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.

i don't watch home movies
hate them
reason being because
when i was young
i was looking for a movie
my mother
had recorded for me
and accidentally
put one in the vcr
that i'm not sure
i was supposed to see
i know the obvious response
"uh oh, ****"
sorry to disappoint
they were only marked with dates
  1991
on live television
montel williams asks my father
"how can you just throw
your child away like a piece of trash?"
   1994
i spend so much time
in the emergency room
that my parents stop
penciling in growth marks
on the frame
of my bedroom door
i always thought
it was because they believed
i would never grow out
of this sickness
sometimes i believe
the reason that they
never bought me a dream catcher
was because they never thought
i'd live long enough
to see them come true
   1996
i am eliminated
from a spelling bee
because i didn't know
the 'dad' is silent in 'family'
   2013
before i got into poetry
i used to do standup
none of my jokes were funny
one of the other comics
tells me my skits are dry
sometimes sad
he says "why don't you joke
about something like your family?"
so i say
"i never wore any sunblock
because i didn't want anything
to keep me from my father"
i say "what do you call christmas
without lights or heat?"
before he has a chance
to answer
i say "1997. better yet
why don't you
make like a dad and
leave"
   2014
every time we drive
past the hospital
my mother reminds me
how much it cost to save my life
like she'd rather
have her money back
she doesn't have to say
that sometimes she wishes
it was me who had died
instead of my brother
i can hear it in the way
she says "love you"
sometimes i imagine
that if i were to die
that she
would pick out a casket for a child
because she never loved
the person i became
yesterday i told my father
how close i'd been
to suicide lately
and he said
"that's my boy,
livin on the edge.."
and i can't remember
if i laughed
or cried

2/24/2015

  The magpies sang up in the rushes– it was the second hottest day of that winter, the gilded winter specific silver sun (for the light seems brass or golden other times) parading through the glass of cars and storefronts and painting people's faces as they looked through.

  This light seems to be extremely influential in visual memory– in fact, I daresay if it were not for the light I would not be writing this.
  Wallace Stevens stated plainly and succinctly once, sweetly ochre, that the origin of love is one often hotly pursued, but its fluttering fashion has so distinct a shade, at its birth, that one can immediately tell.

  And so speaking on the similar topic of distinct fluttering things, Adrienne Rich said herself that love is given much poetic attention- that lust, too, is a jewel. And is it not? It seems more at times that *** removed from love or emotional background is more interesting.

     After all, weren't princedoms in the past running to the brim with more ******* children than actual heirs? Weren't steppe chateaus and inconspicuous inns in the ravine crawling cities put in place for politicians' mistresses?

     Digressing, these were all thoughts sitting on my shelf sitting in the Mitsubishi backseat. "This space is... surprisingly big eh?" I remarked, puffing on a perique, and he'd laughed a little, and I didn't realize what I said, and so then I laughed more.

   Is it possible to separate the after *** phenomenon found in one stemming from casual circumstances from the one in an emotional commitment? The sweet subtleties came to the surface for the very first time since I'd last loved.

    What subtleties? It may sound puerile, but a particular kiss– we were discussing the epitome of innocence in nature and I said that the range is the only place I feel a riveting sense of Puritan complacency. With this he was so struck he kissed me- no more nor less than 3 seconds. It is a very particular kiss that cannot be described- not a ****** one, but one that proves humans are physically social animals.

   It took us both by surprise. This casual sense of security and flushed faces and closure that i hadn't felt with any other casual passive passing people, I felt, was closely tied to a platonic love and admiration.

  Dopamine and oxytocin are released upon ******. It goes back to my Freudian beliefs of human reproduction being exclusive Machiavellian. The reason that oxytocin is released specifically is because it bonds- in fact, it makes the partners want to physically stay together, so in the eyes of biology they can make more children.

  Funny how science works, and funny how that's the way things were programmed to be, however humans as insolent as always found aways around. But the body prevails and so the sense of casual confidence and closeness endured.

   There has never been an instance where I have been more sure that I am not romantically interested in a person, and yet I feel this platonic adoration as strong as my romantic feelings- of course there is something tweaked, if it wasn't, It wouldn't be platonic.
  I have to ask myself if platonic love challenges romantic love, or it is a completely different name all on itself. Or perhaps I  should consider that the reason I am looking at this so hazily was because of the silver winter light.

“’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.

5/13/2015

There happens to be a tremendous peace in a spring night late in the season, sultry humid mornings and days seem brash in comparison to this light blue thing clouds crawling across the sky to the tune of mourning doves and woodpeckers. I cannot remember primaverial scenes before last year's. It seems spring is the shortest, the frigid isolation of winter is so permanent and branding that I can recall every individual one since perhaps '11. Fall and summer always seem to blend into a purgatorial gloaming paste. Throughout all these seasons one always feels he is a single pedestrian (or is there another name when one is wholly alone?) walking down winding drives and straited cremated avenues. Perhaps it is not so common– perhaps it is me, but even when walking in deltas of human life one in winter feels alone. But writing this by the Japanese oak under the beak of a woodpeckers I feel the same apprehension. It is me, I have decided.

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

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.