verses that be like these days
people care more about their phones
than each other sound like
the snap of someone's camera on
someone's phone
there doesn't seem to be much point
besides to let you know, by not
smiling
that this **** be everyday for us, like
"the world is too much with us" but
I'mma look good while I let you know that so,

She is brown.

Do you have da funk?
    It's a kung-fu shuffle with hip-hop hustle
it tussles in nerve tissue and glows copper sulfate--
    when you string up so many ****** of course their eyes
    bob and ba-ba-dump da-dump  jump and roll out the sky like

                                blue,

I mean the colour blue. That's da funk colour.

                               Take a lone winter morning

in which you refuse to wake: this too
is da funk. And it sticks to you like gum on a shoe.

                               So you dance

in your head and you think of the purple fizzing
nights like Lil Wayne on lean he jumps, jumps
and ******* maybe it might make me feel good again, too.

And yet
      after each dopamine pill to heal us in the full
      after each brain scan to show the sad to zap away the next
      after each visit to the white coat to say what is what tomorrow
      after each quiz and calculation that says what you are in the future
There will always be the same sound so unnew and still,
     "I love you".

Strip the words of all their excess until only, only, ONLY the soul and the essence and the heart and the life and the breath of those words remain; naked, bare, coldandwarm and me.

Leaving is such a terrible thing. 'To do',
but 'we did' is the specific. Magic
floundering into pale paper. Here
we are.
In the end our only violence is dumb. We could not
know each other as much as I thought. We would not
do the things that they do in the movies. We did not
hold each other in such ways with sparkling angles. The good
camera and smart sounds from our mouths, written. Carefully
in such scenes the music would play as if to imply. Beauty
is something else for us and it did not look like that.

Eternity ends when the drinking begins,
even though I have you on repeat.

Crimson dream held a glass of white;
last thought I thought when mind matched night.

First thought I think when mind matches day:
Crimson dream is miles, miles away.

I.
//Yum Yum, No Vacation//

Such remarkable running you did there
You look like you're out breath, where is the air
You carried around yourself, air-bending monk
Heaving this way and that like you're in a funk

Yeah, I know, promised to never comment on you or your look
No more, at least to myself, but, baby you shook
Like how you shouldn't be, like someone like me saying 'baby'
Please, I trickled down your throat- gravy

Maybe, if you wasn't lying to yourself, life would be gravy
But then again- my mind is hazy
Maybe, if I'd been more faithful than lately
We coulda ended more stately but that's just a maybe

I like to deal with certainties so if it ain't that physics
I gotta ask why, where and when is it biting me
My space and time aren't hyphenated I'm not prepared to give
Myself away like that- so, can I live?

(Eh, you prolly didn't like me that much anyway
Eh, it doesn't bother me that much anyway
Yeah, writing past that call me Hemingway
Blam, end of a verse just like Hemingway)

II.
//Beach ******, No Vacation//

Oh wow, what weather indifferent is difference
Hello Boston, with your moodiness, how is you feeling?
I'm doing fine cause I'm doing me
Shower with rain and ice, movements in your symphony

Sympathy wasn't no nothing I asked from you
But double negatives ain't mahala so hala with sunlight akuna mathata
Lion King if you really wanna know
Roaring on so bitter with this flow

like

You really gon' try play me out of this Simba
Like Mufasa didn't gift me that rhythm marimba
Whatever homie, they don't even know me
Way they actin' up, they could win a Tony

******- and I thought I wasn't good enough
I'm good, getting out of my dreams, getting out of my seat
Good- like the only house concrete after a huff and a puff
Summer- only time the lyrics get done- sheesh!

III.
//Biking, Frank, Jay, Tyler//

Watch      what you say to me
Watch      pretty clear to me
Tick-tock til' next drop you don't mean none to me
No more if you play me, see

Soft boy, hard heart if need be, breathe
Not just for next stroke, left strokes, knees
Don't get weak, leave ***** sheets hang in breeze
Last whole night b, don't mean I'm happy

Pretty nice problem if you asked him
Little boy playin' 'round Invader Zim, where his friends
at? act   like   you   -   don't care
act? act         -you do-  so scared

Of dying lonely, crying won't be done
Nothing welled in tear ducts since fifteen, no fun, so done
with this shh... where the catharsis
Hamlet complex: the rest is shh... silence

IV.
//Fourth of July- Sufjan//

O, when the crickets clunkered and thundered
I thudded against myself- mind against skull
Bruce Banner in Incredible Hulk, whisper in bulk
Ghost in the Shell, heard sorta mumbled

Skip a few weeks later she breathes on my neck
Same thoughts really I don't like how I see me
I mean, I like myself, I hate my body
Or rather the idea of a body, microphone check:

Can I finally hear myself? Am I still stuck in myself?
Can I get outta myself? Can I please get some help?
I like living and touching and I like what she did there
But imagine if could disappear into universals and share

the same space as numbers and shapes
with none of this creaking and yearning my body it makes
I am a corpse in the making- and so is she
No matter how long we keep at it I am still inside of me

I didn't finish
I didn't finish

I didn't
I didn't

I
I

If you're reading this- and you will- I just want you to know that...

Actually, there's a lot of things I want you to know. I don't know how to say them and I don't know if I should and I don't know if ever in my life I'll ever get to say such things (to you) again.

I hope this isn't the part where the credits roll.
Actually, I hope that no credits are involved at all.

Because then it wouldn't be real.

Wherewithal of sight: light
gasps for air in morning: mourning
for                                      
       form, firm, not silhouette of hand, slight
of hand, offhand words of
                                                    eyes-closed,­
                                                    tombstone
  ­                                     (kiss).
You are not much I didn't say. Often
                                        wish       I did.

It's... an issue of access. I suppose.
Can you imagine how my hair curls? Into my skull
as a soft collapse outwards. Each one is named "me", as if
wonderfully parcelled as phrenology. If you grasp at me
here, then
I become something else. Or simply shoot

me and see
then what happens to my head. I mean that I wish
to be considered
as the way that we look
at lavender, and how our eyes emerge from their beads.

Your pupils are two bees buzzing towards the night.
Focused, stumbling whirrs. You see
that I am scared of your looking? A sting
is a question of when; and with it, your vanishing.

ONE WEEK AT SCHOOL.


Its a Monday morning when
I'm still trying to make out with you.
It's about half a year earlier,
and we're both late for class.
But nobody's looking; nobody cares.

It's a Tuesday afternoon when
we're walking with other people.
It's a few months later,
and of no consequence any longer:
I've written everything I've needed to.

On a Wednesday evening your sister is now
asking me online why you cry into your pillow:
what were my intentions, what did I want.
I'm trying my best not to tell her,
that I really wish I knew.

It's a Thursday morning again
when I still tried to make out with you.
I see you walk but we're both sure I can't.
Soon enough, no one would have ever noticed,
that in these spaces we occupied anything at all.

Then it is Friday, late afternoon when
I call you to tell you I love you.
You don't say why you won't say it back-
I am suddenly too scared to ask.

So now I am writing
everything I've needed to.

My mother is growing old, and beautiful.
My father once tried to grow a beard, it was grey.
My sister has just started standing up for herself.
And I... well... I miss you, I guess.

Weird, long, scary parts of you...
Those hours... Take notes
of them. Dream even
when passing by these old walls.
And paint them...

You are dead and you made us in that hospital.
     That lump of flesh in the pit of you: clay.
          With your hands you grasped it, pulled into yourself: mouth:
umbilical. Like a snake consuming itself. This is what they mean
when they say that circles are perfect. The water
     was warm. It snowed outside for days. I visited
my sister
and wondered about brains. She speaks of her therapist
as a friend.
                       I speak as if I don't know I am
a person
                  and imagine
the rush of light in each of our heads. The heady fire
revealed in MRIs. The showerhead can barely contain the steam
and nothing cools me off. Back to our younger years
                                             in the libraries
when we were still constructing ourselves. You said
                                                            ­                such lovely things
that when you died it felt like deaf. I can no longer

     hear

you singing. Except now, I grasp
at the hard body of a psychology textbook, reading,
some exam tomorrow-- listen, you could've come to Harvard, too,
if that is what you wanted, if your body would let you-- and your quiet
suggests the problem is that I am stuck in the frame of my

nakedness   cross-legged      bottomed

laughing     souped  into the bottom

of the shower curtains: and they open: the steam: the still

images of sliced brains in my textbooks: coffee-cups

emptied by the lips I have taken from you: quiet,

yes, no wonder why. When your hands

did their last thing,  when they reached into your own mouth
to spool yourself into you and the books we sent you
that you couldn't read because you were dissolving
                          
                           ­                When your hands

did that: did you think: could you: and if
                                          you could: do you
                               think
that was what made you: you the whole time?
Or was it: the departing of the air: as if to sigh:
when it gets so cold outside that every whisper:
feels monumental because: you can see: the clouds:
you speaking before you: before: your own eyes.        And then you blink

for a very long time in a single still flutter, stuck.

You taught me how to love words again.

You probably look good in the summer. In a dress,
clear and brown-eyed, as plain as you think you are, glimmering
softly and torn towards my arms' perfect oblivions. I'd like to,
more, I mean, we can wait to do the other things until one
of us is ready-- probably me, it'll have to be me, I think I'll be,
the thing that is, that is ready-- but I warm my hands up
your shirt, burn upon your skirt, or the hem of your
jeans. I'd like to imagine your pale erotica as young,
as something that says nothing about me. We can pretend
a manic dream, you can pretend that I am a real person, I can
hope that I'm not so minor as I hoped you'd think me, enlargened
like that part of me soon in your hand, in your mouth. Simple
magic like a hand-holding and strange mutterings and the things
you don't know how to say. How old are you. Are you
aware of you yet. How much do I care. I like your face. Your face.

"When one of my students asked me why rap and hip-hop developed among black people, I speculated that rhythm is threaded within African ancestry in a strangely existential way. Where Western music seems to be far more reliant on chord progression and tonal development, in black and African music, the focus isn't so much on how the music sounds as notes go higher and lower, but with how long or short a note is, and with how you can manipulate those lengths into patterns. With rap, you’re hitting all those short beats and long beats and letting the words hit you in a way that feels more primal, more linguistic than either song or casual speech. The student seemed more or less satisfied with this answer. I went on to confess how I often feel useless at rhythm. Hip-hop and rap demand you to be in the moment of the rhythm itself and want to stay there; often there’s no melodic movement. But I always feel like I want to go somewhere. And all these longs and shorts confuse me and my mouth gets filled with things I can't understand, cannot taste properly."

A road runs down Harvard called Massachusetts Avenue as if
we own the whole state. Because we do. We took the land
from its people. Violently. And who is we? Ambulances
burn red nightly-casual outside the window of this pale yellow
building opposite the smaller university hospital. The red
reminds me of a different kind of burning. Of bodies.
Wonderful cremations of us down that tree over there next
to the libraries that now belong to us. And who is us?
I am reminded of the burning because the red is part
of the white and the blue and the sirens and the men
launching out of their cars with faces saying, in strange
tongues, strange indeed, And who
are you?

You see everything and then it is gone: lightning
in a dark moonless night: you before everything
it all happened at once and then never.

I lied.

Sometimes I think about my choices

Sometimes I think about my hair
Sometimes I think about Plath's
her bright red her hair; and how she would eat me

     like air. Why

am I in all the other places with pictures on walls
of people who wouldn't have thought of me
     for how long
the way I think of them.

     Oh. A mirror.

Your locker is empty,
much like how I imagine
I and the concept of you and me
will be.

              You're going places;

unmistakably graceful
in your already absence.

Meanwhile
I'm trying to find a meaning,
a point
              in my stasis.
                                     I'm stuck

looking for a purpose without a you.

Irony?
The easiest way to break one's heart is to close it.

Try it sometime.
It's almost fun.

She's as spry as a slice of
young ginger.

Often as if a moth ran into the room like that--
wing-legged athlete-- defeated
by the lamp it saw bubbling though my window...
My mood swoops down as often as this,
totally normal but unexpected. The mind is a machine
(and you knew this too, Descartes,
given how you placed the souls of us
in some specific spot of our brains;
we know now that that gland has to do with our sleeping,
our souls have more to do with sleep).
When the gears of our minds turn they sometimes creak,
and you get words with such unfitting-- the moth
again, whose parents never said before they bashed
themselves clean into night-light, you don't
have to do this, you shouldn't do this, please
do not do this and so they did this. The moth
does this as stuck gears, beating and beating itself
against the light as my own mind fails to mind
itself, and the sudden grey of it, familiar as
the glittering powder of its wings, particles floating as
a possible music of the world.
Then I flicker my eyes back to my work as if to say
how boring, I've seen this episode before.

He cried out to the world and received only the response of his echo. Unlike the many other desperates of life, he did not despair. Instead, in his loneliness, he cried out "I have a ******* awesome echo" and sat down to check his Facebook messages.

That was that, he thought, as he waited for you to wake up and say hello.

It was a very cold and unfortunate place to be right at the top of, here in the mountain of his friendlessness, right here on a Monday morning; but... the sun was rising and the day was coming- even if you didn't get round to saying hello.

My eyes your body
I want no hunger
When I venture
But here we are
The dance
And my hands your waist
May I take you home
Where I would rather
Have stayed

The cold air is so good and honest.

The people are humourless; their scrotums' tighter
than a clenched fist gripping whip- a lash
on the back will make you laugh on the back
of a history not yours no matter how much hip-hop?
What a question
this country is--
no one can even answer it!

My heart leaps for joy.
     The river running dry
     The cream of a volcano
     The sun exploding
     The foam of the hot air
How does it taste:
     the oil, the polar bear claw
     the salve of the ice, sweet
     and gloried like you: your
head is the sweetest thing I have ever seen: I like you
and the little things you do before you die. Before
the photo snapshot prints, flutters away, and you shoot
again. And the flash of my eyes is greedy
and would eat you everyday before my own pictures,
they go. They go. And.

so were trying this new thing of written freestyles and its pretty good i quite like watching the world go by this way just sitting and speaking and playing so gently loud w/ sound im proud to be playing around like this fun fun fun fun til her daddy comes and takes her awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

She kissed me and her lips tasted like my French grade:
somewhat romantic, but still mediocre.

--> if the primary purpose of art is to reflect beauty and moral truth

--> and if beauty and truth are associated with one another

--> but violence, as ugliness, implying its antithesis, and the consumption of violent art as therefore a yearning towards beauty and righteousness via its opposite

--> then violence, in art, can only be meaningful precisely because we think it is wrong to hurt

--> therefore it is perfectly concordant with moral aspiration to consume violent art

--> we should consume violent art

A few more words about: coherence,
it doesn’t exist for me, I’m so hungry
for everyone else and their platitudes.
It must be nice to avoid existential breathlessness.
I like that word: breathlessness.
I resent that platitude: existential.
I am not bitter, I promise.
It’s just that the air…
it tastes so…
                      …(blue.)

A cascade into dark, sheer dark.
          To fall without misery into you like this,

like this; like this
          within art is all of it-- the string of keys

black and white, gallops sometimes; sometimes whispers
          like words glide-- but discontinuous falling. Rise

again

          like this; like this
and it is with you, again and again as your reach for your pen.

We can tell:

that the Jesus who we crossed was just some dude
–we hooked him up to an EEG–

and it turns out his pulses were the same as hours
and did not differ statistically at all

but his blood was a bitterer red than some
but you would think that if you hadn't seen it before.

Two years ago I was in Connecticut in a used book shop. I found very small rare books published as a series of poetry. Red leather- bound, yellowing pages. They crack, those pages, and while this makes me sad if they didn't they wouldn't matter as much. I purchase a few. One of them, "Sonnets from the Portuguese", Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It seemed like the the sort of thing I would buy.

I came back home and I met you and I instantly figured that when you too would leave I would give them to you. I did the worst to you on some day. The other day, you said something to me and I burned for a very long time inside. I might have said something rude in response, but instead I smiled at you. I laughed. You must have burned inside every time I did. I do not care. You might have thought. I laugh at you. You might have thought. I was like that because I thought that They crack, those pages, and while this makes me sad if they didn't they wouldn't matter as much.  

I did not give you the book. Two years later, I have a class and I'm writing an essay about the first poem from it. I have been in bed for three days and the sinking feeling returns, I watch videos about how everything in America will crumble. The audience in the videos laugh. My sounds echo and return to me from my room's walls. Where is the sun and the air that might have been as the home I last saw you in. Not yours though. It was thoroughly unlivable for you though sometimes you think Where is the sun and the air that might have been as the home you last saw me in. It is yours though.

On the moments I do step into the essay-- or rather, I step into the poem for the essay-- I hear her speak. And I would read about her husband. He wrote too. They loved for many years. When they lived, her words were far more loved than his. We send each other emails sometimes. You sometimes call me when you're drunk. You burn. My voice. When I call you through my laptop screen I stare at you. I burn. Your hair. What sun, what air. She says

"Guess now who holds thee?"—"Death", I said. But there,
The silver answer rang ... "Not Death, but Love."

She says before she met him her life:

It's okay. I'm sorry.

Art is the great hope,
                   the creaking at dawn, the anti-
cognition of frightening sounds--
                   the churning, thinking machine-like,
                   of all our libraries, strained of fluid
until
dry, chapped turning, the rows and rows
of solitary whispers-- a certain kind of madness
                   that offends my heart like no other. Where
else would peace be but not here? Somewhere
inside us was once a light that was not
in a bulb and it flew like a moth towards
                   itself
but beat itself apart into its own sun, fell,
its wings little mirrors descending while our
father
                  screamed for us, a howling like birth
itself,
                  and there was the tower anew,
no longer a prison no longer a library
no longer a school or even a thought.

How do the nights go? Chillin' down there with the white folk/
Ne'er be a token given I'm golden so I might just bolt:/
Usain; when I'm lazy talent swishes down the drain like bad milk/
Ain't cry o'er **** that I spilt, rose from the concrete ne'er wilt/

Narrowly lost my mind sometime ago in this flow/
like slave boats from the Gold Coast with wood creaking dream-songs of lost homes/
I was drowning in unconscious streams of different scenes of this mind's scenes/
I seen through the scenes of green trees turned to yellowing leaves.../

Turns inwards, and light.
     My chest withdraws towards
itself, and my eyes are mirrors;
      I don't like what I see. I walk
outside and fear and hate
      everything. I rasp, loudly
in mouth-breathing and I don't know why
      I don't know why anymore-- and the sun.
      Didn't it just snow yesterday and the sun.

Everything is amenable to a pen--
so nevermind this sudden splash of water
on this page, nevermind it all, it is
something I ought to have been able to make
for myself back home-- if I so desired it,
and finally, I'm glad that I no longer did:

You see,

travelling is a game for me. It is no
urgency, no need. When I was younger
how many times was I told that: it would be
this way? By teachers and others and televisions
that to leave home
would be the great mattering;

Let me remind you of the Acacia trees!

Nevermind this sea! And its constant blueness,
their imports of me and those who looked
like me; then their denails of me and
those that look like me when finally
the depature of their self-righteousness

A funny thought:

In RPGS they're NPCS:
In role-playing games they are
non-playable characters:

when you walk your character
to them and give a little click
upon them they might talk and say
something of their


                                     lives

the question is, is what happens
after you switch off the video game
console. Are they always frozen
in their space in that time or is it
that the need for you to journey
keeps everybody so still in your head
that you forget that they too have

                                      lives

White girls in Italy.

Moi: "Sorry, I'm next in line".

Sorry, I'm next in line.

Sorry, I'm next in line.

Sorry, I'm next in line.

Sorry, I'm next in line.

Sorry, I am next in line.

Sorry, I'm next in line.


The hissing swoosh of the flush after the cold metal swivel shift.


Also,            ****. You.

Less the collapsed wound in the chest and
more of coffee, pen-flickering some things
achieved in a college library. A hope
of a future as endless learner. Online laments
that universities are now nothing more
than degree mills: notice the rising tide of shadows
in students' minds as they seem to notice this
sort of doom as noose as tie at middle-age. But for now,
before that moment returns where sleep is preferred
so much so to waking, where anything is preferred
to waking (but the thought of that final jump
off the corporate tower
is yet to find you)-- some slight work here
in this library like a normal person
with normal fears. An uncollapsed chest
like a star within its lifetime, swallowing nothing and
twirling planets all around itself, long long
before it swallows itself
and its own light.

I want to leave. You
are not what I want
to go. Listen, or wait,
whichever your ears will let of me.
Wallpaper has music.
My walls are empty. My eyes are
walls. Your eyes are
--well, you know how letters combine
to make all sorts of things? You will never expect
them. Sometimes the letters will make new
things. New things will be
spoken. New things will
exist. Like this. My walls are empty. My eyes are
walls. I want to leave
you as the ringing after a person shouts in an ear. Because of how long
ago, your voice.

Snow: the gentle magisteria
that we crumble by, fighting
and flinging and fluffing about before
the touch-- of ice, of each other-- the same
thing
gathering about in the utmost
dust of things that were. Water
is in between us all the time, but
we couldn't possibly notice until we do it,
the touch-- of ice, of each other-- the same
thing,
y'know? Y'know what I'm saying? We talk
about it constantly. Flinging and fluffing
about before that
thing,
the touch. There you are. Hello,
how are you?

There's light outside. The blue-blazered man speaks
and I listen with my pen. All the warmth within
my head emerges as if called upon
by private hands. Wind whistles through the large windows. God
is singing low-mood like hormones like a child's recorder practice.
What is literature? we ask.
I don't know but it looks a lot like me.

                                                                             He says
the earth is lost in the future. Predictive
post-apocalyptic longing. Fragile
bones as flower-stems within us. We walk
like jelly. Strange to think of it now,
stranger yesterday still-- and tomorrow, the eyelids
slip away to the night: closing bud-codas.

        Repeat-sign, where are you?

The earth will turn to fire. Our revelations
are gas-large, cow-heavy, burning engines
zooming across cliffs. I drink
because to think of this is not the sort of stumbling
I need. I need arms
and wine-fog hiding them (as children's games). I need a mirror.
And I would want the birds. Them too.

Earl,
I liked how you retreated from the world
Every time I see a sweatshirt I think of you, girls
Wanna take my hoodie from me on Sundays
But don't care about me or my curls

Go, small song. Make yourself
known. Stretch your arms as sunlight,
glow. We humans’ leaves’ greens need you,
so, will you love us as our ears do you?
Wonder with me, throat, as you say
your notes and lengthen their dull to
soft nevers. The crowd still hears you
tomorrow, the last song before the final
closing of the eyes before godless sleep.
Coffins vibrate with your enthusiasms,
corpses know remorse, finally, like a
cracked ancient bell with some something
left. String me as *******
screaming in pillow fields. String me
as hazardous Lazarus sinewed neck-string
plucked as flowers, as slave-ships docked
upon the shore with gentle endless thud. We’ll
keep singing spirituals forever, we’ll keep
saying things about skin. We will win. Win
like mirrors lastly seeing smiles. Come with me
as stars die and are still witnessed. Inscribed
as pride in a mother’s voice with small
black boy joy, with tears, first cries, blood,
water
and the mother’s song mountain-heavy
and living.