3/2/2015

“I woke up in the morning and I didn’t want anything, didn’t do anything, 
couldn’t do it anyway,
 just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made 
any sense, anything.
 And I can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t sit still or fix things and I wake up and I wake up and you’re still dead.” Richard Silken


I wrote of vultures once, I'd found in the sepulchral little category of "poems I had burnt a while ago" that I kept in my brain. I spoke of predatorial lashings against the dead prairie dogs of her and I, class of 2005- add ten more years and...
Contended May heat like the May-December romances in trope, I'd walk to bridges with notebook in sullied hand, a bit flushed, a bit healthy with the sun on my gold flakes shoulders If I had only known? Right? Haha.
The grammar rules of english: you (I) is a proper noun- but of course, i refuse to give myself that much pomp. To be full of such vanity is to be full of treacly purity- which does not apply so much now.
I had been given time to love you - until I didn't need you anymore, you said, then you'd leave- a sweetly sardonic little note, seeing as you hated the conjugal and impossible implications of "forever". I feel, now that you are gone, this is an imprisonment I am doomed to til atrophy...
You are dead. Your corpse rots in the sun of the soil in the coffin and it is still cold outside. Everytime I leave the house I ask myself what I seriously am expecting from March. The heat, the permenance of your being gone makes me sit down on the cold snow,
  My dullard heart sits with a bread knife wedged on a rib when I realize how utterly alone I am- so alone the vultures do not even circle.

3/1/2015

I don't miss it now,
your cold calculated cut
with an inflamed disdain of normality.

I'm starting to replace my love for you
with something a bit more concrete. someone a bit more real.

what can I say, it's ****** anyway
if I do or if I don't, I'll still sit in the summer sun drying dying my death out on paid vacation time.

2/28/2015

There is a sweetly tinged contrast between
the yellow of a primaverial agrimonia and a dead winter bramble,
the tingle of cola the burn of coffee
wild wide scope of memory, waiting
A wholesome night... For once!
Entirely sweet and just
the juxtapositions seem to interlock at the parts of the line; this line:
"I don't want to go," rawly stated in
a vulnerable trap, always with the sweet sun of confrontation
scheming through the panes.
So perfectly set: like an animal caught in a groundhog  cage
"I don't want to go to school" and
"I don't want to go to the marines,"
sweetly tinged contrast of  ingrate talk with hopeful interlocking at this:
Both said with an exasperated acrid breath that makes me think of the mirror stare phenomenon.

2/16/2015

I first realized, with a start,
the green bowery of knitted green turf
in May by the McCarter would
never return to me
in the winter, or maybe that's just how I felt.

The five kids sit and smoke,
and, in all honesty,
in groups I really find no comfort.

To me it is calling you scared before
and you saying you love me and will
be good.  

Guess the call didn't hold on though,
guess we're not all good now
I have 2 bars and
...

No service

8/13/2014

"The cicada's dry monotony breaks over me.
The days are bright and free.
Then why did I cry today for an hour?

I stood under oak, while autumnal fog
eddied around my feet, waiting for the bus
with a dread that took my breath away.
I stood at the side of the road.
This summer- it was the only life I had."
Jane Kenyon

A Sourland night with some tylenol at my
side and a black shirt that smells like Pierre Cardin
doesn't sound half bad,
and if it does, let me know. Do you remember telling birds at 5 in the morning to shut the hell up?
That was june and time goes on. And now you flinch as if hit when you see the first gold leaf, huh?

The end of an era we could not say goodbye to came and it went. We sat sullied in our sunken brows like children who'd misbehaved and silently regretted. Our mouths
tasted of sunflower fields and henna birchs. You realize summer is over when you feel it was minutes, not hours that you killed off slowly.

Don't worry. Nothing Gold Can Stay, this time you can't stop the gold from staying, but the feeling of a hell hot afternoon layed out overwhelming like a blanket is gone.

2/21/2015

Way too cold and dark out today
to be ******' with this, right?
listening to Jesus and Mary Chain

with the crack of my neck
I wanna just drive to the worst cafe
drink the ******* black coffee on the

bottom of the Sourland mountain.
but the fuzzy distortion of ****** rock
hurts my ears and I keep on writing.

a very old poem i just found.*

3/1/2014

I’m going downtown
with my friend named after human faith
in two days.

I’m going to wear 6o dollar jeans and a white striped
T shirt.
I’m going to entertain the fact that I’m hearing
college boys on the rowing team

shout
Hey Ladies
and How Are You
and Girls!

At us on the street,
And we’ll smile and keep walking and if a particularly nice looking one
offers to sell us his sweater for 150 dollars or asks us for our numbers
we’ll stop and talk.

It’s the Friday tradition,
though it seems unhealthy.

We’ll sit drinking large coffees and flan cupcakes by the window side
have people tap on the glass,
and laugh and we’ll cross our legs and hold on to our phones and seem
like we have better things to do but we don’t.

This is how we spend our weekends, and it’s not particularly wicked
but it’s not virtuous.
Just harmless fun.

Maybe she’ll have one of her boyfriends come over and
oh ****,
his friend has the same name as-

Well what can I say? It’s a common American boy’s name. They’re the same age and the same eye colour and the same hair colour,
and I guess I’ll walk around the park to tell my other friends on monday

“the other day I walked around the park with-!”
I see myself calling him by his name and closing my eyes
“--, come here and --, how are you and --, what do you wanna do now?”
“you like the sound of my name or something?”

2/19/2015
note: this poem reflects my political views. I don't support puerto rico's independence but i codemn the way the USA has treated it. If you're not familiar with PR's political situation or don't follow Puerto Rican centric politics you'll be lost af. Anyways this is basically the day to day life i had when i lived back in PR, and my thoughts.

I hate americans.
They ask me, especially the independentista youth,
that think they're special and especially, communist revolutionaries,
"why? after all you are a Rich Kid."

Nah, you don't understand.
coming out of the stairs of St. Johnnies with my uniform
i see them walking with their cameras and tanners
me filling up with a very real digust.

and when I sit on the metro train to
San Patricio (and what a life, when I see the drug addicts on the metro with nowhere to go and the industrial hills of Catano)
I only see my fellow puerto ricans and i am relieved.

escaping the americanness of Ashford Ave.
and when I get to Los Meadows I tell my friends,
the Rich Kids,

How is it that those sons-of-*******
can destroy our grand isle,
with their nuclear garbage

their doctors ruining our native women
and, from their offices in the mainland, teaching us english
just to send the little country peasants of Arecibo and Juncos

to die in their wars? and then
they have the audacity
to take their things and visit our beaches?

-

2/19/2015

The hurt is not enough.
the Frost crawling on the window keeps me grounded
on this sickly saccharine reality,

i'd once described a bedroom in July as an example of
the sucrose candidity of the human condition,
sticking bobby pins in my hair i'd realise in January

that the Chelsea Hotel #2 scenes were as well,
sticking to a sort of geniune artistic integrity
come to bed, hey hello to my friend afterwards

and how was it's? with little no big toothy grins
but then I would remember
sitting under elm trees at Fitzrandolph drinking a cold

coffee, because it was hot then! and it was sunny then!
and the weather conjured sweet artificial caramel flavorings-
sitting under the tree and thinking about how good life is or

was. And when I realize that the forest is as dead as it ever was
and I look at pictures of trees with leaves fully on, maybe in the
forests of Alabama or Georgia,

I realize that I haven't seen a life in a long time- but
when i burn my hand with the lighter the butane glaze on my skin
i don't really mind it that much because i think of it and quite frankly

I like to say i'm as pure as I always was but,
what burns me now: Desire desire desire
and back then the museum was talking about Roethke

and it was all I needed I didn't mind the
idle cab drivers that would call me Angel by the gates.
and my Mennonite father said I need to

repent.  I don't even want to go to
church but that is all I end up doing nowadays anyways.
Thinking about the sun, and falling over a piece of ice and seeing the

red scarlet (connotation vs denotation?) on the
white of the ice i cannot help but think that once again *the
hurt is not enough.

2/20/2015

"Lust too is a jewel
a sweet flower and what
pure happiness to know
all our high-toned questions
breed in a lively animal."
Adrienne Rich

So these days i find myself
scouring the somewhat stolid sure shores of
of seeming lust, which Adrienne Rich says is a jewel.
I don't see it
this lenten weekend.

I didn't give anything up,
maybe i'd switched from walking out of dorms into
walking out of cars, right? I laugh as I say this, not really ready
to say I am empty since I was taught to never lie and I do not feel this
after all,

More like a solid breathing discomfort at the squelching snow
on my solid leather workman's boots
lighting a cigarillo with a spark lighter and wondering what
you're up to.
My love's not so easily gained, i'd written once in a diary entry

and I suppose maybe it isn't,
but maybe it is the weather because
things didn't go as fast as I had liked this past
baptismal season but they still seemed fine.

2/18/2015

I can taste you in the air now,
even though last lazy excuse
for you is long dead.

The rainy days seem to me a
small price to pay and I've
noticed in brilliant sun tundra winds

The potted lilies have started to grow again. I saw three leaves on a stem and
the sun seems to stay for tea.

In my newfound journalistic ventures in efforts to further understand my self, of course and the

Wiley depravities of people i think I now see that in the coldest winters
the brilliant sun alone was enough.

2/18/2015

it's the place reeking of Valentino
samples,
I got the date twice wrong today and
lou reed shouts while they pluck
their eyebrows by summer aquired mirrors in February,
two dollars at the yard sale
dig it?

"But she never lost her head
even when she was givin' head"
and she says,
Hey babe take a walk on the wild
side
the girl with the samples and her
Friends are all like:

"can I borrow a shirt?"
She plucks her eyebrow In a very
manner,
The manner being she calls strangers
Mister mister like an orphan
mister mister care to spare change? or maybe a party invite?

2/17/2015

last Thursday, the snow came
down on Nassau street
and the ludlow alley
by the record shop

It came down in flurries
goosedown down on streets
where, in the spring,
students balance 12 packs

help us out!
And in the fall
they're not to be seen.

"Sir," I ask
stepping out from where
my friends drink flat whites
and chocolate lattes.

"Can I *** off you?"
i grab the Marlboro and walk away
It's funny how people suddenly
notice how cold it is outside

when you're out there alone.
"****, little lady
it is cold outside isn't it?"
and "aren't ya cold, girl?"

a David Bowie leaks out of the record
store when someone opens the door
to leave or go in ? I don't remember.

"yes, it is cold," I reply, ashing.
"aren't you outside too?"
"Well.." The men
have no business talking to me

of course.
"Do you have a ride home?"
"Goodbye," I twirl on the stomped cigarette

go back into the café
say hello to my friends
and watch the pedestrians

scurry out like weevils
in the goosedown, which
I can only see because of the
Orange lamplight.

Null

Null

2/11/2015

"Never though, my mortal summers to
such length of years should come
As the many wintered crow that leads
the clanging rookery home.
... I remember one that perished
sweetly she did move, such a one I do remember
whom to look at was love.
Comfort? Comfort scorned of devils!
this is a truth that the poet sings,
that a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things."
- Alfred Tennyson, "Locksley Hall"

Something about the florid, languid grass that
cooed in place on the turfs and greens,
stagnant in their newfound summer discovery.

The malleability of the universe seems incredulous to me certain days
the days before future people, sanguine
nights in the weaver fields wherein blocks away or a mile

they slept, before prior meetings.
So with this i am curious as i write
what lies in the field of frozen prospect garden?

where agrimonias will soon sprout jaundiced hairs
and I will sit around alone as i do in town
maybe, publicly intoxicated, slurring

along to a Ramones song with my friends
as empty as campus after a year
**** it. **** it?

2/9/2015

"every unexpected change," the ******* continued to drip from her
plum painted cupid's bow

"is an opportunity for something
great," topped it off with a terminal patient smile.

I drew on the desk with a
pen that didn't have a point.
"No such thing as nice surprises,"
dragging it across the dade pine.

"whitman's for the white men" I laughed
marauding through the green squares
AL and I cursing the wind for
our bad lighters and
she laughed again too.
"don't you mean the whole Ivy League"

"yeah **** ****, curse the Caucasian
Patriarchy dude"
she spit drool on the grass by
Dillon

"yeah man I don't know, I'm a bit
nervous you know."
she looked like a pummeled cartoon ghost and I wondered why

then behind me I heard a Hi and
I said to her "uh... Remember the American Spirits" (she ended up getting me  newports)

I turned around and oh uh hey
back in his room explained to him what Imbroglio meant somewhat

hurriedly and then I knighted it the
Whitman imbroglio looking at the door map

This poem wasn't titled the way he suggested I should
But I think it's ok

2/8/2015

for some reason I dreamt about
you last night and In the dream I saw you shirtless for the first time even though we'd loved each other for what seemed like an eternity but to married couples was nothing probably. You had a haircut and my hair was to my elbows like it hadn't been since I was about 12 and it was dyed like buckwheat. Your hair was shaved So close the barber'd almost fancied himself a lobotamist.  We lied in bed but It was usually me waiting for you to come to bed like usual. I remember I said "oh my god, I don't need anyone anymore. I was tired of the dreams. It's finally happening. You're here. I'm not living a mockery anymore." and then I woke up, and I was tilted a bit off the bed. I stood up from bed, remembered that you probably had a hit man out for me at this point. I questioned the relationship between surrealism and dreams.

2/7/2015

"you're a pig," he spat
"yeah," I fished out a stolen
Newport.

"I never knew a woman
could be so cold, you treat men
like objects or something!"

I shrugged it off and threw the
Good cigarette to the ground.
No time for that.

"are you implying I have the
prophetic male gaze"
"I didn't say anything, just that
you're cold"

I smiled, stuck my thumbs up
Right. See you later

she never actually knew what
she was, living in a sort of
twin peakish sourland town

by the river by herself
she painted her lips black?
was it black?

cut her bangs uneven and then
some.
no one really likes going to lambertville too much.

her friends stopped hiking
or maybe they stopped inviting
her or it's probably the summer is gone

a whole block of time
makes you wanna **** yourself huh?
anyways no one ever goes to Lambertville.

I always want to say
and maybe it started when I was
young, knew what a man really was

I always want to say to the men
if I'm not talking I'm thinking
about how I'm gonna write this.

And then this sort of poetic
philosophical tendency
where I try to live as many

Metaphors as possible
when I walk in front of you
and teeter on the edge

Of your doorway or
hand you a lighter with my index
singularly in your room.

especially when I sit in the
bathroom and look in the mirror
with you

except this has been executed
by every man ive ever been with
and at that point it is called a motif

"When we get to New York City, I'm gonna ******* like you've never been ****** before!" - Charles Bukowski

2/5/2015

weeks maybe even
a month? two months?
ago I'd crossreference
you in everything I wrote
As if my thoughts were some of
My pieces.
Actually, upon retrospect...

Remember when we snuck out
That June Tuesday and remember
When I told you in November
We should sneak out to the city

yeah, and make out in the middle
of the street and make
everyone uncomfortable*
you'd said with a smile

Yeah. Tell me something about new
York.
And so then like in the letters which Id tounge in cheek proclaimed Fitzgeraldian

You'd give a sentence like those
Elementary school games finish the story and you'd say

"brightly lit apartment"
the place is **** but the rent is cheap and we get by with our degrees.
"lots of flights of stairs up"
I Would read the idyls of Daphnis and Chloë at bed
"Why do you like that book so much"

Never quite got to finish that story,
But it's cause it reminds me a lot of us
I'd always say with no elaboration

But remember I said I used to
Always write about you and now
Did you know I forced this?

2/3/2015

funny what people remember
chainsmoke Marlboro in the Mitsubishi
3°f windchill parking lot Princeton waitin’
killin’ some time last day of January

More than a year since we met? Really?
Pull on the black n mild
I stubbed my cigarette
yeah really
Time flies when you’re having fun!
Well…. arguably- i want to say but i don't

Remember that time we stayed up almost all night talking? You’re a smart kid
Of course I remember.
Where was my man that day?

I know where he is now, but back then when things were
all wholehearted I am shocked and appalled to see I don’t remember!
must’ve been a dry spell huh?

anyways, i smile and realize the car's time's off
joke like what a good friend
sing along to some songs and

now i'm back where i started walking to campus.

2/3/2015

January 31 2015
"Look at this: the young girls giggle at nothing. The boys are after me. Nothing ever happens. They don't laugh hard and they don't yell. They don't get hurt or die and they don't laugh either." -Anais Nin

how many weeks are left in winter again?
the sun decided to come out today, did it not?
streaming half heartedly through the window slats of
the bathroom.

i am flicking the lighter sitting on a mattress
just going through the motions it's just standard procedure
saying to him "listen i'm probably going to write about this"

and thinking if i'm stupid enough, show him the finished product
anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law
lots of "nice kids" i spend time with i feel sort of inflicted on

or for?

staring at the ceiling and
"hey this feels like a Bukowski poem"
and then, trying in my best impersonation of the drunken Fritz:

"met this girl today/we sat on a mattress and smoked and- um,
we just met today, and um, you know."
then standing up afterwards

with the gross marlboro gold inbetween my mouth
don't worry, i won't smoke it inside.
throw my pack on the bed,

lots of nice kids i've written about
that are just that
and i frown at nassau hall coming up the

steps.

first kiss.
I said
"don't even play, you know
I write poems about everything
That happens to me."

Turns out they were never too interested
In what I wrote.
People are so vain, though

Seems people like to ask
Or be shown be told
"look at this poem I wrote

Hope you don't mind.
It's about you."

My friends joke afterwards
they like to wash the sin off
but they are not laughing.

2/3/2015

I'd written a poem about a
man I kissed once
real cool cat
digged the poetry,

memory smell's like autumn.
"How topical," he said on the phone
when i showed him.

Null

"1.
...***, as they harshly call it,
I fell into this morning
at ten o'clock, a drizzling hour
of traffic and wet newspapers.
I thought of him who yesterday
clearly didn't.
2.
That "old last act"!
And yet sometimes
all seems post coitum triste
and I a mere bystander.
Somebody else is going off,
getting shot to the moon.
...we murmur the first moonwords:
Spasibo. Thanks. O.K.
- Adrienne Rich

I meant to write a headier poem about this
I sit down think about the quarter moon
is it in a fourth? I don't know,
the half of halves

here it is, here i am
writing down all there is to
saint saens the cello

i have a migrane, god.
jesus utterances but afterwards
we'd walk out the dark basements

and smoky apartment rooms (with a start over
sense later in the park)
with this and once you'd told me
"I think shame is a part of me"

however the other one would just
cross his arms
"come on be normal how are you are you ok whatever i don't
care anyways"

not to talk
the heat of the
flue hot on my face

i can't talk if i do i'll have to spit
out this window roll down the car!
the car window

sometimes i'd cry even reduced to tears
i knew to not try that **** with the other guy
you'd just stroke my hair and oh god

Oh god no one had ever touched
hair that softly in the history
of anything

or pulled it like that either and
so i remember august beach nights once
where i'd cry from that memory and

my mother would ask why do you weep?
why do you cry kid?
i'd just look at the breaking waves

the saens sinfonie in my head still
hoarsely say  "it's just cause... i'm loved so much you
know"

and me and the guy with the room and the
black hair don't even
count on it
'
he'd hold my hand, alright
i'd feel no comfort in it
still feeling like i'd

taken a friendly stroll
along the state roadway
chemicals. chemicals. chemicals

soft sun in the
black bamboo
flooringwood and goodbyes.

1/29/2015
princeton thursday night
all out of coffee
and, sitting by wood slats of the
sad sunroom i
smile at a dead beetle

set the record down on
helen forrest and all she does it talk about
how she loves so madly

the sun sets on the west
sourland bramble downwards the cul-de-sac ridge
was in my line of sight long walks

but pulmonary bruises like the radiators
and that was in what? october? april?
no. april's too early

i close my eyes in bed and
i still hear that ****** song
enraptured i sink back and

i open again i open!
i can't afford to die or lose
same thing, just yet

i have dorms to sneak into and
cigarettes to put out,
more lifetime flatlines to complain about and

drain pipes to stand next to and
grass to sink into when it thaws and
unexpected phonecalls from past men
to receive.

month long in absentia you never called me first and now
i gotta go flip this record over, man.
stand up down the stairs off the bed
remind me not to blink for too long.

null

1/20/2015

every man i have taken
is dead to me.
They're dead in the back of the room and no smoking sidealleys, handing a bag of ****** like 'here,'
cigarette-in-mouth induced lisp
They're dead in my best friend's bed or at least used to be lying spent and of course not thinking of me to only say how they dislike.
Peculiarities like: I wish he'd grasped my hand as he pushed in and effort face and all had hurriedly torridly muttered "i hate you, babygirl" because I love to get my fortune told. What is the future?
Peculiar because the other one didn't talk  while high and especially not then, I would love to inherit his estate of drugs and kissing my held hand walking home at 9pm.
I only cried for one of course and barely at that.
In this life,i am beginning to realize certainties.

1/18/2015

here is one thing i have always liked
about myself:
i can force a poem.

12:27am on a sunday morning,
i wonder what you are up to
thinking probably you have more

**** than me,
more luck than me
and you'd told me once

walking down the orange streetlight sidewalks
in mercer county developments
"you gotta be in a good place in

life to do drugs, and i'm always
happy, i gotta celebrate that."
your crooked white teeth

curling upwards and your
blue scary sharp eyes smiling
i just shoved my fingers in the

ripped jacket pocket harder
and gripped your hand with my
other.

"i guess i could never
do too many then."
i'm kidding, though

and i keep taking hits.
i haven't heard from you in weeks
last i saw was your

scaryskinny naked legs
next to mine on a scaryskinny bed.
but i do know you're not exactly

suffering out there
and i wonder what your secret is.
i'll never see you again after those

scaryfast two weeks
i know that and yet sometimes i wonder
how i learned to force my poems so easily.

1/15/2015

sitting behind the shed at the seminary
where we'd rolled off together for the first
time that night in the fall

but that's another story.
stolen lighter flick,
first hit's my honor

and soon my manibular ramus
is reaching towards orion's belt and
i realize with that it's your

favorite constellation and I think about how
I Have To Laugh plays, the Fleetwood mac
hurting the crests of my pink pulled lungs

swaying said manible to the slowly winding
upriver bass remember when LSD was legal?
she says and they used to test it on citizens?

it rips up through my own breath with the
guitar mucking creshendo and the words
it's over, it's all over and i'm glad to be free

and i laugh,  i cannot stop it,
i look up at your favorite constellation
we promised we'd look at at the same time

at new years and i feel very bad because it
is a long time ago perhaps even two weeks,
and the tobbaconist laughs when we ask for Ozium

and I feel bad i don't think of you that often
but then i stand up and say to my friends
hey where you going i'm hungry

and then the fleetwood mac's a story
on itself from the past and i feel my
legs growing on and i realize feeling guilt

because of you
is thinking of you
and i feel a bit better about myself

and dismiss it completely
and keep walking
making sure to cut across *Alexander Hall

1/12/2015
"There is no woman living that draws breath
So sad as I, though all things sadden her.

Alas, Love, what is this thou wouldst with me?
What honour shalt thou have to quench my breath,
Or what shall my heart broken profit thee?
O Love, O great god Love, what have I done?"
- Algernon Charles Swinburne

Utility boots set down stolid on the asphalt
of the Powers field
by the power vested in me
as I sit in stadium seat 547B

In the cold, bathed
in the antifreeze holding
it steady in my mouth

a fat orange plum on the metal
mandible.
as soon's the safety's off with the
fork it's a

crack light, crack light as my
friends would say
and I think who the hell would
ever do drugs?

You've come a long way, Baby
the box says
and all the ones serious about
their tar intake

make fun of me
girl things, girl stuff
where's your love for camel?
but really. cancer isn't a competition.

it is cold and colder.
i think of ******, i think of you
most importantly

of how i probably wouldn't be staring
dully at the bright orange paint
PRINCETON

and throwing stubbed out cigarettes at
the turf.
the next field over was the one he kissed
me in that night

and i'd thought of you then,
thought of you always.
and why the hell?

it is funny. I know why i do this
i told myself i would never smoke
because i get addicted too fast

procrastinate far too much.
i throw another dead little Virginian girl
at the grass chambers of hell below

and I look at my frostbitten fingers tips to
see if they are still there.
because it is my fault,

and it always is;
debauchery's been my best friend for
so long

and i do not know why these boots are
so broken in,
so sturdy and so very "here"

when procumbent you'd
say to me i don't know what will happen
but the future's going to make us happy

and i guess it worked out for one of us.
i haven't talked to him in three weeks,
the almost father of my almost child
(thank god. . .)

the sire of my sense of
restlessness
his words of "i'm 16 going on 21"
ringing on to me

and making my tongue bleed
as i reach for the bottle of tea
i had dropped somewhere in
the "B" seats

but where was i?
oh yes, where you are  not
and i'm going down the stairs to
where i'd throw down the goodness

on saturday nights in november
and i can't feel my toes now too
so i go down faster

my head reeling
and the marlboro boys and the
camel boys tell me that virginia slim's
supposed to not make you feel anything.

11/21/2014
to every person i've ever loved
who loves the party more than me.

You down a 40oz
I write it all down
on a friday night.
But where              is the difference.

I'm feeling pathetic
you're putting hands down pants
But where              is the difference.

Haha.

And in my head, maybe yours
It's recited:
"It's ok to feel tired
Ok to feel bad, Ok to
wish you had things you
can't always have.

Ok to go to parties
Ok to go to school
watch out, babe!
the drool from
those boys- i still see it
on your neck
even today!"

Clearly, you're wrong
40oz liver kid and not one mixed message
on my drunk message phone receiving center
either you don't think of me

when you have no impulse control
or you are disciplined.
i'm not sure which i prefer
do i want to be an impulse?

Maybe. But it's because
I know and you don't
God, i just want-

Looking ****** never getting called pretty
except for when you're weird
and you're sit here
not beered up, BUT riled up

When today your grubby hands
slip n slide down a rusty zipper
while I sit and write on a friday night

but the jokes on me
because come tomorrow i may just
live happily

and let those grubby fingers hold my
hair or maybe
i'll be the one touching the zippers.

with Bolt velocity,
  no moment's hesitation
I got a thirty eight on my math test
but you go out all day three point five gpa
still saying you miss the trees and bees and

(please, I need a vacation.*)
you've been having a bad time too
but it's ok i don't believe **** of what
you say or do
but i'm leaving it up to you like you know I
like to do if you know what I mean

Laziness is interegral of me
so is apathy
and so is envy
  but what's the difference?



do i care?

11/21/2014
1
It is a november night,
and the chill in the air is a colder one at that.
Do I offend it when I lock myself in my room?
  perhaps it says
     'Do you not want to be with me?'

Dearest,
It's not that.
          Definitely. It is not.

But when will the wind learn?
for it only feels  the tailends,
never verbalized.
go on wondering
why people run from it.

2
But when the wind is about to
    lose its mind from loneliness ,
              it screams.
                   This is called a blizzard, or in the warmer months,
                   a hurricane.

3
It doesn't make it less lonelier.
   In fact,
     it only makes it worse.
People board up windows,
go to cheap motels inland.
That's why it always rains softly
after the storm passes through.

11/1/2014
   Every time I go into the library basement I think about the fact: at one point I would have taken a very soft rubber bullet to the ball of my foot for him. Now, at this point, i'd take a very real bullet on the occasion we had to cross paths. Sometimes, walking through Rittenhouse square, I would get this urge to give him a tremendous hug.
  But with the same intensity, a feeling of unease would creep on me when we drove in his car down the hill, humming and rolling with the quiet effects of German efficiency. I wondered. I couldn't possibly be scared of him.
  I'm sure he thought the same things. But mere rejection of Mariology at our young age'd contributed to our mutual apathy. I hate writing in parks. I had to write my Joycean riddles facing the door. I couldn't come to terms with him or anyone reading even a word by mere coincidentiality, right-place-at-right-time.
  Truth is, naked and embryonic, that none of this happened. This is just a cute dream. Philadelphia park dreams with the one who took my... innocence? I more like confirmed that societal pressures are *******. Like my friend Francis Scott said- I just want the pleasures of losing it again.
   When I sit here doing my AL 2 homework and he is doing a University research paper, the fuckedupedness hits me like a brick. Born too late or born too soon, easy come, easy go. I realize that I may be scared when i'm in that car.
   Because the truth is that yes,I do have to write in front of a door- but... I never thought that we'd every really be together in the grown up love future. Capable of loving someone that much I know. Old letters prove it.
   And where am I left? He is saying things to me he probably will say to someone this very year- and i've never said any of them to anyone in my life.
    I close my textbook, yawn a bit. I know there won't be a grown up love future- an apartment. But I just have to make sure the fantasies expressed by him are copacetic.  How will a day in the apartment look like for us?

He'll forget, if I don't first.

10/3/2014

at high noon, and
i think, high tide
She looked up at the shy pisces sun, which is never brilliant,
tripped over a brick, traced her long shadow on the sidewalk
with her finger in the air
and i had to remind her I was standing right behind.
she'd say "right, that you are" I was tempted to
add that I wasn't quite sure about that.

I noticed our shadows were contorted, stretched
like papyrus,
I was remembering how she'd announce at times with no
order: "I am happy" or "I'm sad" while watching T.V.
or walking down the lane.
But now she didn't quite seem to say much.

And I was always asking "Amy you happy? Amy you sad?
Amy you OK? Amy you fine?" Amy you ok? Amy you ok? Amy you ok? Going well? Fine?
It was like that

we held hands in a modern art museum is how we met
"It's a good picture," she had noted of "My Grandparents, My Parents and Me".
I had looked sidelong to its neighbor, a picture of a trashcan
trying to desperately scream about some societal ill
lost in translation forever.

I had already given up when she had given me a 'goodday'
I didn't care about seeing her anymore
but it still hurt.

My name? Jane. Bryant Jane. Born a man
or at least Earth Planet tells me my parts belong to a boy, whatever that is.
In second grade kids teased me and I went by my middle name
as a form of protest against them.

Looking back, I was feeding them.
Or was i starving them?

I read once the name Jane is considered bad luck
in English royal life
I entertained this just as I did my taut masculinity
this 'girl' Amy found it cute. but

remember how i had ended up asking for her opinion on everything in the end?
because she would not say it on her own volition?

10/9/2014

   It might have not happened,
for fear of it happening long ago.
   I can remember it well with varying
degrees- I cannot at the same time.
   It was hot? Sweltering? The Hoosier lake
that after independence day
   Everything lived cloaked in ambiguity for me
but I just knew I was happy
   O, how the score was settled for me
That summer day
   at Ken- Ray.

1/5/2015
Carolina, Puerto Rico
"Llegó la adolescencia. Me sorprendió la vida
prendida en lo más ancho de tu viajar eterno;
y fui tuya mil veces, y en un bello romance
me despertaste el alma y me besaste el cuerpo.

¿A dónde te llevaste las aguas que bañaron
mis formas, en espiga de sol recién abierto?" - Julia De Burgos

so i sit here sickly inspecting
the light's gone dim
in a room where the sun shines through all of the slats
in the nestled crook nape of the Canovanas hills.

at the cape
of my head i'm trying to come to
terms with the fact.
the fact of what?

just the
fact.
I think of all the days I

spent sitting in this too sunny
room the too soft bed
my too hard body making prints
all over the caramel sheets.

It is my last day ever in this house
I touch the tiles and hear a Lomas rooster
crow and for what
does it crow?

A cloud moves away from the sun
the light is all over me now
and the only creeks

i've ever felt are the Bedford creek
and the Burnt Hill River of my town
I think of Loiza

and it is with a slight poignancy
and a bit of relief
i remember my plane
leaves in three hours.

If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose."*
Charles Bukowski

I miss you
holy ****, I miss you
I'm not saying it out loud

because i can't even say it in my head.
I am
going to hell.

He tells me he likes
his girls selling drugs
just like him

I smile a bit.
I am hated despite my
despises my

and i stretch out a bit
hey, how about
that eighth you promised me?

hold up, girl
we're almost to my house.
and i think maybe it's your fault

then i remember my morals threw themselves
out of the car
and at what highway?

"Because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."*
Sylvia Plath

And we sat dumbly on his too big mattress
a cigarette stain here, there
his pants still on the floor

we stared at eachother through the mirror
oh God, what a recurring theme
in my life
and maybe his.

**** water,**** water
******* nosebleeds and
cracked knuckles

our little litany
but please, he'd beg
don't do any of those til

college.
Walked back to the theatre
where i would tell my parents

we were.
"Honey baby,
i'm 21, not 16"

and for a
second i almost believed it
and then he smiled.

"Oh honey
baby, you know the
expression."

Honey baby
Honey baby
He'd

grab my hair like
a ragdoll then
remember to stroke it

in the four thirty pm
sunsets of december
I was reminded of a

sort of sentimental tenderness
and he asked me in the
cigarette perfumed room

"Honey baby,
why're your eyes
misty for?"

I wanted to say
the way he held me
unabashedly

reminded me
of
oh, nevermind.

we sat in his room
staring dumbly at eachother
twice maybe

me trying to squeeze in
just a little debauched
moment

last of the year.
He put on his glasses
then his pants.

I told him i felt sometimes
as if i was living with a vitriolic
air round me.

The wool spread slept dumbly
at my stolid crossed
underwear legs and he just said

"Are you kidding?
do you even know what
just happened?"

12/28/2014
for ES

the dictionary definition of prospect is
"outlooks for the future"
and so this i ponder on a train platform.

once walking between the larrikin
of halls Class of 1903 and Jones,
i'd come across the gardens,

prospective ones or so said the
namesake.
i stepped over the leaves that were

on the ground but not quite
off the branches
read the bronze penny

stained black tablet
the roses and blackeyed susans,
cultiviated by class of 1850

gentlemen farmers
and named as the
view of the sight

filled one with such
good prospects.

now i don't quite know
why the trolly dodger park's
called that

and i've never quite been
so, thinking about it
i'll have to rely on

going with you
but of course
you say the same about the Gardens

so take my hand and follow me

12/18/2014

months ago
walking to your dormitory room
i had asked myself
had i really taken this spurned summer
romance and spun it to this
thing that only breathed when you
touched it with a cautious finger?
a figure moves while i sit
in an empty parking lot at night in december.
we have not spoken in two weeks
and i think that is ok.
it is funny how
i’d **** for you turns without hesistation
into i’d **** you
provided the circumstances and whether
they are extraneous.

10/4/2014

noting that nothing
much compares,
i get up in my bra

while an inamorata
lies behind me on the dormroom bed
their dormroom bed

and i look in the mirror
but i do not even think
to look at my face

like they are doing.
they are studying the curve
of my ears

and the way the shoddy
window lights
my browbone.

but they cannot see my tailbone,
because i must always
keep my skirt on.

they ask me to come to bed
i think about it and checked my
missed calls.

i tell them we are cinematic
and they say well I love you
patting the bed.

i shake my head again
cold as i was when we first met
grown cynical.

i do not look at my face in the
five times i get up to observe
the shape of my chest

while they lie behind me waiting
for what?
i only make eye contact

with myself when i am fixing their shirt
in the bathroom mirror
and we look at each other

through it. A hand on my head.
I cast my eyes down to their
shirt collar that needs fixing.


How handsome are you now?

11/9/2014

it’s not a question
of whether or not
but rather how

your crooked elbow
hangs over my collarbone
as you reach for your phone

lying procumbent on wherever
the circumstances have placed
us

whether it is a dorm bed or
a basement couch me sitting up in a cold
sweat
or the red of my sunburn on the white
sheets of my july bed

it’s never been a question of state
no matter where the state
until i’m sitting

staring at the empty space you left
next to me or
in my head.

it’s not a question of legitimacy
with the intimacy in your tethered
voice suggesting otherwise

but i can’t help but despise
wild intricacies of time.