please don't take this the wrong way but
the way your face looked in the moonlight is always
at the edge of my thoughts

i don't usually say this to people but
you make me feel like an ee cummings poem
you open and close me with your smallest gesture
or texted emoticon

you know
i have a girlfriend and
she's what i need
i think, and the insistent pull of your gravity
is only a temporary thing, but
i am only a temporary thing, so i live
the knife's edge, i hold you
platonically and always say yes
to the plans you make and never
ever kiss you or even intimate that
i want to kiss you (i want to kiss you
like broken dams and rushing floods i
want to kiss you) and i tell her that
i love her
and i do but
this nova or crush or infatuation is too fleeting,
this me is too fleeting, so
i hold the fire as close as i can hold it
without burning, so close that sometimes it's hard
to breathe and i let the smoke fill my lungs because
i know it won't last

and tonight is the lunar eclipse
and that cold rock that lit up
your face so perfect
as we stretched on a blanket under the stars at the drive-in
bleeds old copper, sleeps, and

the darkening moon makes me think that the world is ending
it whispers that
this small tidal pool world of maybe-us
is ending

leaving only salt-crusted ****** rock
and the sense of having lost
something that drowns like the ocean

and i know that eclipses like this are common empty shadows --

how can so many wonders (so many full moons or sunsets
or held hands) be so ordinary?

ghosts outnumber us but
someday we will join them
looking out from plastic-strewn beaches
upon slowly boiling oceans

"I want to kiss you," she says,
"but only if you promise
I won't end up in a poem."

it's been 20 hours since the end

the hot water of an honest shower streams down my skin

she sent me a link to a youtube video
she says it's her breakup music

i click on it, but i don't listen to the words,
on account of how i'm mostly scotch tape today
from across the room, it sounds like despair

the sign at the side of the road says "right lane ends"
i yell at it "everything ends"
no one hears me

except maybe god
but god's not watching today
god's TiVoing me
god'll probably get to it later
i get it though
there's supernovas and auroras and kardashians to watch

the christians say that god knit me together in my mother's womb
all fearfully and wonderfully
i get the sense that maybe the good yarn was on back order that day
it's okay god
i also have days when i wake up late and almost miss the bus and forget my part of the group project that's due today

we got this, though

we got lots of ways to glue and macaroni up a brain just right
all this science and not enough places to stick it
i shove a handful through the blood-brain barrier and there it is
home
chemicals so sweet they make me cry glitter

it's funny how things can look the same but feel so different
when kelsey texts that we need to talk, that it needs to be over skype
it fills me with that old dread

it just takes a few words to scoop me out like a pumpkin
they don't last long, after you carve them

i want to take extra antidepressant tomorrow morning
it increases my risk of seizures but i don't care
i'm not sure how many hours i spent today
shuffling through walmart with downcast eyes
occasionally stopping to cry at a toaster or pillowcase

thirty one is mathematically prime
it doesn't feel very prime

when i get to the end of the toothpaste i know i still have time
i roll it and squeeze it and press it and
day after day this tube gives me what i need to get by until
one day it doesn't anymore
that's my thirty one

i watch the sad blue mouthwash disappear into the drain
i'm not sure why

people act like a breakup retroactively erases
all of the joy and value a relationship had
like its impermanence somehow robs it of significance

i figure every relationship ends
either in breakup or death
i don't think it makes them any cheaper

to regret anything is to wish for your own non-existence
without the steps and forking branches that brought you to here, you would be someone else
someone that your parents and best friends might mistake for you

i regret.

the sign at the side of the road says "right lane ends"
i yell at it "everything ends"

people act like a breakup retroactively erases
all of the joy and value a relationship had
like its impermanence somehow robs it of significance

i figure every relationship terminates
either in breakup or death
i don't think it makes them any cheaper

to regret anything is to wish for your own non-existence
without the steps and forking branches that brought you here, you would be someone else
someone that your parents and best friends might mistake for you

i regret

i wake up to october morning darkness crystallized under my eyes

i despise my smallness
i'm not sure what i mean by that but the feeling is thick in my bones

i wish i had more gravitas or impetus or something else sternly derived from Latin and Physics
wish i had a lever long enough to move myself, to advance the plot
i needed to do laundry three days ago. i still need to.
there is a ticket in the glove box of my car. today is its birthday. it is one week old. its name is driving-while-talking-on-the-phone-to-my-girlfriend or another arbitrary combination of shapes that represent sounds and ideas at the intersection of the nature of human contact and personal responsibility.
i don't know because i haven't read it yet

i think i could probably be more than i am
(more what?)

it's hard to remember which day it is
they all sound like cars driving past my apartment and a bathroom faucet that always drips
relativity says that everyone else is moving and I am perfectly still
october is when relativity first opens its autumn flower self
some time in april I will pick its rotting blossom from my skin

i remind myself that lots of streams have dormant times when thirst exceeds ability,
that even great rivers sometimes choke with silt, reduced by so much minutiae
that it just takes a change of season to set things right again

i am waiting for rain

I am in a bar with more TV than artwork on its walls. This breaks my principal rule of bars, but I had to *** and the bar was open and I felt guilty using the bathroom without buying anything, so I am drinking a Blue Point Toasted Lager and trying to make sense of a sample chapter of Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble on my smartphone while a group of three to six drunk men a few meters to my left debates the relative fuckability of Meg Ryan vs Sally Field in the nineties or the eighties or sometimes both and this whole thing feels ironic and like maybe it could be a scene in an indie movie.

tap me right and i am a tuning fork
my bones hum a desire to shirk, to move,
to shake the dust for vistas unseen

my feet are hungry
my skin has to taste every flavor of dirt
it gets bored with the daily repetition of texture and shade

what of all the palms unpressed and eyes ungazed?

i am a drunk and i'm late and i can't find my keys but i know they're in my bedroom somewhere
so i search unevenly, moving from corner to corner, stumbling, overturning pillows and ***** t-shirts, knocking down lamps, cursing and muttering, squinting and sweating ugly

this is my each day. my skin feels too tight. i want to crack it open at my elbows and the edges of my scalp and crawl out of myself,
swollen so large no city can contain me.
let me boil until i am atmosphere,
citizen of every nation,
kisser of every lip and eyelid,
dervish of every flame or patch of dry earth.

it begins with a meditation

she does not speak in thunder or the roar of conflagration
her voice is not rush of water or gust

listen for the small, still voice

find it in the hours when the black of the highway is unbroken by headlights and the night is a secret you tell no one

find it as a breeze lifts the sweat from your cheeks as you sit on a mountain outcrop born a billion years ago

find it sewn into the lining of the noise of the coffee grinder, in the gaps between the words "green tea with milk and honey"

the right silence is not a crushing of voice
do not cover the wound but let it bleed until there is nothing
silence is an emptying
each chore or occupation unattended is a balloon rising within you
do not contain them
touch each one, then let it go
watch it drift up into every shade of blue until it's too far to see

now, listen.

if we were peacocks,
i would blue-green iridescent burst beauty
all the other ***** would high five me for my excellent choice of eye shadow and  elaborate evening gowns
brightness would be bravery, screaming LOOKING THIS GOOD IS WAY MORE IMPORTANT THAN SAFETY FROM PREDATORS
pretty would mean masculine and drab would mean feminine
feminine would still be an insult.

If we were leopard slugs,
we would all be one ***
maybe my dad would be your mom and my mom would be your dad
I would never worry if I was man enough
I would love all of my hermaphroditic glands equally
or, more realistically, I would be ashamed of all of them equally,
never sure if my gonopore was symmetric enough,
if my translucent blue-white ***** was beautiful enough to ever intertwine and bloom with another's
there would be no gay bars or marriage equality movements or swallowed-wink "no ****"s
no one would tap around your abdomen in search of the right organs before declaring your birthright aptitude in cooking or car repair
you and I, we would follow each other around all night, exchanging playful licks, before impregnating each other, circus-suspended from a tree branch
... I guess that part would be the same

if we were blanket octopuses or anglerfish
masculinity would mean smallness,
would mean quiet dependence,
would mean dissolution of self
i would search for you, my love
cling to you, give you my everything
you would be my big strong hunter, my provider
this is the only world i can imagine needing men's rights activitists
i would log in to chitter (like twitter, but, like, instead of birds tweeting, it's a sound dolphins make? it was the best i could come up with)
i would log onto chitter and try to tell of my deletion, but
some overly muscular two-meter-tall woman would write back,
"I've never had my body gradually absorbed into anyone else's. If it were a real problem, more octopeople would be talking about it."
they would threaten to eat me, to rip me apart and feed me to sharks, would laugh.

we're humans.
we're closer to slugs than octopuses
we aren't from mars or venus.
we don't act like it.

masculine and feminine aren't straightjackets. they're edges of a map.
on my continent, we take ballet and write poetry and cry in public
we love math and cooking and we don't really know how to fix cars but we can figure it out if it's in the user's manual
we want to be strong and graceful and warm and safe.
you don't have to live here, but don't tell me not to.

i don't know what it means to be a man
i know what it's like to be treated like a man
to be given deference i don't deserve
to be obnoxious or impulsive in conversations and not be called out for it

people with bodies like mine, with skin like mine, we take up too much space.
we can be smaller.
there's room for everyone.

today i am at work
it is very monday
everyone's face is very monday
the halls are muted
the sky is an even grey
i can't tell if it's raining

saturday morning, the oven clock was blinking 12:00
something made it forget the time
i woke up to no internet connection
silently, i blamed my
****** roommate, her boyfriend, the cat

the cable company e-mailed me
to apologize and make promises,
speculating a downed tree or
car accident

(life mysteries: an e-mail to
tell me i don't have internet
like a letter to tell me
the post office is closed
like a missed phone call
to tell me to check my work e-mail
because a car is wrapped around
a utility pole and a boy
is in a hospital and his friend
just isn't anymore
so now this sixteen year old
has to carry the friend he
didn't mean to ****, dragging
his body down the corridor at
school, propping it up in the
bathroom each morning so
those unseeing eyes reflect
in the mirror, cradling
it to sleep each night)

it was later that day that
facebook (peace be upon it)
told me this child had died
his ghost must have got caught
in all those power lines and
the joy he had in life was too
much for copper or aluminum
to bear and so it wept great
showers of electrons and
made my oven forget the time and
made the earth forget
a boy

but today i am at work
in nine years, i've said bye-for-now
to maybe a thousand pairs of optimistic eyes
most don't come back
so each year, i silently erase them from my heart
(it doesn't hurt, after nine years)
i have become well-practiced in the art of letting go
so today i feel only guilt for feeling
nothing

i tell myself
boys die every day, i
tell myself we can't
weep for all of them

the principal tells me to send the lost kids to the library
but give the rest normalcy, so i spend the day painted thick
with forced calm over false pain over shut eyes

today i teach them where wind comes from
the way nature tries to smooth out bumps
until everything is equally cold and dead
i teach them anemometers measure wind speed
because anemo is like animate or animal and
they all mean wind or spirit or motion
because those are synonyms and i silently wonder
if boy's spirit has joined the atmosphere as some
small bright gust
dancing snowflakes into drifts and
playing music in the leaves for
millenia, racing faster as sun grows hotter,
finally escaping into interstitial space


friday, they will lower him into the ground.

i'm wandering nyack in search of
poems. i like it when the full moon
and the lights on the tappan zee bridge  
reflect off the hudson.

nights like that, the tides sing me something
inescapable, and my legs take me down the
steep part of main street, east of broadway,
and i stand on the undulating dock and
let the waves pass through me as i scream
song lyrics or memorized poems until
the water calms me. saltwater has a way
of reminding me of deep secret histories.
my mitochondria all remember
being born somewhere like this.

not tonight, though.

it's cloudy and the sky is whispering
but he spits when he talks and
i thought spring was out tonight
but she went home early because she forgot her wallet

all i can find is
drunk strangers and
beer i don't like

few things reduce you
like so many unfamiliar faces
in a familiar place

inspiration tiptoes
out my pores in fine droplets,
evaporates; leaves behind a salt-crust of
voiceless hollow, so
i go for a walk
letting the almost-rain try to rinse it
from my bare forearms, calves, cheeks

i don't find any poems tonight,
only a feeling of

jeanann verlee is on the kitchen table
in a pink mohawk and a polka dot dress
she is racing hummingbirds next to
the onions and the avocado, all
frills and lace and nosebleed and broken glass
like she's chewed a fistful of gravel and
spat out a mouthful of chipped teeth and ******
diamonds

betweeen am and should there is
a wall whose bricks are acetylcholine or
serotonin or the lack thereof and i
am on the wrong side of it and
wish i had a ladder but the hardware
stores are all on the other side

it is enough
to have a body, to
stretch and bend my body, to
drink the radiant warmth of
other bodies, to press our
navels together because we can
grow no closer (only stronger)
and a thousand tiny threads stretch from
our hearts and weave together
until we are cloth and cartilage and sinew until
we are tapestry
it is good

iridium flare:
   when the sun-glint off a
   satellite shines meteor-bright
   before geometry and gravity
   turn things wrong again.

---

i have my own iridium flare - it
sits on my night stand, my
sad-lite -- machine-made splinter of
sunlight to remind my solar cells what
summer felt like

my depression is a discharged battery:
i turn the engine but the engine doesn't turn
doesn't matter that i have to go to work, or
already paid for the class, or my
friend is waiting for me

ivy grows over me   heavy on my limbs

i need something stronger than volition
than one twenty volts or ten thousand steady desk lamp lux
i need lighting, mjolnir, asteroid
fire from heaven to
burn through these roots to
repolarize these synaptic terminals

i need july and hollow bones and
feathers   need mountain tops and
sunny days   need summer breeze
reaching underneath me  lifting me from
ridgeline   elevating higher until i
am cloud   am stratosphere   am
escape velocity   until i am starburst   am
pre-dawn august constellation smiling
down   smiling and finally
meaning it

some days are too many pictures
falling fast like tetris blocks just before the end
and i twist-try to fit in the gaps between the incomplete lines
my body fills the spaces that i couldn't close
i try to brick myself in corset-tight
stretch the laces and slather the mortar until
there is no room for breath,
for pause, for reflect, for what if
all of this is wrong if maybe
i'm playing this wrong if maybe
i just need a pickaxe to break through this wall
of juggle, of yellow-light-gas-pedal, need to
tear down this wall and build a
cathedral, a place to rest,
something beautiful that always points up

he said
write something that scares you

i'm terrified of heights

i climbed up a cliff
in the shawangunks last weekend
there were no poems there, just
rock, just
chalk and cracks and rope and harness and
shaking and don't look down and
me

i don't conquer fears but
sometimes we cuddle
i am always the little spoon
it means i cannot feel the full shape of them
only the small part pressed against my back
the part wrapped around me
the part breathing on my neck
every sound a promise

he's on the news again
all anyone talks about is
how they wish everyone would stop talking about him

i try switching off the radio, the newsfeed, the idle coworker chitchat
dig down to that layer of earth somewhere safe from winter bite but not quite mantle heat
and i bury my head in that goldilocks soil

my mom always said that if you ignore bullies
they go away so my ostrich head incubates
among the worms until i feel like maybe
it's spring and i start to hatch and send
my shoots up toward the sun but
when i wake up everything is
shadow because
he took my silence as invitation and grew and grew and grew
and now there's no room left
not even to breathe

i feel like i owe you a love letter
(or at least an apology):
my love
letters have always been born
of spark, burning bits of bark
or grass, ash -- elements consumed by morning
fed to wind
departed

i do not love
you flash and fade
surge then break

you are underneath all the soil
you are warm and solid and everything
we move together everywhere, slow
but always together moving:
until the heart goes ice we are
together moving, and even in silence
in darkness we will be together
unmoving

i do not love you thunder
i love you stream:
sometimes roar but often murmur
heard but hidden somewhere among the oaks and maples
not tucson wash that flows twice a year
but new york stream that ices over,
floods springtime, bows deep into late summer,
always cuts
steady etch deeper every day until we are
grand canyon love,
see it from space love,
lasts like mountains love

i wish
i could write
these words
smaller,
origami them
through your pores
dissolve them into
your blood

feels
too true
to be
louder
than whisper

after julio cortázar*

my bourbon

i drink it at a bar, alone

its translucent honey-color is an axolotl's eye
looking into me

and, like a cortázar story,
little by little,
my bourbon axolotl steals my body,
its soul stealing through my eyes to evict me from this
honestly-not-that-well-kept apart
ment

and i feel my bourbon axolotl eye replacing me
as i am drawn out into its glass prison

and i stare up as my bourbon turns me
gently in my glass
as my bourbon raises me to its lips
sips me
no longer winces
or even registers any emotion on a calm-liquid-surface face
eyes wet and flat and blank as a tumbler ******* deep

and i don't know where i'm going or what i'm becoming but
this feeling of spiraling and draining and emptying
is everything that i know

and there is less and less of me as bourbon stares down
cold
unsmiling
neat
and silently consumes me
and i am disappearing
and i am gone

and bourbon stands,
calm, but not serene,
and bourbon walks to my car, each step carefully measured,
and bourbon drives my car to my apartment
and bourbon sleeps in my bed and goes to my job and collects my paycheck
and bourbon falls into habit and routine
and bourbon feels my
empty.

but having a body, a life, is better than being trapped in bottles and glasses
it's probably better, anyway

and bourbon won't go back, won't trade flesh back for silica,
will keep living unfeeling behind glass-eye walls until skin and sinew unknit

and bourbon is so alien and content that
it never wonders if there is anything more,
never despairs for its ending road,
treasures every drop

bourbon calls this body, this life
top shelf

bourbon knows that **** ain't cheap

If I were a peacock,
I would blue-green iridescent burst beauty
pretty would not mean strange or weak
brightness would be bravery, screaming LOOKING THIS GOOD IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN SAFETY FROM PREDATORS
I would love my women drab, concealable, nearly invisible
... maybe some of us are already part peacock

If I were a leopard slug,
I would never worry if I was man enough
I would love all of my hermaphroditic glands equally
or, more realistically, I would be ashamed of all of them equally,
never sure if my gonopore was symmetric enough,
if my translucent blue-white ***** was beautiful enough to ever intertwine and bloom with another's
there would be no gay bars or marriage equality movements or swallowed-wink "no ****"s
no one would tap around your abdomen in search of the right organs before declaring your birthright aptitude in cooking or car repair
you and I, we would follow each other around all night, exchanging playful licks, before impregnating each other, circus-suspended from a tree branch
... I guess that part would be the same

If I were cricket or frog or songbird, my music would be my perfect gift to you.
I would learn guitar and start a band and
everyone would love me
(way more than the bass player)

But I am a man.
I don't know what that means yet.

some nights, it's raining
to the smell of decomposing leaves and wood smoke
and the stars have taken the night off

and i'm the full moon,
all rock powder and collision,
and nights like this, my dust stirs
and my craters ache

i look up,
wash the shadowed earth in my reflected starlight,
try to taste her clouds

i miss the rain

i never met her, but i miss the rain
i don't know why my craters ache but it's because i miss the rain

i don't know what rain does to a body,
the way she washes dust to deltas and floodplains,
the way she makes you grow in ways you never thought you could,
turns grey to green and growing.

i need that.

i don't know that i need that, only that my craters ache, that
my dust stirs, dry and restless...

my life is grand and complex:
i, a cosmic ballerina, engaged in elaborate
planetary dance: turn, pull, reflect,
I look for solace in the sunlight and the shadow,
find joy in the warming and the cooling,

ignorantly lack.


I do not know the shape of you.
I don't know how to look for you.
I don't know that I need to look for you.

If we meet, I will not recognize you.

Soon, the first flower would bloom from my lips.
We would smile at each other.
My dust would feed your clouds and your clouds would feed my skin.
We would be grateful.

I am already grateful.
I do not know the lack of you.
My dust and my craters are enough


except
sometimes, in late Autumn,
when the smell of leaves and wood smoke remind me of
nothing
and my craters start to ache...

male blanket octopus:
size of a thumbnail, you peel off
your wriggling *****-filled
hectocotylus, cut your own arm
as a gift of love to a female
the size of kobe bryant
i imagine you van-gogh,
whispering "keep this object
like a treasure" as your unbloody
*** arm curls up in the safety of her
mantle, as you slink away to quiet
obscurity, as you find somewhere
dark and alone to finally die, giving
up your body as food, giving everything,
and i envy you your unobtrusiveness, wish
i could be free of ego and gregariousness, and
i envy your pure dedication to purpose, wish
i knew so firmly my life's end, wish
i knew anything

on a wednesday night,
two days after the new moon,
the sky bare of clouds,

i almost called you -
i even dialed your number -
but that longing's gone.

i looked at the stars
and realized i don't want
to share them with you.

there is a cat that sits on my driveway
it has green eyes and black stripes
and you wouldn't know from looking at it, but that cat is an angel

the cat stares, unmoving, as i pull up the driveway toward it
because it knows that i won't cause it harm,

or if it is further down the driveway when i return home,
it bounds off into the brush, having spotted a demon wrapped in bluebird feathers or groundhog fur

i do not know if the cat is male or female, so i have decided the cat is neither --
*** is an attribute of animals born haphazardly from evolution.
but angels don't grow organic and messy:
angels are each lovingly hand built from the embers of stars that burnt out before earth formed
when you peer upward through your million dollar observatory, into the far depths of distant galaxies, your eye
is kissed by the light that was shed by the cat
before it was given to protect this domain

in a world of seven billion humans, one-in-a-million miracles happen seven thousand times a day

once, on the subway, a woman smiled at me
a stranger
smiled at me like i mattered
and i didn't realize this at the time
but that woman is god
and that smile was given to me as a gift because
she knew the way it would echo in my memory,
spill from my lips like tea sloshing from a full cup as i hurry from day to day

i have been in churches and prayer circles, but that smile is the closest i've ever come to the divine

these stories
these holy, sacred, special, set-apart,  made up
stories
are the only skin i have left
against the cold fact that we are all atoms,
that atoms are indifferent,
that we are indifferent,
that we are drops of water on a bit of star-**** at the edge of one of a hundred billion somewheres.


when i die, wait.
in a few billion years, the Sun will swallow my ashes
she will grow small and dark, fade out in dusty death

we will all be angels.

enough time
turns lost love
into a cicada shell

a hollow melange of
lust and nostalgia
left abandoned under a tree

the ley lines and star alignments that drew us together
have all lock-tumbler shifted
and the combination is in a notebook
in a cobwebbed and dusty box
that i left on the curb for recycling
on some unspecified thursday in 2012
or 11, or 13
something a little unlucky

i miss you
in the same way that i miss
a dream, upon waking:
a sandcastle, built under the wrong moon, described to a stranger
shapes so thick with water that they can't hold,
but it was good, wasn't it?
it was probably good.
it must have been good.
i think i remember smiling.