know why nothing is

coming out
The year is grey, egg washed and egg white,
Painted and glazed over with

typhoid
I don't walk anymore to the reserve
don't see a point in it

There's no motivation to
see the world
try to find beauty in things

I'm trying to find where
I went
and trying to find where

I put my sanity,
Left it in a biohazard box
picked it back up ungloved

I put my hiking boots up
feel bad for the unloved agronomias
and I think it always gets better

but since my poetry's getting worse
I can't say with certainty
my world won't either.

3/1/2016

"* The river is rising
      over the thawed ground
   and the banksides. When you come you bring
      an egg dyed lavender.
   We shout along our bank to hear
our voices returning from the hills to meet us.
   We need the landscape to repeat us.
[...]
      In the debris lay
   starlings, dead. Near the park’s birdrun
      we surprised one day
   a proud, tan-spatted, buff-brown pigeon.
      In my hands she flapped so
   fearfully that I let her go.
Her keeper came. And we helped snarl her in a net.
   You bring things I’d as soon forget.

     You raise into my head
   a Fall night that I came once more
      to sit on your bed;
   sweat beads stood out on your arms and fore-
      head and you wheezed for breath,
   for help, like some child caught beneath
its comfortable wooly blankets, drowning there.
   Your lungs caught and would not take the air.*"

wd snodgrass, 'heart's needle'

here it is and here i was
succinctly woman,
growing into my title as one
never deciding whether or not

to be the one to upturn her nose cruelly
or ground her feet into the dirt shyly.
i revel in my past

and i believe it happened, yes
reading back at old letters
two years prior to the day

looking for any
auspicious auguries,
anything that would have alluded to

this swollen self.
winter this year lasted
maybe a day

i cannot decide
if that is good for me or
for the earth,

but i have never been
an
excellent oracle.

2/21/2016

I am a
horrible human
being.

But I knew this
already you see?
The difference:

A year ago I knew.
In fact I embraced
it sitting in alley

and smoking cig stub
I don't really care what happens to me,
didn't back then either.

I saw with you on the knitted grass
and reconsidered dying,
again

dying. again I
dying- again
dying, again

find what makes each one
different than the other.
I am the unsightly scar

she tries to hide during ***
  I am a syphillictic.
"Why can't you get over one night?"

because some ribbon
  snapped in half
as did my brain

I live not looking when I cross the street
I am a horrible
human

being

2/13/2016
"notice how he has numbered the blue veins in my breast.
he is building a city, a city of flesh.
he is an industrialist."
anne sexton

i've seen god themself stirring
subzero confectioner's sugar around this place,
you are the dried up ***** on my face

something acrid that i fell asleep and neglected to wash
i used to cut down swathes of brambles, and the bees
they'd run away

when i was a kid they followed me everywhere.
"you're sweet, kid" my father would say
now he just says i am stupid, so droll

as if i've never known that before
my bulbous arteries run with the notion of
him, sweltering, pointing

"bowie's on sale again,"
the same stamp on the telephone box
there, rotting, gentle

two years later
i say this: there is nothing in princeton
and everything in manhattan

that princedom where you stumble on
***** sidewalks and run hands along bubonic
subway railings

where, really
wanting to throw myself on the freight rail
would just be wanted to throw myself off the Veranzzano.

sylvia said it best, i guess
my own bell jar sour as ever
no matter whether

i'm in Bremen
Lesotho or
in his bed, again

i'd find a way to do it,
i told her
the only place i am willing to.

/

1/30/2016

we spoke in the darkened auditorium,
waiting for a dance,
waiting for stories told wordlessly

I told her about that summer and how
although I didn't like you I remembered it vividly,

and how you woke up at unbearable hours and i did it for you,
so I would wake up every 2 hours just to make sure I didn't

sleep past my 7 am alarm

I was home alone that summer
most of the time,
we laughed when my parents told us

we didn't spend enough time together
it was extraordinarily hot that summer
i remember, it was like breathing into an oven,

We drank a lot of rootbeer, sat on the porch with sandwiches, and you brought me blueberries and tried to make me laugh,

And you usually suceeded-
I hadn't yet succumbed to
tearing my hair off and sitting
in the white room like later

and I swear I've aged so much
in these two years
but I got carried away

and I told her
I don't love you at all
but rising  those chlorophyll mornings

I've never forgotten that,
I know not why-
maybe it was the light. maybe it was the heat, maybe it was my youth.

1/30/2016

there was an age
where I discovered that I had a face.
It happened all at once-

everyone tried to tell me
how they thought I was hot or cute or are you down to hook up girl?

Virginal me, i raised a pastoral finger to wag and say no no no,
I wish I had that kind of leverage now

but I am a blood stain on a sheet
a cataract in a cornea,
a nick on a peridot

but mostly
the blood

1/16/2016

The days drag themselves
succinct, akimbo-
spitting out the day in spurts and
steadily vomiting the night.

I am never afraid of death in the winter.

And so when I sit in bed
and out of the corner of my eye I see
it- death has always been a sort of

white rabbit, I once felt I was one
crushed in a young girls' hands,
having to carry that burden for the rest of her life

I don't want to say that
I missed innocence, in fact,
I want the pleasure of losing it again (Fitzgerald)

I read so much Fitzgerald that year
perhaps because I felt my life was
on some sort of side of Paradise.

Was clumsily and unbearably in love,
Princeton summers,
Was quite unloved
New York autumns,
Was throughly confused
New York winters.

The men come at us,
fling themselves like a screeching
jungle animal of a kind

But we don't care,
we sit in the park fermenting
like we usually do

but still the men laugh
still they come at us
while our skin sloughs off our faces
and we tell them "I'm dying, don't come any closer"

I felt like my face being ripped off once
but I didn't try to do anything about it
of course.

-

12/15/2015

"You, doctor, go from breakfast
to madness."
Anne Sexton

The engine of my amygdala:
                   so burnt out
I needed coolant, I needed something to prevent my
   immolation
a sort of precautionary measure

***'s flammable
  I'd soon find out
In a crowd of hundred dark and
smoke crawled through my shoulders
    social little parasite
apologize for being an interruption to everyone

   "Wish I could've been there"
Sucrose altruism,
back at the mental hospital id relived
every single second with you

thinking of your anger I read Tennessee William's letters
I loved you

I even loved your hatred.
A girl across the hall screaming
about Jesus and her ****
shouting singing Shenandoah

"But I don't need to be here,"
   I turned to my roommate,
a strong figure I still admire,
"Everyone says that, even with a Thorazine needle halfway down their ***."

They'd had a name for it
Something about kisses, I don't remember

"Yeah, it leaves a huge bruise on
your ***," they laughed in the
tv parlor

there we were
The tristate area's teenage
girls too unstable for the world

a step above "oh, you know how
teenagers are"
A girl with grey eyes

Came in my last night there
"Is it normal to cry on your
first day?"

I wasn't allowed to
even touch her shoulder
and so

with the alcohol and the
Lamotrogine I tried to figure
out where it'd all gone wrong

but it'd been hiding in me
psychotic seed,
a virus carrier a patient zero of my own

tepid insanity!

12/6/2015

"my pill is white.
It is a splendid pearl;
it floats me out of myself."
Anne Sexton


a dose of one
i douse myself with cold
exposure therapy. extreme temperature.

too late
i already did that last year
smoking new ports down to the stub

in 15 degree weather,
frost bite settling in
oh well time to go back inside

and I begin to think a little too fast
one foot in front of the other
my head pulses, a cardiac muscle


on its own,
the nerves pressing my cranium
I wince,

think,
decide that that is disgusting
take three pills and

it is like being held
i almost never feel this way
entangled in a sort of woolen comfort

synthetic tenderness that
lulls me to sleep
forces me with sharp hand
to count the sheep

12/6/2015
"Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence."
TS eliot, the wasteland

I am amberbeetle,
  stoked fire,
medicated ditz

I ramble through the wasteland,
hook foot and slackjaw
and go south in the winter.

you gave me asters a year ago
now they call me aster girl
memory almost always mixed with

desire,
and I
should've been

a pair of ragged claws
but that's a different poem.
We talked for an hour

maybe more
in the summer,
and he said

hold tight,
and I was was frightened,
and down we went.

Swiss instigation,
broken video tapes and
grimacing at sweaty sunsets

sunrises, and
there was no Japanese maple
no silver leaf,

no silver lining,
I read much of the night.
roots that clutch me in

metropolitan
rubble,
and these days

the broken deadtree gives
no shelter, no consummation
no conjugal embrace,

I don't find,
nor am I
the hanged man

"And I'd do it any other way
but when the hell am I gonna get a gun?
and you can't OD on clonepazam

without it being ugly of course."
Dorothy Parker–
I planted a corpse in my yard

Who am I kidding,
we did,
me with some assistance

It was carrion
found in the corridor
did it sprout?

it did,
but not in the way I hoped-
no carrot flowers or crabapple

in fact it was held up
by fruit vines
that illuminated it for all to see

including me.
In the sad sad light a
carved seraphim

melted into the laqueria
my nerves, they're bad tonight
and every night

stay with me
Speak with me
breed

in the rats alley
and lose your bones

10/27/2015

the morning darker now,
day's opaquement growing and foreign, a lichen on the stratosphere,
  furry and colonial,
draping the blue in a gray wolf fur color moss—
I used to think this was a metaphor for living,    
    and it stayed consistent,
the mold ***** into my ears  and eyes
  I remembered reading once
  in ancient Egypt a hook used through the nose was to extract the brain

    my cerebellum quells and throbs
Its own moldy dogged lobotomy.

after anne sexton*

12/3/2015

Here is a vivisection,
my dull operation,
  cutting into my epidermis,
pulling out maggots and rat pups,
scuttling across the scalpel,
Armillaria inside of my tendons
this itself is: a deposession,
a sort of pneumic
   inquisition, the
paucity of the gold striking someone
   sick running down my shoulders
quadriplegic in motion,
  temperament boiling
hissing now stovetop unattended
foaming at the mouth falling into the hot ,
  moving and finally
over the edge the foam sick bile like
Sliding onto the voided floor

stitch me back up.

11/29/2015

I haven't eaten in three days.
The enamel sticks to the pearl and strips away

swift current of stomach acid
throwing up something I don't
have,

rejecting something I don't have,
clear puddle
that seems like an extension of
saliva

I wish I wasn't a coward,
and I sure as hell wish I was
a person

But it doesn't work,
never does and never did
I stare at the bowl
blood mixes in

it's pink now
and foamy
if I didn't know any better I'd say

It looked like shorefoam
across the banks of an African lake.

11/15/2015


i am fetid and
spewing rabid motions rapid little

impulses
I want to debase
I scoop my iris out with a spoon

11/15/2015

it has been a while since
i've been to the wetland coppice
teetering close to the neck of
a somerset sourland hummock

soft rushes and pickerel ****,
wild lavender and marsh elder
a Canadian goose choking on a

birch branch
it died.
it has been a time since I've been there

timber rattler and weasel
playing in the grounsel
September,

like Wallace Stevens: lonely in
Jersey city.
November dead
cold bright annihilating days

i sometimes walk a mile
cutting across dead garden snakes
they sit in the living room, playing

the Nile is full of waste and bile
i wait alone by this little grove,
hoping that my fickleness of

Conversation topics
can help me now
but my mind, it raced

like a dead horse at a betting show
Sunday morning,
Saturday night really

I read Wallace Stevens in the field
And dream about jersey city