-

I stumbled into the sun
I didn't know what I was looking at

--

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.

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

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.

null

11/4/2017

third floor balcony the highest it goes
we stood– he said earlier
the top staircase is good luck

just her and i smiling leaning on railing
talking about everything:
who gives a **** but we did and we do

the night was brand new- sitting
joking the apartment was an ***** den
smoking your lucky cigarette, you paused

and i thought is this the best we're ever gonna get?
you hand it back to me,
i breathe remember last time i was here

we walk back in,
they laugh and talk about how they're out
of beer

she asks if i want my makeup done
and how the others will be here soon
i can only think of the dead leaves

i saw on the courtyard from the stairs
and wonder which one fell
first.

-

3/29/2017

Time divides us like state lines
coming together,
apart again

After all
the mismatch words
and my would not, could nots

Simmering, cooling
into stability
My past now

Agrees with all the books i read
i am not tortured,
i was

I have said before
that year, you didn't think of me
But i believe you did here is the problem:

Better to not be thought of
than cursed but
maybe they were secular thoughts

Don't you think and
there was an incident at the
canal street station today

Suicide- i was running late i didn't catch the 6:40 train
maybe it is better i did not.
as i got to the platform, hot-to-trot

"They did a good job cleaning
it up," i looked down sick to my stomach
vertigo rising in my chest, ailing at the fact that was my first thought.

1/14/2017

one in the morning, champagne drunk
KNL INW and I
steered uneasily down the sidewalks
of an uppereast side street,

the January wind whipping us
into a frenzy
smoking rolled cigarettes
a homeless man stops us:

asks for food
she gives him a cigarette
lights it for him
looking back, this was not good

a drunk bougie boy out of many
says "it's alright sweetheart!" as he passes us on the sidewalk. we complain of exhaustion

it is quiet.
i will move here next year
i pause.
I think, stop

and we laugh
and wonder if it's really happening
and i think my poetry is uninspired
and frankly, ugly

my state does not settle in
i almost step on a puddle
i say where am i? the answer:
realization enough to strike me sober

11/29/2017
"
I
...Bitter rain by the mouthful...

II
More hands on the terrible rough...
The whole thing turns
On earth, throwing off a dark
Flood of four ways
Of being here, blind and bending...
A final form
And color at last comes out
Of you- alone- putting it all
Together like nothing
Here like almighty

III
Glory.""
James Dickey


October is here and
you are not dead yet.
the room is always hot-

every room is always hot.
at least to me,
a month later

a fever takes my brain in its hands
my body trying to fight something
this is a delayed reaction to

your blistering lies to me as the
sun set and cast
ochre glisters

that only autumn can create.
i fear the winter
and its pallidness

and i fear the delaware river
looking at it too long
and perhaps discovering the truth

whatever that may be.
it did not happen
this did not happen.

October
and you are
not dead yet.

November
and neither am
i.

when you said you
were proud of me
my confusion grew.

proud of eternally ******* up
and looking at you
when you needed me to speak?

the words I have used today
have not done this or you
justice.

no, not at all.
days stretch on
and nothing happens.

time is the biggest thief
and the biggest trick
known to humanity.

one day the light was shining on us
the same shade of ocher crawling in through slats.
i stood up and closed the blinds.

i would always ask you to guess
guess what?
only to say something quite obvious.

guess what
october is gone
and you are dead.

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.

3/4/2015

so much depends
on a
single droplet of

pure water roaming
down beatific
skin

and the lost hour
at midnight
sprung forward

the dewy pine
disregarding the
dead cold.

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

6/7/2015
princeton, nj

now, I don't often
go on walks by myself
anymore like I used to when

I had things to think about but
I don't exactly spend time with others
Like I used to when I was trying to

Pretend I didn't have things to think
about,
Stepping out of the church doors
early,

believing that Fresh Air and sitting in a nice nostalgic bath will do me better
than prayer, as my father insists,

Turning round the rotunda by the Chapel and Firestone,
stopping like a ***** to take in
every single detail of the virginal church panes

Church glass wiring miser.
There is three only three
students I have counted on my walk

One walks with a hand posed as if
he held a cigarette but he does not
have one.

with every step the phantasms of
men calling me from dorm rooms
and crawling around town asking
for cigarettes,

Dressed for parties,
the overall wintery sadness of it all
escapes me and all I am filled with

A very real sense of loss
for a thing I do not want again
I say "I surrender"
To the garden of prospect.

6/16/2015

last june
the grass seemed a little
more alive, more like it was willing to
fight, you know?
i ask her
and she just nods.
i think you think too much, but
the sky was bluer
and clouds were shaped differently i
suppose.
I take it as it is...

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.

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.

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.

null

7/14/2015

"I mean I just don't get excited
anymore, you know?"
but even that
statement drains all the life out of me,
grabs a spot in my ribs, twists it, pulls it out like a dandelion ****.

I decide walking on 3rd avenue in
a Brooklyn neighborhood that I don't
need energy anymore
or, I've been doing well with the scant
supplies I have of it.

The day before, blow dried hair sticking to my neck because the windows are locked,
I had listened to the radio
Billie Holliday: oh lover man where can you be?

I know **** well where mine is,
unfortunately across the hudson
but I think I am happy for him because
any sane person would be otherwise in
princeton after a while

I count and recount the oaks and pines outside my house and the cardinals and bluejays and mocking birds, try to find something, don't find it,

Read a book, and I yell to myself:
"'That’s funny! there’s blood on me.'
- Frank Ohara."

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

I wrote this in November and was not happy with it;
"
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"

12/25/2016

On the sidestreets of Little Ukraine
men smoked cigarettes and said *pryvit
and KNL said it's because you look slavic

but i'm pennsylvania dutch! i laugh
shoofly pie, not sochniki
off the 33rd street stop

and it was getting to be dark out
the sky heliotrope and true blue
I heard a noise

did you hear that too? I say to her
It was angry or happy? she asks, more like states
I don't know, all i said.

*But it's passion.
It's passion.
On the streets of new york city. That would make a good poem, right?

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

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."

"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.

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?"

10/15/2015

down by the ravine twisted woods,
By boxelder and sweetgum,
a timber rattler in the field over,

you say "those are dangerous"

"Mhm" all I mumble, stifling in the memorial of that sticky sunny summer in the forest

you say sooner or later
"Barely is enough sometimes"

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

3/10/2016

"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.

8/4/2015

"It's,like, the Jersey
theme song," he bubbles out
excitedly

conjuring up images of
driving through the parkway
Down the shore

where they'll say
"Hey, buddy! Whadayya think yer doin!"
Well they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night,

I wish they'd blow up my house, too
on the steps of a granite building called Clio
Princeton's lost its golden air as said before and

the Sourland crepuscule
of rock and woodchip
under my feet seems

to be just woodland landscape no
longer some powerful nature scene or something
i have friends, but they are in cities

looking through high still air i say
and declare the sourland scene dead the
vague Appalachian terrain the parkway by Princeton

i go to sleep.

10/25/2014
”darling, it’s frightening! when a poet loves he might be an unshrived god enraptured.” - Boris Pasternack

The late october sun hugs our faces with a looming brilliance.

We are propagandic youths emblazoned on a poster in orange tint.
Looking forward to our victory– our war efforts, living in pride

followed around corners and sidealleys

by a most vague sense of wrong.
and when you turned to me to look–


I realized, with a horrible feeling,
I was in a sort of strange complacent love. 
 It’s not to say i was in love –
That had happened months before when I’d refused food and drink at the Independence day celebrations

smiling at chinese invention gunpowder in the american mideastern 
sky.

But to say I was good with whatever was, albeit jaded, but i would never dream to say it.

And as we sat in the car rolling over dead leaves that were on stems months before

You asked me “Do you still like me?” 
“well,” i replied – I had just lain with you 

in a hushed affair with whispered I love you’s

how could i not like you?

Carnal wanton needs— hell of a thing.
But, I added

things were easier before that.

Now when I think i am to wait weeks until I see your face 
It seems wrong

and this poem is far too long

to just be saying that I love you
so perhaps i do not.

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

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.

8/13/2015
Canovanas, Puerto Rico

cobble street San Juan
yellow walls and drunks at the
bars on Wednesdays
the glass plate says CHRIST STREET
calle cristo

and i have to ask my father:
what day is it again?
all I know is sleep

and I fear I must retire after writing
these words.
goodnight.

-

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.

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"

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.

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?

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?

--

7/27/2015
Wildwood,NJ

It's as if the brine
of the water is something
I have never experience before:

stepping,dizzling,stumbling
into the path to my apartment
I am on the balcony at 2:

a drunk man yells
"heyyy whaddaya think  you doin?!?"
some great trespass either his
or against him

I beg for memory's forgiveness,
twisting my sweatersleeves
i spit out a pick of hair and

Narrow my eyes down some more.

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.

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."

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.

Null

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

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.