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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2/2/2017

your look, i saw, i aimed for a reply
i couldn't find one and looked
at the ground

i went to see my friend
i tried, the windows were
dark

hello she called and opened the door
she never keeps the lights on
there are things in life you just cant predict

and i sit in my room during the winter
and i hate to use contractions in my poems
i wont i promised myself again, but here i am and here ive been

i tend to stay in my room , dont move a muscle
or a tendon that is
while the lights get lower

all its missing is the smoke of the lounge
and i very much miss cigarettes
the ones i rolled for myself almost a month ago

i know i will grow to love them though
so i
dont

overpoured
emotions carried
along unpredictable courses.

then left memories.
the two
were compatible

*"O Lord, thou givest and at thy pleasure takest away."

7/19/2017

"I did, and it broke my heart- into a billion pieces but I had to. I had to."
"He held up his head with his hand, steadily observing her. He turned to his side fully. She could no longer see his face.
'you don't understand,' he said finally
'i've always been afraid of being an egoist'"
"'I've a couple idee fixes'
'not any i need to know'"
"i'm sick with the idea... sick with it.*"

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?”

9/30/2014
Manhattan, new york city, new york

you got to wonder
September saturday nights
walking down church street.

the man on his smoke break
gives me a smile on the corner of 9:30
at night and i return it even though it
isn't wise because
it seems kind,
a smile i’d like to get to know better.

in the taxi
i think uninspired thoughts,
running along the sidewalk’s lining
sidewalks i’ll probably never walk on
and this is when i realize
Manhattan is a small island.

back on the train
i think that monday mornings wouldn’t
be so bad if I lived in Manhattan
crosby street or wall,
but then i think of all the
manhattan schoolkids
that seem like they know everything
and i think: do I really want to?

back in Princeton
i think that i am bored
and i realize far too much has changed
from april,
the raw essence still the same
seeping at the core of the stem, however

and i accidentally step on an ivy league
cufflink. I think to myself
i probably wouldn’t think so much
if i was in manhattan.

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.

1/30/2016

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

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

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

sleep past my 7 am alarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12/25/2016

i remember how she'd
noticed my eyes wavering
and wandering along the grey sidewalk

watching shoes go by from
the basement window
they seemed sentinent

she asked
what are you thinking about and why
after all you are my best friend

i know you better than any man you meet
i took a deep breath. "why do things go away?"
i had barely touched the jasmine tea.

she poured me
a cup
"you think too much,"

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.

1/29/2015
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.

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.

1/15/2015

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

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

I am amberbeetle,
  stoked fire,
medicated ditz

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

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

desire,
and I
should've been

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

maybe more
in the summer,
and he said

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

Swiss instigation,
broken video tapes and
grimacing at sweaty sunsets

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

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

metropolitan
rubble,
and these days

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

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

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

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

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

It was carrion
found in the corridor
did it sprout?

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

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

including me.
In the sad sad light a
carved seraphim

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

stay with me
Speak with me
breed

in the rats alley
and lose your bones

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.

4/27/2016

when we walk around the avenue
the air follows us and it looks like dessert wine

3/3/2015

"Hard when all my friends are
addicts, down low people, you know..."
caught her own thumbs.
spring'd only come in calendar form,
it hit her astonishingly coldly like
"Please don't let her do anything that could hurt her.." From the others and the don't worry I won't that came with it.
"I don't know my value," adjusting her skirt
"and I guess I never will"

Null

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.

7/30/2016

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

"Twist. I always get chocolate twist." I smiled down at the cup. Sunny day in south north central new jersey. Good day for custard. Good day to die. Good day for anything, really.
"Of course,"
"You say that a lot."
"Because I concur with you, a lot?"
"Hem. Hm. Ha" A low hum and then a laugh.

   A lot can change. It has. In fact so much had changed I could hardly keep track. The days followed each other closely with vague hints of urgency- I did not know why, figured that was for later. This was a change- both things. Things had never seemed to carry much weight and for the first time in years I was really just content with seeing things play out.
Peter Yorke and his orchestra played in the car ride home. "Love, here is my heart." OH, If only it were that easy. A simple offering, or presentation.  The sun beat down relentless. Earth was dying and all the great works of art anything that was ever to be made had been accounted for and done.

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.

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.

4/3/2016

i fear i will never get that year back,
that lying down on the grass
that turned into loitering on alleyway fire-escapes and
dont you think this town is a little too small for that hahahaha
i tried to recreate it, the futility drove me to
smoke camels i found on the side of the road,
i haven't smoked in a year and i feel worse

i felt a very real grease back then a very real
bad quality
and now it is just vague, glacous- a night without sleep,
a cliffside leap.
it has been six months since i sat on a shackled hospital bed

and i dont think i ever really left.
my mother threatened to bring lawyers,
to halt my detainment
and i did leave
but i didn't really
and i don't think i ever will

this is all because i tried to recreate that year
and i failed
and i tried so hard
but the scalpel and cauterize of live's uncouth events picked me
apart, a biopsy
to the bone,

accidentally severed my torso and killed me
so i linger a downy ghost in a grey colony of moss
wishing for better days
that are far away
and will always stay that way.

"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?

9/11/2016

Feburary 2015

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


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

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?

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.

9/10/2015

It was raining when you called,
stupid blood girl waking up from livid vivid dream.

Brackish Atlantic beach bars
screaming drunks and vitriol sweat
down your templeflesh

far away unlike any other summer

New York in the middle of the festering Thermidor heat– hot
and hazel,

She poured sweetened milk onto the concrete cracks

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.

3/15/2015

Around me. Around. Everyone around me. Around me they're *******. I figure if I had something equally stupid to ***** about I wouldn't be so bothered by my mom asking me why her secret boyfriend hasn't talked to her in a day. I Don't know. Divorce dad first. I wouldn't have problems I wouldn't mind, something to cling to. Something to tether myself from. That's her problem at least my life is in order. But I'm miserable. And I'm not well dressed. Everyone is *******.

5/6/2015

may 2nd,2015
Lying in the dried gutter with White
by the 11:30 light of the
may moon

  It seemed, to me,
a quiet sylvan scene
the dried out cat tails in the mooreland
bordered by the soft tufts of forest grove.

I drop my cigarette stubbed now into the half empty Heineken
"Yeah I finished it" throw it at the cemented bank
its ember stained glass church body
shattering into pieces
"just a smattering of a
headache," she says, her cigarette finger pressed against a bottle (multitasking)
"the surgery is next week," we lie down on the grass now which is cold.  

Since when do we care?
"i kind of hope i die." a million stars
dangling over the heavens
I envy the ones who burn out unspectacularly.

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

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

[fragment]

9/16/2015

lately I've felt the pink **** of my metal cranium

swishing with every throttle

i close my eyelids touch my skin

i dont feel real

in the end of july i felt like a disembodied heart on the streets of

bowery and village

vowed never again to the pink drying milk

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

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.

short story  i wrote in 11/1/2014*

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

"I cannot remember things I once read  
A few friends, but they are in cities.  
Drinking cold water from a tin cup  
Looking down for miles
Through high still air."*
– Gary Snyder

a cloud like the tower of babel
behind me, and the sun rides high
to my right on the handlebars of
six pm.

she cried to me that she missed
getting smacked little blows in the face
i told her that isn't a relationship

but it's only a little bag of dust,
she proclaimed and i wondered why
we are, ultimately, all made out of dust

our bones art frames for our
failing livers and kidneys and
me? well my lungs are perfectly fine.

the best compliment she ever told
me: i am the anne to her sylvia.
i sit on the deck of a street bridge,

the gurgling mountain creek
below me vomiting into a pit
of mud and tadpoles.

the cars brush my hair with
every pass or maybe it is the
storm wind from the tower cloud.

i am her anne, she said
she is my sylvia, she said
it is june and i am not tired of
being brave, i am

tired of waiting for her to be
saved.
Even gas ovens are made of dust,
somehow.

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.

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.

1/8/2019

an argument down below
i get up,
gaze down

from the 16th floor
black sheet over window,
punctuated by this:

orange and white
the concrete of the street
i hear voices

they feel something
i can't find them
i hear them rising with passion

all i can
think is
i agree.

i sit back down
stare at the wall
remember where i am

i
keep
forgetting

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.

5/2/2015
In the golden light through the window
Of July I could imagine how I looked quivering and the premonition of my betrayal months from now a maelstrom.

4/23/2015

Just because I think of you often
does not mean I miss you.
the plaited faint gold leaf of
the air of one in love
I know it now
I guess I can give you that credit.

"love is an illusion, and we're all going to die"
romantic verses for me
from you, a la Byron, a la Keats, a la
Kafka to Felice.

and why do you despise  normalcy? I'd ask in the stuffed up German car in  October brusqueness thinking of
Leaving before being left. But I can't predict the future.

Remember before you hate me
that you told me once
It was like death never existed when you loved me but

We haven't spoken in 5 months.

Are you dead?

No. You are not.

on the train with grant
its cold
its white
sterility                              ok

ok   you cant hear anything when it snows
        and it isnt as cold

i cant see nyc but i looked for it

                   ok
i wanna quit and cry full time

i dont know x79,345  
                                i dont like when people  
                                   watch me write
it looks like its cold but
it (?) why                                     that was a test. i dont care
isnt cold                         ok

it is cloudless ok they laughed kind of
ok
im dumb it snowed we have two hours

i have to finish my story about rich people

ok oooooook

3/5/2016

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

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

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

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