I am the emptiness that exists in the kitchen
at such hours, late and lonely.
I can operate only in this space,
at night when the answers become irrelevant
and the present tense becomes the past.
I rely on the sporadic sounds of movement of traffic below the window.

I am the scratchy sound of death cab
on the Buick’s aged speakers.
I claw at the insides of the aluminum
and seep out through cracked windows.
I shore myself against a distant past
despite better judgment.

I am born of the vivid summer heat.
I ride the train to the loop
and back out to the city’s extremities,
like blood through a body.
I sweat under layers of wool humidity.

I am the concrete paving the boundless suburban streets.  
I exhale tar and forest
as the rain begins to fall, long after dark,
cooling the still-hot surface.
I crave the tires and feet that brace themselves against me.  

I am the slow moving clouds at dusk, the color of tea.
I ignite as the sun slouches toward the horizon.
I consume the jets that depart from O’ Hare in every direction.

I am familiar laughter, striking ears in palpable waves.
I move most freely though vicious August heat,
But even in such passive chilled air, I proceed.

I careen toward what has been named peace,
though it’s been forgotten over the years.
I have fled the immortal city for one more ageless.
I crave the smell of the death of summer.

I pass into a state of suspension
like the bodies that surround me, never born but built.
I trace the veins and find no flesh,
but only bones beneath them.
I stretch willing to bridge the gaps that exist.

I am the tangled freeways moving among one another
in the heart of a city accused of being heartless.  
I am guiltless in the face of isolation.
I hold blood hostage on a daily basis.  

I am lethargic, gold-soaked afternoons
Bearing such spacious skies.
I lie beneath gilded light
like the lazy palm lined streets.
I am the trembling airwaves,
And I disarm the distance itself.

We won’t evade starvation to shrink
Naïve to the death of us,
We find, we find bodies

In the absence
We regress

No one remains
If we debate *** leaves in pink chalk

We proceed
through negatives without shadows

If we find nothing, I will live without

Doubt
We don’t go

As the vivid heat of Illinois
sheds
the profuse breathing forest
and crowded meadows,

smug evenings
bleed
insect symphonies.

As pressurized homes
Exhale
oblivious life
cushioned in air artificially chilled,

one thousand Julys
forever in transit
traverse golden cloud ceilings
above so many absent walls

until savage nights
visit for the sake of vacant freeways,
and neon blooms
shadows, brake lights, and flickering darkness

Nightmares must be gentle to do any harm.
They stagger through my unconscious mind
the way the dead tips of palm leaves flicker in the wind.
In the absence of sleep, I converse with them
from my second story window,
through the air above the boulevard.

They break out in golden sweat
and their leaves clash and rustle
when I ask where all the clouds have gone.
In the face of such hostility,
I crave the trees of home,
happy to accept their fate
even as they begin to wreak
of the death of summer themselves.

They shed leaves like flesh
that bleed smoke the flavor of rotting earth
as they burn through late October.

Light dissolves
and shadows move like vertigo,
the way Lizzy Volkamer moved through the Midwest
the summer before last.

The palms won’t speak to me
And Lizzy watches dead leaves gather.
Until they’re burnt, she won’t speak to me either,
though she misses Lo dearly.
Because Lo only lives in the summer months
and is miles away by now.

Ashes began to fill a sky already in decay,
so she swam through August to escape.
She followed the heat to where it settles in other seasons,
where vicious sleep peruses such fugitives.  

Se faltan las nubes
whisper the palm trees in her dreams
even as the wind picks up
and offers to help them say so much more

The altitude clicks through my head
We join the stagnant air, neon stained
And creep through the hills
Like ghosts of an age almost dead

I’d walk with my people
if I could find them
In the fading light at least
I feel less like a sore thumb

The potential sparks against our ankles
like sirens in the rear-view,
Wading through the space
Only the unknown can inflict.

Fear fails to show
the way we knew it would
And the temp can’t master conversation
So we fall asleep, second row,
standing room only
Fog consumes the sound.

We steep ourselves
in jagged silhouettes
of your piano intro.  
Bathe in dusty memories
like sepia-toned snapshots.

We will hear you
until we, too
are too sore for sound.
We shiver through
flickering silence

Far less.

Lost like a static low.
Where affinity breaks down,
freeze crowds against
our feeble fish-bowl walls.  

We can’t tell cold
from native skin

Braking black-and-white
festers at our feet.
Extremities unknown.

Confident,
we wander.

with eyes still closed,
woken by rowdy students
with 8AM classes, outside not-quite-ground-floor windows
distance fills a mind

the shrinking spacial gap
creates slack in the fraying rope
that connects us at our cores

it winds in and winds back out,
like the memories of months past,
like the inside jokes and wordless exchanges,
that show up and lace through my days

distance that thrives in the cool west-coast air
and in the delicate heat of here
it grows like the vines that crawl across the canyon floor

whose pale green leaves
don't quite seem to be of this earth
after a summer spent in the midwest
where the lush green life was anything but pale

but the color has faded out
like the closeness we once knew
as if it belongs only to those distant midwest months

In this monotone washed out city,
The traffic moves slowly,
But still too fast to **** time,
Under a desolate ever-grey sky.

In such lack of color,
These days lose their meaning.
And laughter gives way to silence,
As bitter cold seeps in,

Through the cracked door frames and slush-speckled windows;
Through too-pale limbs and never-enough layers.
It settles only in bodies
Shuddering from more than cold air

Home among the *****-snow-lined streets,
And lonely leafless trees;
two-thousand miles from the sea.
The memory fades like melting snow.

Dead are the places that once killed time.
And lost are the ideas that enabled a hope,
That this place was ever more than a shell,
Or these bodies were more than cold.

It occurred to me today
that I like the way you died.

You died gently, the way I hoped you would,
as if the fall itself was enough.
And then I remembered that the fall itself was.

I let it draw me away
the way I knew it would,
to naked skies hollowed out,
nests for the cool indifferent air
that creeps in after dusk

And then fall crept in on you
as the violent heat we knew dissolved,
and the profuse life turned into something less alive
like the permanent muted color
of the world I now belong to.

Any kind of you and me
that ever would have been
fell,
like the leaves are doing now, I'm told.

They said they changed colors first,
like bruises blooming against the sharp, liquid sky.

And then
they  fell.

By the time they sank to the ground,
they were all dead.

The bodies will be piled
and celebrated by some before burning.

And though they won't know why,
the smell will remind them of something good.

Only those of us
who have already gone might know
that the smell carries every good day these bodies have seen

a whole season of good days,
an age,
brief as it may have been,
worth flames.

barely able to breathe
ten feet from the stage
in awe of her hero
she sings along with a sage

"its me and the moon,
she says" her voice almost spent
showing her gratitude in decibels
"she says she wont forget"

the notes feel like needles
they stitch through her soul
they hold her together
they're mending her holes

the volume increases,
the crowd closes in.
She help from screaming
she cant stop her grin

she follows this feeling
she fits in this scene
in need of no answers
the chaos strangely serene

He sings her thoughts back
and she knows she'll survive
even as the music fades
and the crowd dissolves before her eyes

she drifts out to the buick
onto a humid june night
and as rain begins to fall
she is sure she's alive

the highs creep up
the temps pushing their luck
the seventh day will suffocate
or else just embrace

the rounded drops of rain
and animated wisps of clouds
become more and more sparse
as the days creep on

the air on day six
will be weighty with something
perhaps more than moisture

the unnatural grey of the sky
on a day like today
will dissolve into something better
says the seven-day, at least

Fury.
tears through me
like my spikes tear through the surface.
they leave tiny chunks of track-flesh
and wetness in their wake.

Burning.
again for a sensation
that wrecked me in the past.
it left me broken in two places.
Now I want it back.

Extinguished.
two years ago
on Loyola's maroon track.
a place I haven’t been since
my burning turned smokeless

Succumbing.
To the pull of something
that took me years to shake.
To the neon hurt
that creeps across my flesh

Savage.
is the strategy
that works best for me these days.
I charge the line again
as my muscles scream for air

High.
on my strides
that feel effortless again.
bounding off the curve
where we left each-other last.

The calico-gray quilt of clouds
is no longer backlit by a sun
we won't see all season.

The naked sky of summer
reclaimed its heavy covers from storage,
the ones it needs to keep warm
even on the mildest autumn evenings.

And of all the planes I study all night,
just one lands

The rest talk over me,
struggling to reach the ceiling of this town
to pierce it and flee through the bareness behind it

The metal bird sheds ash
and demands attention in the darkness.
A lack of color trails
as it descends
across the space between the ground and the sky.

Slowly, it settles on the town
looking so much less threatening there,
like a joke even, resting on the stone heads
of the gods and goddesses in the park.

You might never love me in the way I want you to.  Or the way I need you to.  I like you too much and I know it.  I've gotten over you, but I continue to fall back in intrigue with you at the slightest provocation.

Because I change my mind a million times a day about you.  And at the end of it, I don't believe in you.  But against all good judgment, I recognize all the shadows that move like vertigo through my sleep as yours.  And believe in you again.