He is in love with questions
And the lilting world of words,
With the fabric of philosophy
And the taste of fresh ideas.

He is in love with the smell of green
And the shifting sands of dreams,
With the hunt for profound moments
And the hunger-lust for purpose.

He is in love with his books
And the zodiacs cross the planet,
With patterns of chain reactions
And the way we cog and gear.

He is in love with pools of stardust
And fanciful notions of theory,
With darkness, deep and coveted
And the fabric it is made from.

He is in love with one who left
And the poisoned past he bathes in,
With being perpetually lonesome
And floating twixt life’s sabulous banks.

He is in love with memories, and the universe,
And nobody else.

With my choking heart, I’m grasping at dust,
And I am in love with him.

if I suffer at this
typewriter
think how I'd feel
among the lettuce-
pickers of Salinas?
I think of the men
I've known in
factories
with no way to
get out-
choking while living
choking while laughing
at Bob Hope or Lucille
Ball while
2 or 3 children beat
tennis ***** against
the wall.
some suicides are never
recorded.

do you ever wonder
about the difference between
looking at something
and the hallucination created
when looking past it?
if you look at your hand
it's all you can see
but if you look past your hand
there are now two of them
sometimes it's hard for me
to remember which is real
it gets me thinking
about how my father
used to wake me up
in the morning by rubbing
his stubble across my face
i spent my 11th birthday
under the assumption
that he might come back
if i drank his aftershave
like maybe if i could turn blue
if i could be his favorite color
on our bathroom floor
he would forget why he left
the paramedics were all sobing
as they pumped memories
out of my stomach
i coughed up the day the post-it note with your new address on it
burned a hole in our refrigerator
coughed up the day
the divorce papers came
and my mother
took a baseball bat to the mailbox
i've been choking on the splinters
for 17 years
it's been 17 years
since the last dinner plate
exploded on our dining room wall
17 years since my mother
started accidentally setting your place at the dinner table
17 years since italian night
at the restaurant on the corner
where the juke box
spat tired music
and like so many other things
it stopped working when you left
i guess it's no coincidence
since the juke box went quiet
that the cds in my car
only skip on "i miss you"
i've been hemorrhaging memories
for so long
and now that i'm looking back
i can no longer tell
the mirage from the truth
sometimes i swear
you showed up to my graduation
and last time
i was at your apartment
i can't remember
if the imprints of my hands
are in clay hanging on your wall
or if they were left in the mud
the day god had the audacity
to let it rain
or maybe it's like the time
i saw someone crying on a bridge
now that i think about it
i can't remember if it was me

You sat on the other end of the table
Glistening, shining, and taunting me
Rosy cheeks with spurts of Yellow and Green
Silently teasing
A juicy, little Apple.
Hopefully no one would see me, no one would pay any attention
As I grabbed the treat and the knife
And began to dangerously peel.
I knew I was doing it wrong
My hands shaking while my cheeks began to flush
Embarrassed by my ignorant inadequacy.
Are you left-handed? she asked from my left.
Humiliation filled the corners of my eyes, wet and distraught.
No, I mumbled. My cheeks reflecting Mose's Red Sea.
I was beginning to drown.
Your thumb needs to move, You make me nervous,
and she sounded nervous indeed.
Put it down here. Help yourself control it. Guide it.
Everyone was staring now, the whole table awed
My ignorance showing, like a medallion at my chest
My shameful Apple as pathetic proof.
You're doing it wrong.
Non così. Basta, faccio io.
Let me do it.
You're about to graduate, and you can't peel an apple.
I began choking, drowning in tears of Humiliation.
No, let her do it the small Voice on my left said.
She is finding her way. Let me watch her.
I finished peeling the Apple
Suffocating my tears as I ate.
You remind me of Daisy, she said soon after
From The Great Gatsby.
I choked and laughed, more ashamed than ever.
I'm not sure that is a compliment.
I could barely muster a mumble.
She couldn't do anything by herself.
She looked at me, gentle and forgiving.
I think it is, she replied
Wistful and Wise.
Daisy was vital to the story, you know.
And I believe that given the chance, she could have done anything that she wanted
*On her own.

i guess you only like girls who are broken
and want to be hurt, like your hands
around her neck, want
bruises and cuts
in the shape of a heart,
inhaling and choking on your affection
like she needs it to breathe

translucent skin stretched across
veins that pump nicotine and you
you, you, you, you, you

judgement clouded by hyper-dependent
infatuation and the need to heal her
hollowness, although you’ll only ever be
another teardrop on her pillowcase
while she hums herself to sleep
with midnight lies

“the loss of you would be the loss of my life”

and the saddest part
is that i almost let myself fall
back into becoming that
lifeless, empty girl
once more because i thought it might
make you love me again.

~Many people rely on the convenient, easy ways of living in this age of fast food, plastic packaging and rapid development. Most people do not care to see why they live the way they do or what it takes to live in such a way. Toxic pollutants leaching into our earth and water should not be worth the convenience! Third world women working in dusty, cramped factories to make designer purses for fifteen year old girls. Garbage is America’s biggest export and it ends up in China, on the coast of Somalia... anywhere that American citizens won’t be bothered to see it.

~What does it mean to buy a pack of plastic razors? Some metal, some chemicals, some plastic, more plastic for packaging. Use a razor a few times and toss it in the garbage. Somewhere, maybe at La Chureca, someone will pull the rusted metal and plastic from the landfill. They might make one US dollar per day collecting scraps of aluminum, glass, plastic and other scrap metals. What does it mean to wear deodorant? The plastic stick isn’t reusable. The ingredients are highly toxic. Aluminum-based antiperspirants have been linked to Alzheimer's and cancer. Soap comes in plastic bottles, coffee makers made of plastic, water bottles made of plastic… hell, my plastic shower curtain came wrapped in plastic packaging.

~Americans are lucky. Indoor plumbing with quality water. Green lawns and exotic flower beds. Buy and use, throw away and repeat. Big corporations pay off politicians to pollute. Industrial waste, land erosion, low air quality, pesticides. Why are we so quick to trust an artificial sweetener being promoted by a company that makes poison? They call you a hippy, a conspiracy theorist. They tell you that you only live once and to stop being so worried about it all. I ask them, how can you look away? Deforestation and destruction are all around. Those that profit are not concerned with what happens to the land after the loggers and miners have left the ground scarred and desolate.

~Modern living is a hoax. Yeah, you get around quick in your car but at what cost? Carbon dioxide, greenhouse gasses choking us and everything alive that lives with us and cannot speak. Can’t you walk to the corner store? Can’t you grow a few things in the garden or in the windowsill? When was the last time you saw a sunset and didn’t take a picture of it? Dairy cows packed together so tight they can’t turn around for your glass of milk. The disconnect is everywhere. Overpopulation. Overconsumption. People don’t care.

~They can choose. They can choose paper over plastic. They can buy a water filter instead of 20 plastic bottles. They can bike to work. Anyone can lessen their impact, anyone can think more deeply and live more sustainably. But we’ve made it so easy to be lazy. We’ve become so dependent that we’re forgetting to use technological gains to make the way we do things better. We’ve come so far that we’re forgetting what brought us here.

~

‘We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire – a crackpot machine – that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate.’ Edward Abbey

‘In the developing world, the problem of population is seen less as a matter of human numbers than of western overconsumption. Yet within the development community, the only solution to the problems of the developing world is to export the same unsustainable economic model fuelling the overconsumption of the West.’ Kavita Ramdas

‘Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.’ Jacques-Yves Cousteau

‘Globalisation, which attempts to amalgamate every local, regional, and national economy into a single world system, requires homogenising locally adapted forms of agriculture, replacing them with an industrial system – centrally managed, pesticide-intensive, one-crop production for export – designed to deliver a narrow range of transportable foods to the world market.’Helena Norberg-Hodge

‘Throughout history human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonise-destroy-move on.’ Garrett Hardin

i slipped out
into the waves of watercolour
that broke themselves upon the shore
of the horizon
and i disappeared
as they darkened into black

i escaped through the sunset
as words were climbing up my legs
setting fire to my ears
and forcing me to retreat away
from the choking letters and sinking ink
that tattooed all this sound into my skin

at first, the sunset saved me
and the waves that gently hit the dock felt like a heartbeat
telling me that this was how it would always be

but soon, i began to miss the panic
just for the simple fact that it was a feeling
and the sunset had stolen them all from me
leaving me bare, black and stretched high above
unable to land on the ground again
unable to even blink stars down onto the grass
unable to do anything
other than wait for the sun to rise again

but solstice has already passed
and the dark hours grow longer again
and i am pulled thin, veiling a world
that accepts me as the night
and doesn't even miss the stars

I remember
when you were young and wide eyed
excited at the possibility of the world
and afraid because it was all so big and you,
you were the smallest creature in a forest full of monsters

still, you had big dreams and wanted
so badly to write something
so unique and profound
something to make people understand you
understand themselves
see that we are all one
know that we all bleed the same
slippery shades of water color
even if the canvas is is different

Fear is an ugly thing and overshadows
and overwhelms, *******
the life out of life
and the colors out of the rainbow that
is supposed to shine overhead and keep
the bad the things at bay

it crawls into bed with you at night and
keeps you awake, drilling
everything that is wrong
straight through your skull and
into your soul like a
woodpecker, never ceasing
never letting you rest

there is so much that is so hard
to comprehend and make sense of
and it is so much easier to let the fear
take hold of you, wrap it's fingers
tightly around your neck
a noose growing ever tighter, strangling
while you struggle until
you have no voice left to speak

It left you choking
out fragments
and run-on sentences into a journal
that no one would ever see
that still makes me burn when
I flip through those pages reliving
the story of my life that you wrote
all those years ago

I remember
when you thought that no one could see you,
so you lived your life like a child
jumping up to see over the counter,
making make-shift ladders out of whatever
you could find so that you could grasp
everything that always seemed so far above your reach,
losing yourself so easily
in a sea of people
because they were so big
and you were
nothing

You words are a time capsule
that bring me back to a place when
when we stared at each other in the mirror
and curled our tiny fingers into a fist
wanting to smash the glass
because
we were ugly

But my words are a time machine,
my gift to you from the future

You are small still,
but the world is not as big as it used to be
and nothing ever comes easy
but your dreams are coming true,
you did not give up despite
believing so often that you would fail and
you are making a difference

I am afraid
because
everyone is afraid, but
I stand in front of the mirror
young and wide-eyed,
excited about the possibility of the world
and when I look at you now, I know
that we are learning to love each other
finally.