2/18/2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10/3/2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5/30/2015

today is your birthday
and although it seems just like
four words strung together, a
part of me wants to say happy birthday, we haven't spoken in 5 months, but it's ok, because you're not who you were a year ago anyways.

what a hallmark card.
I have spent the past 48 hours staring
at the beams trying to imagine
a happy death
because of unrelated events.

i woke up with dried blood on my
face for some reason or other today,
in the cavernous trash pit of my room
and I declared this a sign.

3/16/2015

When I awoke,
too depressed to leave my bed,
too caught up in the fact it was Monday,

I decided to take my liberties with
attendance and questioned when
social services would end up at my door

but that's for later. For now I stood
up and went downstairs, and the first
thing I took note of in the panoramic
window

was the fact that all the snow had
melted, seemingly overnight
and I saw how grass looked like

I remember close to a month
ago I had spent a blessed day
in town where the birds chirped

seemingly out of place for a
February sunday. But I smiled
and smiled and I still felt like

Every single vein was ripped out
and I was watching my blood stain the sidewalk

And  last night I had a dream about you for the first time in months and I was happy to have you back even as a subconscious hallucination

Where I drove my car into your work
that little funny store where we ate breakfast the last day of summer

And you just stared at me, red in the face with a reviling hatred that
I am used to at this point.

The snow melted when I had woken up but now the ground is so hard to walk on and the sky seems blue today bluer than usual but I know it is mocking me.

11/28/2017
"I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move."
the thoughtfox

The sun set on us
there was nothing I could do.

We talk of
Ted Hughes and the thought-fox.
you say I will be a good anthropologist

i don't want to travel if it's without you,
I learn this:
Plath bit Hughes when they met

for some reason, I thought it was relevant  to us.
it is the last time we meet.

You are reminded that I disgust you
and say it has to end.
Earlier you said

"I feel like I am your Ted Hughes."
and I reply:
"He killed his wife."

2/19/2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Null

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

confrontation

4/27/2016

It is spring,
and outside my window when
I woke up i found a bleachwhite dogwood creeping outside up onto the wallboards-
I was scared it would get in,
its vines creep through the cracks
with the green woods in the back cheering it on

My skin danced with the fleas of my
uncertain past, the thready stinging reminders of my yesterdays
and the one hour storms at night and late mornings that come with spring


I cursed my living in a forest
when I stepped outside, carefully
so as to not be seen by the woods
and the syphillitic robins
that sang disgusting little hymns
and the frogs that muttered at night.
the air was sharp, it smelled like a dripping faucet

My blood dripped into the laundry
sink, carefully twisting itself when it hit the water
it looked delicate, creeping and soft.

I read Salinger that day- I always
do in the spring- it is something about the disenchantment that brings me back to peonies and azaleas, tulip sales
ecetera-

I heard your voice on the line and breathed
that I hadn't heard it in a while,
I said this with my nose
and you apologized

but I did not want it
because it is not fair:
they all  apologize to me for  things that they should not
but I should be the one that is apologizing eternally

eternally for being this
like a cicada,
that comes out after years for one thing
and then disappears all over again
and perhaps even dies.

this summer is supposed
to be the summer the locusts come
to visit the east coast and
If the apocalypse is coming, I am not scared- it has arrived many times for me before.

10/17/2017

it's not real.
not here.
not yet.

driving past the
streets i've grown to memorize
clapboard and craftsmen, american

summers drifting over me like haze
and all the memories that ensnare me
all i know is the past and that scares me

i am
thinking of exurban new jersey and thinking of
last week,

the lights across the Delaware river at midnight
reflected perfectly
but not quite,

orange red and white oil slick in the black of the water,
the lights of cars creeping across occasionally.
i burn a cigarette out, toss it into the water szzz

ah, god, you say, looking up from your stoop
i love that sound,
i recall i used to burn them out

on my hands because i did not feel them
and for a while there is nothing say. you look back down again
and it is quiet.

but look, i stand up, almost yell,
almost wading into the cold October water
and

maddening with interest by the second.
is that a light i see, in the water?
a glance towards you

again you look up,
now leaning to the side
the faintest glimmer,

you conclude.
i wonder, out loud, what is it.
you tell me it is hard to be like us.

i ask, what's us?
eyes still on the water.
oh, well, you know.

then i understood.
striking a match again
and pacing round the riverbank

i throw stones now,
smooth ones and rough ones,
each making a different sound as they hit the water

trying to hit the glimmer
then stopping, wondering why?
i sit back down, chastising myself for my inability to relax

you listen to my heart
oh its fast
tap my thigh as you hear it, head on chest

dundundundun
i laugh because my heart's gonna **** me one day
just like it did my grandmother's father

and so on
and so forth.
driving back,

on the bridge,
i shake my head.
point at the darkened spot

hey, thats where we were earlier
i don't tell you this, but i look for the shine in the water.
i don't find it.

warning: suicide, graphic descriptions

"I forgive you for what you did not do."
Anne Sexton

    The sterility will crush me. The whiteness will **** in through my nose and ears and consume me when the room implodes, if it could. But it cannot. I wrote to tell you it is so lonely desolate and so cold. There are people here but they are as lost in death as they were in life. All the jumpers go to rooms where they are eternally falling all the squashers go to the crushing room where walls like the southbound 1 train during rush hour kiss constantly and the ribs are broken, contorted put together again and there is no clean up crew that isn't getting paid enough for this and no cynical commuter fathers telling their children they are sorry they were late but there was a suicide at the 66st stop.

    The drowners live in a soggy blue haze where they gasp for air and the pill takers have it easy. They always have a stomachache nothing more; and they faint over and over again giving them rest what they wanted anyways. I wanted to let you know you have probably walked into my room and seen the stupid polite carrion of myself. I trust you have read my note and I trust you have told your parents screaming on the phone and this isnt happening.

     I trust you've delayed to call the paramedics and ended up calling them 20 minutes later than you should because you knew I was dead- the cold paste of my wrist was just too true blue and it reminds you of that ring you got me when we were young and said it promised something.

    We listened to I Left My Heart in San Francisco that night in my suburban American Craftsman. Neither of us have ever been but I liked the line about being left alone in Manhattan because that's how I felt often I never told you this once I got there though. You've combed my hair that you always said reminded you of gold-leaf and you've punched out the wall because you said some stuff or maybe didn't that one time and you're ****** about it. The neighbors have heard your keening and wondered what is going on.

   You've stiffened my collar so as to hide the marks and put my body down but nothing will hide the marks even long after my body attempts to rot but can't by way of embalming as I sleep in the graveyard I told my mother I wished to be buried in when I was 15.

   The victims of garrote are constantly choking and our necks break constantly. Our throats gasp but we cannot get air. To get into heaven I must make my peace with the life I had on earth. But I will not. I  wish I had not thrown out my pills.

3/3/2015

At three years old, my
mother's grandmother took my
hand and proclaimed:
She is a nervous girl.
my hands shook. my hands shake.
in my younger years I stripped the
skin off my hand with my teeth,
in the ides of my youth I swallowed
many a perique blend–
all to cure the shaky hands,
that came with having to ask
if friday plans were on every day
since Monday,
exclusively listening to Joy Division
because jazz makes me nervous
and screaming music makes me rattle.
'You've said that 3 times already'
I know I know I know, I'll
never be able to live here
'you're so nervous!'
a wind is going to knock mine out
one day

The magentine and orange yellow garrote of the twilight has yet to strangle the youth of Princeton, but it soon will. Sun sets over stockton and delphinus sits on the shelf of the sky next to the half moon ready to maurade over Marquand. Most of the store fronts, they shutter, a year closes in like a train in a tunnel and most do not know anything yet. Cannon and Tower boys do not go to Town anymore they go home to their Bay and Gables, their saltboxes ready for suburban consumption, for the dirt world of finance and brokerage, ready to pray their scandals are quickly smothered and they will be- meanwhile here sits youth, which drools in a corner, never to be invited by a bickeree again, watching the low shrubs and mafia graveyards of Linden parade through the train window, a melded scene like a watercolor. The  limestone walls of Princeton sit up straight in vigilance, the heavy doors shut along with the adolescene and the stores. The sun sets over Stockton and rises over Beekman.

2/11/2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

3/29/2017

steaming july days,
screaming at me that I certainly did not know
what I got myself into

i couldve slashed my throat and
bled onto the connn-creete
and it wouldve boiled

no, you dont understand
no, you dont understand
no you dont understand

you understand? no, dont
you dont understand, no
dont you understand? no?

no...you'll never understand.
twisting our car-seat conversation
back and forth like a rivet

you were right
i didnt understand and i never did, an ingenue
you see back then

i was young for my old age
and old for my young age
who are you now

youve grown your hair out
and youre as woman as me?
a better photographer, too

but youre odd and always will be
i didnt know the indications of looove
i was what i was:

just a
little
girl.

4/3/2016
"The hurt is not enough."
Robert Frost

i lay in a swathe of linen,
not having left the house for days,
not having showered since the 31st
oh, back to my old ways.

sitting up
i read a letter i locked in a box
when i was fourteen.
it was meant to be open when i turned
twenty

a paper grasped in the throes of
sticky fingers,
sticky with isoprophyl
i wished to clean off all the impurities
i remember i showed three times that day and then some

you told me
you know how i feel,
but no one deserves that

you told me that day
you didn't know why you didn't hang up,
didn't know why you were bothering to comfort me
you know i still think about that?

spent every hour trying to pick apart that week
i still haven't come up with anything and my friends get good marks and alexander understands his schoolwork and i still stare at the wall anatomizing that week

whoever said fate exists was wrong.
i was a girl who walked on unsteady feet,
trying to not make eye contact
awkward, but somehow

happy.
now it is as if i know too much too soon
nothing thrills me, no.
i have been reduced to a glacous experiment

for gods' spindly hands-
their metal prods scooping out my corneal matter
and my grey one.
i remember i once told you

that i felt like a grasshopper in a sixth grade science class,
bathing in formaldehyde
how ironic- i had considered that notion alarming back then.

i remember you said "no, you're not"
"how awkward, being manhandled by the tweezers
of liebniez."

you smiled and told me
how much potential i had.
those were the antediluvian days,

the letter went on to describe a man i had talked to some months
before
who really i have forgotten about til now.

he swears gatsby is the best novel of all
time and tells me that he is writing a novel about a
Brown Law man, 1955, who lies about his life.

this seemed oddly topical to me.
we would talk about writing for hours,
life seemed to me a roman a clef on its own,

like its plot was vaguely familiar but
i was not myself, but the names
were changed.

now i speed through the antiseptic tunnel of
apathy, i wait for alexander's calls and tell my friends
i am sorry they feel that way or this way

i fail my tests,
i try to sleep,
i don't.

i write another letter now
and i hope to be able to open it in a few years
and i hope that i will feel better
i hope i will feel anything but this
this blindfolded hike, this set fetter.

9/15/2016

the first confirmed case of cannibalism in the Jamestown colony has been identified as a 14 year old girl, possibly from a wealthy family

they found you with
lamb in your bones
and said you had a good diet

I am trying to think of
what kind of person you were
before they put a hatchet to your

skull, assembled you along with
skunk, peat moss, dog.
you were from a wealthy

family because of the
protein they found embedded in you
or maybe you were a servant

and ate well.
maybe this is why they got you–
the first two blows were shallow

and meek
the one that severed you into
cuts for meat

broke your tibia
like you would slaughter cattle
maybe, the archeologist said, if she had

someone to protect her
this wouldn't have happen
she didn't.

but then I read you were dead
before they even
started

ND
1944-2018*

You taught me how to write
it took me too long to write this.

When you died,
the nurses combed your hair

and put your favorite perfume on
your neck.

without you I am nothing
and a ceaseless
mess

but for you
have kept
living

in 1967 you had a daughter,
born dead.

you never visited her
grave  you didn't want to know where it was

but your husband did.
and the first person he told about you was her.

she was born with
lemon yellow curls stuck to her head.

the pain is so much
but not as much as your beauty

i will learn to live without you  as
you would have wanted it

racing matchsticks down storm gutters
i still don't believe in god.

But if there is a hell
that means there is a heaven

I would take eternity of
darkness and iron hot
pokers

if it meant you could be
with your lost daughter
and hold her.

-

Green tufts of grass always return in
the spring, right?
ave maria through the open window and a lost notebook
Lots of little breaths here n there
   hair flip. Things seem to be dull
sedation in dogwoods and the blossoms I wonder if I'm already wasted.
I was given youth at my dawning

2/2/2017

to vivisect the reader,
to bleed all over my paper
the one great poem i wish to write one day.

dead plath would be happy
my life with you a fat diseased rat.
for once, i think about what i write

taking slow breaths and thinking about meanings
there is something i am trying to say and i do not
know how to

clawing inside of me
an incubus's baby, what is it?
only dead saints know

but here's the thing,
and it is:
i did this to myself

i don't know what an apostrophe is
but i would if i saw it.
my past is full of ulcers and

the cold February cuts into me
it is my butcher
i have been that girl

12/27/2019

this emptiness
in my ventricles
could fill a room

and there is not
much else
that i can say.

6/4/2015

you pour the milk in first
In the bowl,
like a kitten mewling for a
meal

Milk is poisonous to
adult cats.

Not fondly
not with hate do I recall
My friends would ask,

The crystalline creeping February
with all its rushes and frozen rivers
"So, how was he?" of some man
I didn't care for

He had one job:
to make me forget for
1 hour
or maybe thirty minutes.

"...Surprisingly big, right?"
they'd finish it for me
Smiling and grinning
like my heart, I suppose
and my depth,
I suppose

I would not say anything to them
just smile
and light a match

11/22/2018

the leaves underfoot
i'm here to hear
while i walk in battery park

the river sways, partial to the quay
where moss covered rocks
and gum wrappers lay

and i liken it to my brain,
how it moves between
garbage and rot,

things that have stuck to me
through nature
and time.

i entertain the idea
of jumping into the hudson
shake my head. that'll have to wait for another day

but why?
that i cannot answer.
why the delay?

as i sit and stay and do nothing
hoping it'll get better
it never does

i shake my head
and turn
and walk away

things that happened to me
that seemed so full of eternity
and set in green and granite

things i figured i'd never forget.
The city distracts me but
i go back to dry land



everywhere i find evidence of my memories:
people, places, streets, trees,
the laces they took from me at the hospital

i cannot find them-
they lie in a bin,
in a landfill, deep in the ground under the rot

but these memories-
i cannot find it-
the idea they happened to me



i am finding ground
and lying on it
but falling through to the core.

forgetting what it is like
to feel air on my face
to feel my chest when i cannot recall

the feel of anything
or anyone at
all.

the few days i do remember
are vignettes of a film,
stored away in archives and
exploding in a kiln

the other ones run from me in a tunnel
towards green orange and gold days
of leaves, and air, and trees and hay

to lock me out forever
to send themselves away
from me.

to forget my memories  
it's like a sickle wedged into my heart,
handle out towards the hand of time that sunk it there

who did it happen to,
and when, and where and why
I don’t know

purple vermillion skies
in October, the turnpike pulsing under me
flying past on an over pass.

Now a year later I lie
in cold sepulcher of room,
wooden smell and dark purple night

I can finally see the stars
but they do nothing for me
except to remind me


they were there this whole time
and remember more than i could ever
dream of.

12/15/2015

"You, doctor, go from breakfast
to madness."
Anne Sexton

The engine of my amygdala:
                   so burnt out
I needed coolant, I needed something to prevent my
   immolation
a sort of precautionary measure

***'s flammable
  I'd soon find out
In a crowd of hundred dark and
smoke crawled through my shoulders
    social little parasite
apologize for being an interruption to everyone

   "Wish I could've been there"
Sucrose altruism,
back at the mental hospital id relived
every single second with you

thinking of your anger I read Tennessee William's letters
I loved you

I even loved your hatred.
A girl across the hall screaming
about Jesus and her ****
shouting singing Shenandoah

"But I don't need to be here,"
   I turned to my roommate,
a strong figure I still admire,
"Everyone says that, even with a Thorazine needle halfway down their ***."

They'd had a name for it
Something about kisses, I don't remember

"Yeah, it leaves a huge bruise on
your ***," they laughed in the
tv parlor

there we were
The tristate area's teenage
girls too unstable for the world

a step above "oh, you know how
teenagers are"
A girl with grey eyes

Came in my last night there
"Is it normal to cry on your
first day?"

I wasn't allowed to
even touch her shoulder
and so

with the alcohol and the
Lamotrogine I tried to figure
out where it'd all gone wrong

but it'd been hiding in me
psychotic seed,
a virus carrier a patient zero of my own

tepid insanity!

12/7/2017

The month was over
heart in my hands
pulsing, bleeding

crawling down and off my
fingers
ruby, garnet

all over
the muddy riverbank.
the summer night's air-

still, holding.
it was unknown,
so were you

remembering the
look you gave me
as i walked away

you thought i didn't see
days turned into weeks
soon enough

like always, of course
and again
i watched you walk away

forever and ever.
you did not look back like I did.
I did not expect you to.

December I sit on the top of the slide, looking at
playground monkey bars

I laughed when
you hopped on
looking at the brook we

flung cigarettes at.
I wonder why no one has killed me yet in life

With something as simple
as- placed firmly in
my liver- a knife.

the biting air freezing
the tips and tops
of my fingers

the lights of the cars
pass over my head in lines, through metal slats

thinking of you:
a brick to my face,
to my brain, please.

so I can start over,
comatose, new and
unknown to the world.

In three weeks
New Years
will come

you will laugh with your friends miles away
i, sick sad abandoned

will frown deeply
at the television
and make myself empty promises

that
others will
break for me eventually.

11/28/2017

"Desire and
All the sweet pulsing aches
And gentle hurtings
That were you,
Are gone into the sullen dark..."
Ernest Hemingway

Pain
because the sky is darkening
and turning bruise blue.

I glance out the window
look for some kind of answer
and nothing comes to me.

9/16/2017

i sat on the corner
and stared
until you woke up

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

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

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

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

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

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

and
objects seen in mirror
are closer than they appear

4/18/2018

the waxwings singing
through my window
remind me of when i was young.

letting bygones be bygones and
staring boldly out the doorway at the
morning sun

but who am i anymore
if i cannot be that girl
i don't know, i don't know

to sleep's to dream
and to love's to keep
April– the canopies turn white and green

5/26/2017

I search desperately for it:
the drive to write.
It can be found in my inability to stay satisfied

The visits- never too numerous
one call I'm thrown off
oh, it would be great to see each other

I stare off and agree.
i dislike driving
because i see all the dead animals

on the road
one call from you
still no response. still no response

9/2/2017

my last september–
in princeton, that is
the late night talks

soon to be replaced
by the real business.
two am

i sit on hard floor!
phillip green and his orchestra
softly in my room's air

watching the door, weaving,
like penelope, my memories–
almost tangible.

i raise a finger follow the light
from the lamp, think:  

god!

someone should write a book about us

they  already have:
the beautiful
and the ******.

1/17/2018

"the going into winter and never coming out."
-frank o'hara

the lights of nassau
***** and white
like raw pearl

shining down on my shoes
and
i, moldering and wicked,

sitting on bank steps.
you held your hand out for me
but i stood up by myself

this is how it happened
simply put, and no
metaphor.

you say to sit and talk
i know where talking is
red gravel i kick up like i had

before
and all i see in the cold and the dark:
your pupils, your hands

held out again
i would be dumb to take them
a month ago, dying for a lack of you

and now i try to catch time by its tail
but i can't
for time isn't an animal

it could have fooled me,
by the way it slinks and sidles
in the dark of the woods.

sitting in Anacostia,
on the phone with you,
dead roach on sidewalk

so long ago
back to reality:
you ask me if it's alright

and i say yes
i let anything happen to me
and everything happens to me.

i can not hold on to it
time is in the air
but what i can try to do is remember it.

*II*
my life is lived in the past
a life not worth living
a life not respected

there is nothing
i can do about this
i think, as i walk to my car.

2017*

I hear the first mourning doves of the year
somewhere high in the branches of this toohot day
like your calling me then going away

You are sick, sick
your head implodes with the fetid treacle
of thought.

and i have done what i could
this is:
nothing.

i will marry one day and be happy
fat and glowing, tenderhearted
i will send you a letter

perhaps you will know
if you want to know
but for me this year is this

the talking too much
and hating the
taste of cherries

the last blue nights by the fountain have passed
there are scarcely poems to write.
a plane flies high in the sky

white and dry
to jump from it,
broken parachute

and land at your feet, liquified
is a fate of which i
can only fantasize.

3/2/2016

It's March again
and I'm lost again
wondering about the Delaware

Feeling like a child
who got more than she could
bargained for

colds bitter
good, it was a short winter
I'll never be that wholehearted

girl again,
but it was a short winter
My writing is disgusting,

Only good when I'm suffering
and the thing is I'm suffering now
and I don't know why nothing is

coming out
The year is grey, egg washed and egg white,
Painted and glazed over with

typhoid
I don't walk anymore to the reserve
don't see a point in it

There's no motivation to
see the world
try to find beauty in things

I'm trying to find where
I went
and trying to find where

I put my sanity,
Left it in a biohazard box
picked it back up ungloved

I put my hiking boots up
feel bad for the unloved agronomias
and I think it always gets better

but since my poetry's getting worse
I can't say with certainty
my world won't either.

9/2/2017

Now johnny hartman
using the same excuse i do:
i just dropped by to say hello

oh but how destructive
a few words could
be!

two and a half at night
god should i be asleep?
should i drive into oblivion?

i'd like to disappear into the mountain
driving, turning into a ravine, melting into the night's rocky tiers

god
id rather be anywhere
but here:

East Maryland, or Narrangansett
you know, whatever it is i  want
i'm not sure this place has it

The dew drops off the brown brick still
I am not there to watch it
Back home everything stops
It is hard to imagine my life without me
In the gray city, I lie in bed
For what reason?
Why am I here
As the rain comes down
And washes the garbage away.

1/18/2018

i used to be sentimental,
i declare like some sort of achievement
like it is something to be proud of

that i feel nothing
nowadays.
and i do, i think

but i have always been told
my writing is analytical
corpse cold, to the point

the car's quiet in the night
and, moving to the corner
and crossing my arms

i entertain the notion of what've i done
but life doesn't mean anything
and that's the good part

i laugh but I'm not smiling
as you confirm this idea
the fields are

evil and dark
but how do i explain
i can't it's not like i have ever felt it before

with a smirk
i
play with my hair

and remember
what being a woman's
good for.

2/16/2015

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

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

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

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

No service

7/15/2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1/3/2018

Paling to think
think what?
oh, just to think!

It hurts,
but
it helps

Time escapes me
there is nothing to do about it
papermoths and gnats of memories

And i'm not sure i dislike it.
*** and orange juice,
laying on the cold floor

Laughing about myself
and what not.
everyone laughing

Because we've made it
another trip round the sun
excited because

I've picked up a new habit:
never sleeping!
sickening, the state of my writing-

Sickening, the state of the night
it is so beautiful, so cold
bruised blue-and-black all over

So that i want to watch it forever
the light hitting my shoulders
and hands

Holding them
up to
the window

1/25/2017

the sky melted, sweating glass
for three days straight-
once, we marveled at the inexorable and eventual

at
the drop that makes the bough
bow.

i remember the ache
of the sunlight on my
crooked nape

one May day . We sit in a January cafe
"It is springtime," she announces
except these days, it's no emotional pantomime, not a hopeless mantra

"and why?" I beg a question
"oh, because something's starting"
she mixes milk into her honey

it is too sweet for me
the umbrella opens in the shop
"put that away, it's a bad omen" oh, as if I care

imagine me so treacly?
she talks about pregnancy and politics
about marriage

and something in me,
i realize
wants to be, is disgusted by my far future maternity

at the supermarket
there's a jingle
hey, mom, what's for dinner?

"Uh, hey, I feel like Plath... marriage is oppression and all that"
"Well, join the club. Oh, domesticity-"
"O'Hara said : There is only one man I like to kiss,"

I misquote, intentionally.
"Heterosexuality!
you are inexorably approaching!"

perhaps we can't wait
to be thirty and bored
with three kids

watching them play at the Minetta
wondering where the hell our time went
and there they'll sit

polish- to her irish, italian- to my puerto rican
new jersey mutts
i laugh

thinking of drunk days down on
53rd and Lex
we're not ready to live like it's 1953

*oh, johnny promised me
and i wear his
ring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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