10/25/2014
”darling, it’s frightening! when a poet loves he might be an unshrived god enraptured.” - Boris Pasternack

The late october sun hugs our faces with a looming brilliance.

We are propagandic youths emblazoned on a poster in orange tint.
Looking forward to our victory– our war efforts, living in pride

followed around corners and sidealleys

by a most vague sense of wrong.
and when you turned to me to look–


I realized, with a horrible feeling,
I was in a sort of strange complacent love. 
 It’s not to say i was in love –
That had happened months before when I’d refused food and drink at the Independence day celebrations

smiling at chinese invention gunpowder in the american mideastern 
sky.

But to say I was good with whatever was, albeit jaded, but i would never dream to say it.

And as we sat in the car rolling over dead leaves that were on stems months before

You asked me “Do you still like me?” 
“well,” i replied – I had just lain with you 

in a hushed affair with whispered I love you’s

how could i not like you?

Carnal wanton needs— hell of a thing.
But, I added

things were easier before that.

Now when I think i am to wait weeks until I see your face 
It seems wrong

and this poem is far too long

to just be saying that I love you
so perhaps i do not.

9/30/2014
Manhattan, new york city, new york

you got to wonder
September saturday nights
walking down church street.

the man on his smoke break
gives me a smile on the corner of 9:30
at night and i return it even though it
isn't wise because
it seems kind,
a smile i’d like to get to know better.

in the taxi
i think uninspired thoughts,
running along the sidewalk’s lining
sidewalks i’ll probably never walk on
and this is when i realize
Manhattan is a small island.

back on the train
i think that monday mornings wouldn’t
be so bad if I lived in Manhattan
crosby street or wall,
but then i think of all the
manhattan schoolkids
that seem like they know everything
and i think: do I really want to?

back in Princeton
i think that i am bored
and i realize far too much has changed
from april,
the raw essence still the same
seeping at the core of the stem, however

and i accidentally step on an ivy league
cufflink. I think to myself
i probably wouldn’t think so much
if i was in manhattan.