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.

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.

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.

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.

10/3/2014

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?

7/1/2015

"you will remember, for we in our youth did these things:
yes many  beautiful things" - Sappho's fragments

Greenwich Village, NYC

Only the 24th of June and
Simpson and i already
tire of the summer weather.

I always seem a little thinner these months
i note, i bite a strawberry candy and show her
how to light her lighter

just hand me the fork
no more callousness
both on palmflesh and human dealings

the building facades on Charles street
as in the southern Chawellsss....
she explains alcoholism runs in my family, you know?

i nod. no other problems i presume?
the community garden nods and
people who will always be richer,

prettier, strut past with tuesday briefcases
and their children's wheelcradles with ethiopian
and guatemalan hands on the handlebars

follow a block behind.
But we're from Joisey, and **** proud of it!
Lobster rolls and jimmies and johnnies and

boardwalk planks Erin dreams of
broadway instead and neonatal nursing,
who doesn't?

the only youth on the street that day we
teetertotter past all the cafes and pubs and
laundrymats

*you know, if this was the school year we'd
get picked up for skipping school

12/18/2014

Subartic winds howling down tunnel wind slleys
sounding a lot, you know, like us.
Smoke plums would climn up past our
cupid's bows reaching fo the reaches of dark matter
"oh don't worry about me"'s
under the sweet toffee light of the cannery
black haired boys would smile and we'd
spit back more crass
the light shining down on our columellas
and the trefoils of menthol ginger history now-
a boy would take out his lighter
and somewhere behind us in the back of town
we'd hear the ghost of a christmas Mel Torme song
on the terrace of a good cafe.

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.

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.

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.

2/24/2015

  The magpies sang up in the rushes– it was the second hottest day of that winter, the gilded winter specific silver sun (for the light seems brass or golden other times) parading through the glass of cars and storefronts and painting people's faces as they looked through.

  This light seems to be extremely influential in visual memory– in fact, I daresay if it were not for the light I would not be writing this.
  Wallace Stevens stated plainly and succinctly once, sweetly ochre, that the origin of love is one often hotly pursued, but its fluttering fashion has so distinct a shade, at its birth, that one can immediately tell.

  And so speaking on the similar topic of distinct fluttering things, Adrienne Rich said herself that love is given much poetic attention- that lust, too, is a jewel. And is it not? It seems more at times that *** removed from love or emotional background is more interesting.

     After all, weren't princedoms in the past running to the brim with more ******* children than actual heirs? Weren't steppe chateaus and inconspicuous inns in the ravine crawling cities put in place for politicians' mistresses?

     Digressing, these were all thoughts sitting on my shelf sitting in the Mitsubishi backseat. "This space is... surprisingly big eh?" I remarked, puffing on a perique, and he'd laughed a little, and I didn't realize what I said, and so then I laughed more.

   Is it possible to separate the after *** phenomenon found in one stemming from casual circumstances from the one in an emotional commitment? The sweet subtleties came to the surface for the very first time since I'd last loved.

    What subtleties? It may sound puerile, but a particular kiss– we were discussing the epitome of innocence in nature and I said that the range is the only place I feel a riveting sense of Puritan complacency. With this he was so struck he kissed me- no more nor less than 3 seconds. It is a very particular kiss that cannot be described- not a ****** one, but one that proves humans are physically social animals.

   It took us both by surprise. This casual sense of security and flushed faces and closure that i hadn't felt with any other casual passive passing people, I felt, was closely tied to a platonic love and admiration.

  Dopamine and oxytocin are released upon ******. It goes back to my Freudian beliefs of human reproduction being exclusive Machiavellian. The reason that oxytocin is released specifically is because it bonds- in fact, it makes the partners want to physically stay together, so in the eyes of biology they can make more children.

  Funny how science works, and funny how that's the way things were programmed to be, however humans as insolent as always found aways around. But the body prevails and so the sense of casual confidence and closeness endured.

   There has never been an instance where I have been more sure that I am not romantically interested in a person, and yet I feel this platonic adoration as strong as my romantic feelings- of course there is something tweaked, if it wasn't, It wouldn't be platonic.
  I have to ask myself if platonic love challenges romantic love, or it is a completely different name all on itself. Or perhaps I  should consider that the reason I am looking at this so hazily was because of the silver winter light.

12/24/2016
to G.G.
"When the sons of Princeton
Gather anywhere,
There’s a place they think of,
Longing to be there.
It’s the one and only
University,
Situated and celebrated
In New Jersey
-Traditional Princetonian song, "Going Back to Nassau Hall"


You worried I
wouldn't contact you again
I laughed because it was funny.

I'd told you
my favorite beach boys song
was That's Not Me

He moves to the city and regrets it
I guess maybe the feeling of being in
over my head prevailed in my life.

Speaking of which–
we sat in the deserted
Prospect Garden

where Fitzgerald did once
And it was donated in 1879
people wrote of it:

"Its grounds, like eden"
I wondered if this was ephemeral
looked hard for the temptation.

I didn't see any fruit trees.
I stared straight ahead on the bench
into the piercing dark

English Yew
behind us
and the red gravel.

I said:
"I can't use thin spoons"
I didn't look at you when I did.

"When you say that,"
A pointedly deep breath
I turn to you.

You continue: "I feel like I love you."
I laughed, not because
it was funny

But I laughed in its simplest form-
Is it not an expression of human happiness?

You told me that you
didn't know why
I seemed to

Dislike the things
that made me great
I laughed because it was funny

And turned to kiss you
you were the first person to ever say
I was "absolutely" beautiful

What do you say to that? I
smiled and
tried to not look

At you in a way that
betrayed to you the feelings
I was trying so very hard to conceal–

they said this:
That I was starting to feel the affects
of a very deep fondness.

As time passes
my poetry, more
succinct.

i fear i am losing it
but does it
matter?

we'd talked about vanitas.
it was hard to say goodbye
and i

turned to you as you walked away
focused on the way you walk
watched you become smaller

and went out to the car.
in front of nassau hall
and i

thought of the next time.

“I conversed with you in a dream.”
Sappho’s fragment 134

"He said 'no worries,'" she said
when she hung up. "I love when people say that." quaint little town,
they say of us – quaint little smile, I
say of her.  
"When you drink, i..." another plantative little contest the context
ringing and you can tell that the "i" is not a proper noun.
"Were you alone?" it surmounts up and climbs down the treacle gavels of sensibility
this question suggests concern.
and a boy who wants to have *** with me calls me kitten. His hair is brown.
Two conversations at the same time:
"Where I'm from, twenty a gram's a ripoff!"
Standard prices.
and
"Princess, if you were my girl, you'd always walk funny."
The ice is
thin under my oxfords
the murk of my conversational devices
Lake bottom:
vices.

"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.

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.

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

I
"We spoke of men
as often as of poems.
We tried to legislate away
the need for love –
that backseat ****
& death caressing you."
–Erica Jong

ah, this side of paradise!
there's no comfort in the wise,
no comfort at all. I roll it up how I was
taught to, half cancer half plant,
wait around for the next one.

ever feel like a ******? I'd asked her
once, waiting on a corner, fishing for a lighter.
no, but I feel like Sylvia Plath.
I had responded: can I be Anne Sexton?

it seemed right, that is, my severe rejection of emotions via denial, via wanting to tear out my hippocampus,

stomp on it, trying to forget every walk to every room and back, to every house and back.

she herself was severe, though, this friend, more sad in an intrinsical way, more dull and rotten than I, via bad chemistry, while I was just a
case of depressive charlatanism gone bad.
Right?

I searched for acceptance in every bed cover's crease and dollar bills I handed them to buy me smokes.
I searched for it, hands on me, and then before then I had searched for it while he asked what's wrong?
You need to tell me what's wrong!

I love you! You need to tell me! Are you ok?





You are funny if you think I responded.



I likened my staring state, I fixed it in my head as a piercing quixotically sad one, once.




My silence was a story in itself.

II*

"You loved a man who spoke
like greeting cards.
'He ***** me well
but I can’t talk to him.'"
– Erica Jong

It was ultimately guilty,
this time removed from pleasure.
The whole situation, blows to the face
and little slaps of course,
I felt the need to send myself into
a sort of temporary sleep so I forgot
but then would wake up again
because that would mean they won
and this is why I concussed myself once.

He tells me he cares and it's not
that I don't believe him but
it's that I don't believe myself.

I apologize for my being a burden and
he asks me why.
I suppose I am used to it

and if I could stare at him
it would be the same old stare.





"We shared that awful need
to talk in bed.
Love wasn’t love
if we could only speak
in tongues."*
– Erica Jong

8/17/2014

Her name was Joy Jenny Jeffers,

known only really as Jenny.

I loved her for the way she’d sometimes

sit up in bed at four twenty three am,
the linen bunched all around her naked
 knees,


and she’d proudly and dully proclaim
to her imaginary friend
perched on the wall:

“Frankly, Frankie,
I don’t 
think this 
relationship

is going

anywhere”

I’d laugh, call her a doll

“Oh Joy Jenny Jeffers,
I love you too much,”

with a slap, call me Jenny, 

she’d plop back in the bed.

(This all happened
in the dark,
don't you remember..?)


I loved her for the way she would 
put wildflower honey
in her black coffee

and one time, hungover, she poured in
canola oil,

which she drank anyways,
Which would prompt a swift

“Oh Joy Jenny Jeffers,
I love you too much,”

as i drank my St. John’s tea

laced with Bacardi.

I loved her for the way she hated 
animals and music,

for the way she burned off a strand of
hair when curling it,

for the way she blinked when an eyelash brushed up against her iris.

I loved her for the way she said Frankly, Frankie, and I loved her the very same

when she started preforming old tricks
in front of new patrons,
when Frankly Frankie became

Frankly Johnnie or Frankly Helen,

I loved her all the same,

And in this i realised i didn’t love Joy Jenny Jeffers,

but I loved the way a certain woman 
got an eyelash out of her way,

fixed her earrings when they caught,
comforted sickly children halfheartedly,


and I loved the way a woman went about waking up at exactly four twenty three am every night or morning to say
"Frankly,
Frankie,

I don’t think this relationship

is going

anywhere.”

With the linen
all around
her knees.

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?"

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?

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.

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

4/23/2015

There's a ***** little trick you oughta know.
he lights a perique blend.
We're both at different stages,
he'd say
But not different enough that we can't **** like rabbits.
alright, alright.

What's the trick?
It's nothing.
What?
Nothing. That's the trick.
Are you kidding?
No. Never.

i changed my mind about that, you know,
I was hoping so. I give him the money
for the cigarettes.
He steps out in the February rain
(Me too)

And comes back with red 100's.
He tosses them on my lap.
Alright. I'll get you going home now.

3/26/2015
after Frank O'Hara

The golden green buttress of
agrimonia lined sticky river water gnat towns
hasn't been seen in so long. But je pense beaucoup
quelle est que tu pense? beaucoup

An unwashed strawberry on my palm, bleeding. Ruby shards, shooting red bloodied streaks that could crawl down my forearm  and drip into the floor. My innocent hands and they
near the fainted wisps of maroon wiped on the idea of the golden green Prospect house Ivy arches, trimmed agrimonial foothills and lilies in root beer bottles.
I trip on the curb and find myself looking more like the ones with the clean hands sin shorn hands.
Can I start again…?
Spring here in shy steps is making itself known. The Arabic signs of Bay Ridge Brooklyn beckon me to buy hats.
It is fogging glass and what am I thinking?
Beaucoup beaucoup.

5/26/2015
may 23rd, 2015

night of my birth
black brackish lapping at the boadwalk and the painted
hermit crab shells for sale with ****** fencing cages on the boardwalk
i can relate to them

holding your hand was nothing i had to consider
i just did it
and as we look out onto the wild woods
on the top of the ferris wheel i glance at the moon.
1/4. last time it was a full moon

undated

Autumnal leaf air,
with the historical cut of princetonian guile
I walk toward the dull exonerated street
she looks heavenward; asks for a cigarillo
   tahiti bean
we never questioned our being,
        we just floated and
the capsicum katana slicing our
      corneas into julienne,
I tell her I can't, I quit,
never knowing quite what to do
smoking in june outside a wedding with the boys
she cuts me off, fast it's back to
thinking of  melting flower pots and broiled
   confectioner's sugar in my tiptoe mind-
   my toes are flat on the ground I walk with a gait,
          lifting my heels as if i myself seemed an aristocratic soul
                                                             I look up
                                                                  she has walked away
                                                                                              toward the
                                                                                                          candy store
to buy licorice

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

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.

5/31/2015
5/2/2015

sitting in the darkened 10pm stadium
with a six pack of beer and a pack of reds

talking about our lives. She asked me how my poetry is going
"Well," I took a swig as drunk princeton students messed with the announcement system

"I don't have time to express listlessness I guess."
there was a very particular feeling I wanted to convey though and
*oh, I can't quite put my finger on it.

9/16/2017

i sat on the corner
and stared
until you woke up

in the car, later,
the sun dipping under
the trees

and painting the air
dark blue
i remembered the vermillion summer sun

frowned deeply, for some reason
i didn't say anything
you looked at me and smiled

i had to, too.
we sat by the woods
the car quiet and still

two hunters came out of the woods
and later, back out:
empty handed.

i looked over your side and over the seat:
saw your blue reflection, the moonlight sheer

and
objects seen in mirror
are closer than they appear

4/19/2015
dedicated to the girl I used to be

crushed right next to the
broken glass.
"I don't write
nearly as much poetry
as I used to,"
I tell her in the orange light
of the German café
this time it is shining in through.

"Like you used to
before you were sedated?"
No.
I suppose it must be the weather.

I remember dancing to morrissey
in my darkened room at 3:43 am
on a January tuesday,

it was a good lay, good lay,good lay
Like some sort of charicature of teenage one dimensionality

I remember picking up a half empty
Heineken at a dorm room right before
winter finals like some sort of charcature of teenage pretentiousness and

putting my tights on, "my mom thinks I'm shopping, cute, right?"
Old floor crushing my shins minute before like some sort of charcature of teenage indulgences

"Don't you sort of miss the cold?"
I ask, picking at the cake and
the girl I used to be this time last year
infinitely more innocent weeps at

confrontation

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

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.

7/28/2015
"It was a queer, sultry summer; the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."* Sylvia Plath

I used to  believe
not think, that word implies
there is effort,

that I was stuck in a bayou of
twigs that stuck into sand colored
thick dirt. that the hallways at school

sunk me with every step.
The sun stayed up higher the
later it got and soon I

realized that no matter how hot it
shone i just felt embarrassed
for it like a ****** woman you

see at a bar late at night in a city.
the city was
my frequent companion, yes

six times in two months
I counted: I had been only
four times last year

I still did not know
where I was and why I was
Even the amethysts and
little emeralds in the street signs

seemed sickly to me after a while,
seemed dull and tiring and
i stood in the sidewalks in alphabet city,

Villanti eating a peach on a stoop,
and the subway grate below me pulled me up with its twirling vines of ***** air

and pulled me down

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.

5/10/2015
Brooklyn, NY

the smarting sun on my
neck nape (this was built for me)
and the crook of my back
building subliminal ponds and
dripping little monsoons of salt

and you held me while different
little ponds were flying this time
out of my tear ducts and it is monsoon season in the countries they get salt from, after all

the heat of the sun on my skin of
course and the unfairness of it all but the security like a little latch or something. Lots of water today everywhere except the dry sky.

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.

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.

7/21/2015

sitting on the wooden bench in the middle of the park the
couple across from us rolls something
to smoke the “hooligans”
(who am I? That was me months ago)
congregate on a bridge overpass
a dog lies down

your tears do not fall steadily and well
practiced like mine,
in a cacophony like an abscess
in a concrete dam wall

clutching your shirt, cursing masculine dogma,
my fingernail pushes a little orange seed of water and you
blindly take out a pack of menthol

you offer me one– you never do
I take it, light it, burn it out after five moments,
I press my face against yours so our tears blend, this nodule of saline congregating merging like a bacteria

as it falls ahead on the ground
our tears, one
hit the Silent concrete on the grey New York

fat rats  play on the nettles behind us.

4/13/2017

spring sprung like a coil
forcing itself, tugging on the city's dress
and the flowers, rabid

the mixed old cement steps
of the apartment building where i sit
tinny song in the air saying

oh, i'm just a kid
oh, i'm no longer a kid
dead on arrival, letting myself go

the city's mine now
well, at least any point below 4th street
and city hall

i am no longer suffering
i am simply waiting
the argument could be made:

what's the
difference?
that, i don't know.

5/13/2015

There happens to be a tremendous peace in a spring night late in the season, sultry humid mornings and days seem brash in comparison to this light blue thing clouds crawling across the sky to the tune of mourning doves and woodpeckers. I cannot remember primaverial scenes before last year's. It seems spring is the shortest, the frigid isolation of winter is so permanent and branding that I can recall every individual one since perhaps '11. Fall and summer always seem to blend into a purgatorial gloaming paste. Throughout all these seasons one always feels he is a single pedestrian (or is there another name when one is wholly alone?) walking down winding drives and straited cremated avenues. Perhaps it is not so common– perhaps it is me, but even when walking in deltas of human life one in winter feels alone. But writing this by the Japanese oak under the beak of a woodpeckers I feel the same apprehension. It is me, I have decided.

"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

4/23/2015

March 14 2015
He hands me a bag.
He is 22 years old and has a
puerto rican accent (bronx)
"What are you doing in town anyway?"
I stay quiet.
he shifts around in the front of the pick up truck
"Visiting with boys?" snare snicker smirk.
I stay quiet. He sighs.
"Be careful sweetie. See you later."

8/9/2017

the heat doesn't stop for anyone.
i learned this three- is it three now-
years ago,

the weeds crawling up my sticky ankles
laughing with the windows rolled down
years later, the smog hits my face

and i roll up the escalator,
now used to the sight of 34th street
hitting me in the face

head on like the freight trains
i used to graffiti-
i  used to contemplate jumping in front of

my life here is a terminal one
my days in my childhood home numbered
a new life filled with grey and steel

approaches me
and i do not flinch, i do not cower
nor do i tremble in anticipation

i simply wait
like i used to in the train tracks long ago
oh, but i always changed my mind then.

3/15/2015

everywhere I roll
on the bed there's a
glass bottle waiting
to be crushed under weight
and bleed shards peppered with
red chrysanthemum petal

excuse everything I do with
"I was manic back then"
everything was beginning to get
tragic back then truthfully

first baby december days
and here we are in March
we haven't spoken in three months

and we will not forever.
I know when you say
Never Again you mean it because you had said to me earlier I Love You with the same vehement strength and I knew you meant that.

When I think of it,
butter knives pry my ribs open
the pain of the cut still hurting me

such a long time afterward and
nowadays I spend my days sitting on steps smoking a pack, kissing men trying to replicate something. And what?

it seems I am so detached from love, now I am trying to replicate me leaving a dorm room looking around hoping no one noticed

and sitting on a bench writhing because
I have so much to say and not one soul really truly wants to hear it, besides from men who've seen me naked and read my poems and

I only find that thoughts of dying,
not suicide of course just dying
are the only accustomed ones that I enjoy

I ***** onto the sidewalk
(hopefully my weaknesses my desolation right? Like the black humor of plague times)

blink my eyes
(Patients of severe depression are said to have melancholy, heavy grazing eyes. See Ian Curtis)

check my phone
(last call I made out was 8 hours
ago. no call back)

move toward nassau street now,
the long term suffering victim
of too much love,
and I can understand
why people **** themselves after

ten year long relationships.
however I am not so vexed,
just resentfully doleful and I

decide I shall blame tonight's
little dorm room nightstand on
sweet hypomania.

"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.

7/15/2017

A plank of wood,
sand mites bite our ankles
my ankles

One in the morning at the
Gated Beach Community
and the signs said

Without parental supervision,
No one under 16 allowed
but there I was, 15

Dealing with a bad lease on my brain, don't forget yours, too
parents nowhere to be found

Or maybe two buildings over
Years later, it's night
I step over puddles, drunk boys

Walk around the complex laughing
Trying to remember when I found that sort of thing fun,

Remembering never,
I sit on a ledge--
And you'd never guess the sea

Was several hundred feet away
with the way the sky bleeds black
congealing, together

The Atlantic and it.
Remembering my old obsession
With blood, my old poems

Speaking feverishly of it
adding meaningless symbols-
the flower the color of it,

or the sky in the morning in august
trying, selfishly, to make sense of my life.

I wish to run a fever-- forget this place ever existed
Or you, truthfully.

9/25/2015

I remember the tar stuck to my shoe, penny and patent,
a hot summer

staphylinid female with
wiry rotten acorn hair
swollen fingers red running

through the autumn dirt
the forest floor
Japanese maples, Douglas firs

purulent nailbed and
the window rolled down:
air whips like a riding crop,

I close it back up