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.

11/28/2017

Grinning,
but who's to say I'm supposed to bear it?
dreaming of being loved and

tops of parking garages
where I will make my Olympic dive
perfect form, perfect form!

perhaps I'll make a show out of the whole
thing
the rigamarole of my rigor mortis

i wake up at four am and
think oh my ****,
life is a nightmare

you told me your self it wasn't fair
but you made those rules
and stuck to them


i will grow to hate your countenance
eventually and soon
when i rot and bloat in my grave.

/

Null

4/7/2016
tw, suicide

you were five eleven
i thought it so elegant
you hated it though

i still see you walking down the
linoleum, sad halls
with your gown

and though you swore you
were ugly i thought you reminded
me of one of those pre raphaelite

girls.
you're dead now,
so i heard

i knew that the system
had failed you before
you even knew

you were defective,
you felt the need to be recalled
back to the mill

before you even knew that.
i saw you for a week
that's a funeral i wont be invited to

but i can't help but
think what your last
thoughts were

if there were any
i wonder if you said
goodnight to your

sister before
you did it
but i also

don't want to think
about it- the fact i
know a ghost

4/23/2015

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.

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.

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

3/27/2016

teeter tottering on my penny loafers
down Nassau street,
I smelled a Newport and remembered
why it reminded me of the days full
of princetonian guile, that were no more

two years ago to the date,
I was meeting so many new people
finding out what it was like making a habit out of going downtown.
two years later I take the train
downtown

that is, in a different town.
My paltry self, forgettable as the days went on, fading quietly in my own personal, dark mess, crawled through alleyways and down stair cases and up them to rooftops.

Now my sense of self sits slobbering on a desk, the town feels surreal to me
I prefer New York of course.
I went to visit him, sat on that conjugal bed and traced ribcage,

Looked out the window
saw all of New York
the empire shining like a
big sparkly monster,

the staid windows that each held,
You know,
a different story,
or something.

The smell of hot trash- you know,
I miss that
I tell her
"Id spend a day in a landfill just to live
there."

As opposed to an hour on
the train tracks. well, at least it is
an hour.
I grab a hot chocolate just like the old days,

on Witherspoon,
and trace the route I took a year ago
down Stockton
when I went to pick you up
from the arriving section
of the station.

Now I'm hoping
I'll hobble over to depart
and you'll  walk a certain way
just in a different city
To penn station
two years or so from now, I suppose

"If I'm not dead by then," I laugh with her
I'll stay in New York for good- with you.
But I went from the permenant staid fixture on the Nassau sidewalk
to a typhoidic city rat in a year so who knows

I hope it does not happen again
for I didn't care much for Princeton
As opposed to sharing a pantry with
you
those tall grey monsters in the backdrop painting, in the Greek tragedy of life, our lives.

“’Have you ever seen a man?’ I knew he meant naked. He disrobed.Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. Then I felt very depressed.”*
- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Afternoons while the dog sleeps
turned over on the side and i wonder what organs i push on
liver? spleen? clean the bile for me, please

and then I  shall leave extra gratuity.
Please don’t cry, I feel a hand on my hipbone
my eyes pressed against the olive cushion

The green and the wood of the trees blur into one outside my
june july window
much like the book of Esther i look for a place inside

myself to stop the killing of decency inside myself and
i cannot muster it much like anything else.
I wish i had never asked that December night to go

I stop the disgust cut it at the bud
find a way to necromance up my personality
the outside is smelling of charcoal

i stare at his flesh,
then at mine then
at the floor.

he says we shall wait all i want and
now he is looking at me with doe eyes and i
nod. I nod. I feel i am ok now.

"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.

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.

5/26/2015
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

4/8/2015

Lying within the breadth
of le petit mort
i, accustomed to being

escorted out, sat up and out
of bed, the golden glaze of the
whitman skylight probably
shining around my brazen cheekbones.

"Come here," He said, the student,
and I was filled with a tender repugnantion, I was reminded of how
post coitum I would not let my past

lover even touch me for a while.
and so with this resignation I
crawled up next to him in the
Old beige wallpaper surroundings

The prestigious institute.
"You know," I told him, burying my nose into his arm
"I was named after a seductress. She would poison her father's political enemies after ***."

He shuddered a bit.
"How long does it take to kick in?" He feigned concern, eyes blinked on and off rapidly then

"Ah!" He clutched at his gut. "I feel it! The poison!" he closed his eyes and went limp. I laughed. Then he laughed.

It was a scene tender with beatific memories of vague sentimentality, quaint regard.

"It is time for you to get going now though," he stood up. "I have a paper to write."

5/31/2015

lately I have found
mostly everything
of mine's simplified

and my breath rattles
three or four steps at
a time, keeping in uniform

with my eyelash batting
and i have so much to say
like speaking of the G train

or the wooded ravine
in Prospect, the sandy
spurs stabbing shins in cape may

and so something that
would have been so
delicately put only

some months ago
seems like only a wasted
little movie reel in my head

as i sit sedated,
suicide watch girl
grey and sleeping.

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

2/3/2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

Null

12/28/2014
for ES

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

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

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

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

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

gentlemen farmers
and named as the
view of the sight

filled one with such
good prospects.

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

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

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

so take my hand and follow me

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.

11/15/2015


i am fetid and
spewing rabid motions rapid little

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

"said my muse to me,
'look in thy heart and write.'"
-Philip Sidney

1
"i have a song to show you," i said in the late morning
but did not play it until eleven that night.
your eyes seemed blue when i met you
i realized they are green or maybe temperamental.
as the train swept past the neighborhoods and the forests
in between them
and the white delicate soot of the snow lifted in the air
for a second, or two or three
one couldn't see anything from the window
on one side, this
on the other, you
one ethereal
the other, just frozen rain

2
in the museum,
the serious straight lines of malevich stared me down
i walked towards the other side of the room
when i turned around, the back of your head
ash blonde and head tilted
i looked at the art, then the floor, then the white walls
you looking at your favorite painting
you implied it was an honor and
i touched your shoulder
and called you the prettiest thing here.
you smiled. it was just the truth.
i said i would see my favorite painting
but i don't know where it is
you told me, with a laugh,
you did not mind traveling
i later found out
Portrait of Maude Abrantes*
is in Haifa.

3
"where do we go?" you asked.
"good question. i don't know,"
figure out for yourself what i meant.
The subways were all closed
and only the 7 was running
who gives a **** about the 7? i'd always said
guess the joke was on me.
walking to the station, whichever one we could find
i looked up at you with snow dusted hair
and frostbitten hands
feeling something i hadn't felt in years
"let's hop on a train and get off wherever"
it took 15 minutes
but the D train rolled in
and up to 59th we went,
then the E down to west 14th.
We laughed at the incompetency of bureaucracy
and hopped from the train onto the platform,
watching the gap as we did.

4
there,
on west 14th
the Chelsea streets were wordless,
sleeping in on a saturday night
we walked past snowed in cars and i laughed at the
ridiculousness of it all
this is how badly i'd wanted to go to the city with you!
but i didn't mind
i walked a bit ahead
turned around
the beaux arts townhouses
on either side of us
strategically planned trees
and a pair of lost gloves
it was so quiet i couldn't hear my thoughts
just my heart's rhythm
in the station that night
you had told me you wished i had a place in brooklyn to go back to
"yeah, if we could even find a train that went there," i laughed.

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.

8/13/2014

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

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

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

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

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

11/29/2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

in a car that smelled like
burnt tobacco
and run through

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

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

This is all gone now
and
I need new trivial distractions

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

or maybe not
maybe.
maybe.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

“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.

2/17/2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i am the obituarist
and still am shocked when they die
a sort of dull plodding preparation
dressing the dead presents itself in memories
of you
as dead as you.
I loved you,
O, how I loved you! And you to me.

snow covers sod farms, it reminds me of purity.
Sickly i want to burn it with cobalt flame
so that i may wash my torn up hippocampus

with the rain water.
and the question i sleep to and wake up to:

i used to be like the snow
so why did i melt it for you
when i knew i would be washing your corpse with the water?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh honey
baby, you know the
expression."

Honey baby
Honey baby
He'd

grab my hair like
a ragdoll then
remember to stroke it

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

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

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

I wanted to say
the way he held me
unabashedly

reminded me
of
oh, nevermind.

we sat in his room
staring dumbly at eachother
twice maybe

me trying to squeeze in
just a little debauched
moment

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

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

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

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

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

9/15/2014

I

Poor-

  Is it poor manners to remember very well?recalling each recoil

with a frightening penchant

for reliving many chances.

II

The trees bawl at their own nakedness like the boy who asked if I was

  ***** once.

Foliage constantly in my line of sight

once is finally beginning to change

  it begs the mirror for one more than just a reflection

It misses its adornments because it is ugly now.

III

I had marveled to myself sitting in the middle of the gravel

   today at five.

I'd painted the very first day of spring in my head messily:

  lacking tact- like chalk that takes days for the rain to wash it away.



IV

When they asked for my name

I'd reluctantly give in to everyone, everything

the days they were unbelievably hot

  and look at me now, almost not believing

the choking ravines of newly **** brambles had sent a chill down

   my spine

     last yesterday



         just as your voice over the phone had done the day before.

2/26/2017

Prince Street, NYC

the bright white heaven of a
terrace chair
you touched my shoulder, you thought

i cringed
a longer pause—— i didnt
i tried to freeze the spring

in its tracks and dead as a doorknob
stopped decomposed and quiet forever
the summer then swelled

to a crescendo
i sweated out what was left of my
humanity in battery park city

my art used to be found in suffering
and yet i wrote no poetry that week on
wall street

there is no nobility in this,
the suffering art
i mean.

Anne sexton: I never seemed to like the
spring for what it was but for what it could've been.

Princetonian fields, mausoleums
foreign to me, a brief reintroduction in
January only to be murdered again

How tragic, this
did the Witherspoon spring
the Nassau nights

mean nothing?
I revel in the past's
futility

4/11/2015

Today I woke up
after a long tribulation, got up
found my way down

and remembered how to
make myself coffee.
I couldn't help but feel

a longsword in my lungs
when I looked over the ridge
and started to see green colored oaks.

5/31/2015
the first week of april

we sat on the baby boy blue
carpet of the bank, laughing until
we cried in our short skirts and heels

smelling of Valentino and Chanel
the beige ceiling plates curling and twisting in a spectacular show for us

Rockefeller college waived by us,
and everything in Princeton closes so **** early, like...

calling one night stands like
hhhhiiiii, can you buy us cigarettes?
running like my dorm room's free and I got beer and when we finally

got to Henry hall:
we were too young. We just laughed
And laughed and considered maybe
it's a sign and then we went straight to bed, our bodies warming the bed.

3/1/2016

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

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

wd snodgrass, 'heart's needle'

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

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

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

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

this swollen self.
winter this year lasted
maybe a day

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

but i have never been
an
excellent oracle.

8/18/2015
Harlem, NY

metal-mouth:
The wire sticks into my gums,
legs like quart of milk
and whipped  browbones
gaze up ward into the light

blood runs onto the sheets

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.

2/21/2015

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

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

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

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