I'm obsessed with the vision's edge
How we look straight but there's always a sideview
Looking right through
The glass of a picture frame
The image splattered my name
On every newspaper, a cheap kind of fame
The sideview shows the real me
The kind of person who I'd be
If I'd sent this body out to sea
In that funeral pyre blazing to the sky
Mom and Dad think that I'm too young to die
But you're never too young to be that one guy
Your friends see on the tv with a nice little snippet
Of how you hated your thread so you got up and clipped it
But your parents will talk to the reporters and flip it
Say you were so great, so happy and nice
Always the one to give the good advice
The one crossing the street as you looked both ways twice
And the truth is you were already cold as ice
You tried to cry out but they nodded with grins
And they looked at you pondering and stroking their chins
And in this situation there's no one that wins
Because there's always a bridge or a cliff to jump off
When the stress level rises set off by a cough
Or you just up and choose to dive into the trough
And get eaten by pigs, digit by digit
And since you don't give a ****, you don't even fidget
When they bite off your legs and leave you a ******
But size doesn't matter, you're dead in a few
And it's not as if you have to choose what to do
In the end your fate is just pay per view
Because you'll be there, it's you that is dying
But the life negation requires none of your trying
So you can sit back relax and just watch it
There's more than one way so it's hard to botch it
Your death is the end, because there's nothing else to it
You once had a life but you up and you blew it
There was **** to be done but you just said "***** it"
And it's true, it's your life, and you have control
But before you eat lead, put the thought on parole
Give yourself minutes or days to rethink
A miscalculation of that size would stink
Set up some goals, some silly, some not
Of things to accomplish before you hit the black cot
Where they stick all the toe-tagged
The black-bagged
The life-gagged
The death-filled
The over-pilled
All those singing from their throats
Bleeding like goats
From the knife wounds like Abraham
Would've done in just seconds, ****
But the voiceless have no spokesman saying
"Hey world, there was no point in staying!"
There's always a point, and you've just got to find it
Once you do, wrap your mind and bind it
Obsess yourself with the point of staying
Remember the steepest price you'll be paying
Sometime in the future, but now be braying
The call of the stubborn, those that won't leave
The ******* with something in which to believe
I'm one of those ******* and we need more members
To warm up the cold of Depression Decembers
Obsessing about the vision's edge
The only thing that kept me on the safe side of the ledge
When I was seconds from falling down
The sideview turned my *** around
Gotta find the source of the curious periphery
Curiousity killed the cat, but the sideview saved me

raise ourselves, rouse ourselves, rising to race up versus the sun,
to ferry dock, to catch the first, the 5:10am to the mainland,
which is just an island-too-but-longer,
on the first boat of the workweek, the first leg
of an island to island to island journey-poem, but that
for another morning, unless already writ, but forgot?

the north fork, an herb garden of vegetables and fruits,
family farms & rural suburbs, towns of English & Indian names,
all cheek to jowl, corn rows, tractor museums,
high school football victory banners of a prior year,  
and alas, always fresh, aged-woe reminders,
too many streets, ferries, bridges named for young boys who didn't return from foreign wars and whom we all knew by right sight

me, a summer sojourner, a summer visa, an off-islander,
a Hebrew, living among the native island born hareleggers,^
the Methodists, Quakers, and the rest of a varietal potpourri of "Egyptians," come here by choice, all, living in a paradisal
farmers market, all faiths enjoying seven times seven
years of plenty

Country Road (CR) 48, plainly named, snakes it way to the city,  
a  hundred miles, a hundred miles, as the song says,
to a distant, invisible emerald mecca,
which magically emanates
waves of gravitational pull powerful,
where I heard that human city folk go to do derring do,
battling with numbers, creativity and keenest human instincts,
game playing for a throne that may not even exist

as we go west, the sun sneaks up behind us
spotted in the steve sideview mirror, watching our
winking red tails,
moving away, asking us why, are we somehow dissatisfied,
with the rich purple soil of this little refuge it protects?

this soil, blessed, brings forth the babies of summer,
truly a fruited plain cornucopia, the famed potatoes,
fresh eggs, for sale by unseen and oft unattended hands,
plant it and it will come, the peonies flowers, the sod, tomatoes,
the Christmas trees, local duck and fresh caught striped bass,,
over flowing fruit stands endless,
where they debate no politics but only
which fruit will become tomorrow's pies?

and always, first and foremost, the vineyards, the vineyards

not yet six am, sun still too weak, to do the ***** work burn,
fields full of snow white mist lying over man tall vines,
the mist, ground swelling up to the chest level, then north
to the nostrils and head, intoxicating the lungs, the brain,
inculcating the chest with a salve of moisture,
a blend of sea and farm fresh air,
containing the designer's secret arts of earth creation

the fine mist so thick, no different than a snowy white out,
leaves me marveling and a-wonder, why do I leave,
dictated to by boxes on a hardware store calendar?

why not bide and hide in the morn mist,
never will-would we-be found, the vineyards and corn rows,
my protectors, the bay and sound, my natural moats,
is the music of wind + leaves, symphonic insufficient,
isn't the theater of the birds, wild turkeys, families of deer, osprey,
tern, visiting Canadian geese, and the hard to spot, Broadway stars,
those little foxes, wondrous enough?

this guising vineyard mist offers solutions to questions
I should not be asking, especially, primarily,
where is shelter,
for that is asked and answered

I seen a picture of you from the sides,
and got lost in your sideview
I put my thoughts to rest, each time
we're running into that room
And I flip you over to another chapter
of your body's next page
So lets have a bit of these sides from the
ashes of past days; put it all in that ashtray....

It’s spring outside and the days are long and it gets dark late at night, past 8:30 when I’m home. I’m happy stomping my feet in the fresh clean grass and I don’t mind the back sweat clinging to my T-shirts and the way I can’t help but hate my body. I don’t care, as long as I can prop my hand up through the window to feel the breeze and as long I can see the sun glint the sideview mirrors of the car, I can feel all cheesy and soft inside. I like to watch the college students share picnic dinners on the grassy shore of the Charles; I like when they sit in circles and wear bandanas and sunglasses, smiling with their 6pm rosé smiles and glinting teeth and whisper to each other, and sometimes I’ll see someone scurry by on the cement on a pair of roller-skates or a bike, and the sunlight dances shadows through the trees, the trees that are impossibly green. Green, shiny, and full of life they swell with the late spring breeze, and they lazily hang over the road so I don’t see the blue of the sky when I look up through the sunroof, only leaves of green. Today I walked home after I saw the fish and I filled a cup with frozen cherries and I ate them with a plastic spoon while listening to Josephine Foster and I felt rather pleased with myself. I am going to read now.

In this time I think of my life six months ago; lest I forget the burning cold of winter, the gray that envelopes Boston in a ceaseless ashen fog. Even in that winter though there is still beauty; I watch dark birds flee the sky and little children cross the street bundled up in red, blue, green, and I feel that same tug of love in my heart for the world I live in. It’s melancholic, the connection I have with this world, and yet it finds its own balance [I find my own balance], between the anxiety of what could be, the anger of what is, the hope for what could be, the satisfaction for what is. I wish I could do more.  

Of course, we say goodbye to some things (like winter), and forget we say goodbye to others, perhaps for good reason (like the ashen fog), and some things we don’t want to say goodbye to but must anyways (like friends), and there’s a balance somewhere in all of that, I imagine. Something like a hallway between open and shut doors, or perhaps the door itself is the pathway between one state and another.

I am sixteen now. and I will say goodbye to some things soon and other things later, and perhaps a hello or two will be mixed in there. For now though, it is late spring, and I am here, here in this moment when I am listening to Billie Holiday and my empty cup of cherries is resting on my bureau. For now, I am here in a room that is not too small for me nor too big, and I will be here now, I feel like I will always be here in the way that most things continue for a long time until they don’t. And I am okay with that.