With the possible exception of one person, I tend to leave people worse off than when I met them. Sometimes in small ways. Sometimes in big ways.

The big ways are getting more often and I think my heart-growth is stunted.

I'm worried.

The Justice League doesn't exist because Superman can't save the world by himself.

It exists so he doesn't have to.

I have this mad dream of getting the Ninth Symphony back onto paper. I want it to scream even louder because I put it in a cage. The cell will be overtly tone-deaf and unmusical in the most obvious of senses but will still roar without complete complacently. After which I will know that I am Man. After which I will know that I am God. After which I will know that I am Me. This is my truest and deepest ambition as a poet.

Well, until tomorrow when her name comes up again: Haha!

One thing he always thought was that
if he could share his heart with the world
he would become it.

He ended up being promiscuous instead.

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.

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.

You taught me how to love words again.

If I start writing again it'll become real again.

I have this nasty habit of doing what I want.

It's not my job to give answers.



Yet.

I'll dab in yo' face.

This is a really ergonomic chair!

S.        L.

who is beautiful,
so beautiful.

"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."

"There’s a beautiful Buddhist temple in West Lake, which is an entire fresco of greens. I’m still trying to figure out if I’m trying to write quiet colourless poems or thick, heavy raps so sometimes I sit still, say nothing and write a few sweet nonsensicals, and sometimes I tap my feet, bop my head up and down, and convert my whispers into scratchy line breaks. This is a false dichotomy. I know. I can do both. Somehow. We wander into a room filled with hundreds of heavy-bellied figures, stony-faced, in a criss-cross maze. Another room has warriors towering thick as trees-- some are dark-skinned, fearsome; I look at my hands to see if the colours match-- and they snarl and smile with swords and spears in hand. And then there’s an entire wall carved and filled with hundreds of dancing bodies that I cannot name, coloured in endless golds and browns stacked up in a massive Creation. I try not to think of the Sistine Chapel ceiling painting, which I have not seen, but for once the West cannot compare, and in this room, finally, I don’t even bother looking to see if my fingers match the statues’ colours."

I.

I am surprised at how simple it is.

When I first met the girl we were staring at each other across five metres of party space, ***** and blue light. It felt good.

Her number; I somehow managed it.

A week later I clear the trash and toss the unshelved books into my wardrobe and stumble off far away to buy some new bedsheets, they smell clear and clean. My desk is empty and few and neat and is everything my own head never feels like-- she arrives from her elsewhere about five minutes after this thought and we’re here, she puts her bag down, we go to the art museum, we go to the other art museum too but it’s closed, we look at each other the whole time and I don’t really register the paintings, we come back to my room and then stumble across each other’s bodies on my bed and she gives little butterfly moans and kisses in short puckery bursts. It is nice. It is simple.

II.

With the other girl we drink. There’s a secret society that I’m a member of somehow-- would you like to go with me to some party? Yes.-- and we drink. The floor is wood and aged with the fact and feet of so many dead men who didn’t look like me and wouldn’t have me here--and her too, her hair took a great deal of fuss even if it didn’t look that way-- but we drink. She wants to dance, she says, but I can’t dance so I drink. There’s something calling so she drinks. I am scared of being boring so I drink. She is scared of something else, probably work, she drinks and I’m scared for her work too, I drink, but what about me, I drink, she drinks, we drink, we kiss. I waited before it. I looked at her before sometimes but nothing, it couldn’t be simple, it isn’t allowed. We’re both so busy. You have nice eyes. Sometimes we work together. Yes, I’m funny. I’m glad you think I’m funny, too. Stop that. No. I can’t. Okay. I can. Can this be simple? We drink and kiss in the secret society and the wood creaks under us and our bodies and the other guys think I’m cool now, I guess. When it comes to snow I’ll walk her back to her work and we’ll mildly do this again. And again. Another time, too, we drink. And then we won’t, because it’s not simple. I want to have fun.

III.

When the morning comes someday I’ll wake up then make-up my bed after leaving it like I’m supposed to and it won’t matter if a girl shows up again. Okay. I don’t feel like going to class, again. Okay. I go to class this time and it’s such a bore compared to the other things that seem to me to be worth doing. Everyone in front of me and around me doesn’t seem to care, too; but they type up their notes and the lecture hall is filled with clicks and clicking and their faces are brighter because of their screens and their expressions are cold and mute. Something feels wrong. Something feels quiet even though the professor keeps talking. It’s really only been, like, ten minutes and my legs start doing the thing, my mind starts doing the thing. I think of how clean and clear my desk is.

It's okay. I'm sorry.

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.

I often bite into myself when talking.

So long as there is time
something will happen. On this earth,
small and interesting place,
constant new statue,
glaring eyes from a corner (ambivalent eyes
perhaps calling for a maybe, perhaps
making eyes at another body as soft screaming). All
summer the bugs buzzed. Like your hands.
You are there again.
As ghost. As ocean.
I went to a beach once and the sand
was made of fishshells. I went
to a mountain once and the stone
was made of smaller smallfish. Somewhere
else the water sings and you will
sing of me, and the birds. And your mouth,
how clear, how blue, how real,
how small. Like yours. Like hands. Like fish.

I.

Same image: Smash a skull, pour out the mush--
isn't that a person? Or is that just some smooth thing
--skin for a jellyfish!
--gummy wrapper!
--used ******!--
that we might have figured as an infant without legs?

II.

Same image: pink-wet brain. Send some
pulses to me. Is it beneath me? This thing
that sings "this thing"? This thing
insisting these words? Persisting
in carpal-tunnel clicking wrists, knowing
itself by coughing up stuff
I didn't know I had. Send some pulses
in that machine that maps me. And
thinking of jellyfish, of a gummy wrapper,
the ******.

III.

Same image: we kiss.

My feet smell the deliciousness of long Thanksgiving. O! plain footsoles
wandering about carpet-jailed stairs like violin strings'
gravity encircling a soul. Hum a-long enough and you can conjure whole
oceans in my eyes, whole masses of water that don't exist
where we were born (hey, landlocked love). Outside in New England it
sometimes snows.
Today it rains.
Anyway, I am a magician. Look here. Can you see
our landlocked love from the shore it does not
have? Like the Pilgrims
finding Indians not from India,
I find me
not from me but from these smiles, our people, these feet,
sinking and stinking of some small peace and walking sockless
up and down a small warm home. And tomorrow,
Harvard again, and someone has snapped my wand
and killed the sparkling airs of incantations I had.
But wait! Isn't this proof of a person who was once
something not transplanted, but rooted earthily into a couch
as brown dancer? I'm waiting for movies
and the seizures of memory there as our minds' own lenses,
and that empty feeling here remembered as good enough reason
to greet us, draw further breaths, comb curls, chew and walk and talk
of the cold outside (waiting endlessly for the landlocked sun), and talk
of the bitter pinpricks of our still-life skin.

Go ahead, listen
to Martha Argerich
play Chopin or Ravel, and then
tell me that words have any meaning-

they don't.

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,

Finals season.
        Open fortune cookie.

"Do not fear failure",
        it reads.

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.

So many themes sound the same.
But it's not so sterile.
       Some variations are other songs.
       I could talk to you all day.
       Bach was a genius.
       He played the same thing again and again.
You all sound the same.

denouement matter matters
nounema matters matter
scatter, sakura flower bossom
autumn, not pink here, but something
very close to a red (orange).

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.

Creamy: beautifully carved hillocks
of mush-- I crack open skulls on the daily yo
in the lab, I scan
     them and need them
to stay very still while the machines blip and bop--
     sculpted
by algorithms
that recombine the pulses of your sentences
     into maps
of meaning: spiked with and voltaged at its peaked lines
and smoothed by noise towards its graphy flattenings.
                                                                             Can you imagine
the treacheries of travelling one can find
                                                                              within oneself
the kinds of climb in mind inside
                                                                               you?

Well, to be honest: no; hence, statistics

I don’t believe in you but
                             your face.

Tomatoes are nice
fruits or vegetables, I like them.
I eat now. It is nice.
Cheese has a fullness.
Meat a warm blankness.
And my tongue-

The business of living makes me be.
And it is often simple,
         I would cry.
         Could, but can't,
         I could.

These are so many misunderstandings.
To be had. Some built in already.
Mental architecture, walls holding it all in.
Rigid bounce against doorframe, concussion.
Sudden nothing- push back from the dome,
the end of a thought; it is hardly weary.

I'm pretty sure that none of us can think, thought,
in fact, is a trap, made entirely of language games;
and then some experiments in William James Hall-- reminder:
no one ever knows what thought is! What are you thinking.
                                                       ­          What are you thinking.
                                                       ­          (thinking you are what)

Let's bring out one more. I like this flicker
of ink, a lil' swoosh-swoosh and scratch, and,
surely one day I'm this lucky again!: a glow.
I remember the baby's moth-breath even though I am born
I remember a child being the father of man
I remember how more than a lil' weight
                 of the world
                    is love.
Dawn and Siegfried go out towards the great, big blue
and Dawn and Siegfried land on the moon. Black,
everything is black now. See where we are. White,
everything is black now, it was all white then. I
don't really know anything at all   about how we'll return,
but here we are and what a view?

There's these moods I'm having,
   life cinematic,
I don't care much about grammar,
   ***** are you listening.

Rabbit, run run
    Poets see things other people can't
Don't
Want to
Where were your eyes, my eyes, where
         do
Rabbits run, run
                               Back then I wanted to kiss everyone
    (everything).
All the pretty girls in their summer dresses, always
    Rabbits, running, run, ran

                        Look at how the world goes by when you
                        walk in these moods
                        Mr ******

***** are you listening to me.

What was it that you were looking for.

     Rabbits run run.

Lives were lived across those school fields the rabbits ran.
                                            I missed those moments of encircling.
                                            Arms of yours.
So soft.
                There's the small body of the Chinese girl
                I wanted to take.
God.
                Shame does not concern me no more.

If you look hard enough there's always a somewhere.

To breathe is a desperation,
it afflicts us all until it is artless,
a noose or a collapsed lung,
the wrinkles giving way to a baby
that never cried. Hush.

Siesta in darknesss. The sunlight disappears to the clouds.
I could wonder hazily from one step or street to the next
yet feel unfurnished and empty. Walk through me.
A bash to the shoulder and some books fall, I'm sorry.
These magicians flutter past as I blink unthinking
and there is the joy of the thoughts glittering:
But I am tired, so, so tired.

Maybe you do or you don't
remember that (first) glittering unfeeling you had
(as a child probably) when you looked into yourself,
and there was no mirror involved, and said
     -what the ****?-
and, hopefully, it was a formative memory
because I haven't stopped looking since
and I don't really want to be alone in this.

Regret is such a useless thing
I’d so prefer it, if
you did not, look!,
                    at me
                    that very
                        , if
regret is such a useless thing
why preface it with the word
              (poem)
why preface it with eyes.
I will never forget the word
-even if it messes my head.

My entire totality consists of Beethoven,
                                                   Kanye West,
                                                   Neon Genesis Evangelion.

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.

Better now than never
They said

I wouldn't know

Some things don't sing

Some things don't quite sing the same

(To be honest
Some of the black songs
I cannot dance to
At least not with them.
Mother, please, it is my right.
I will survive
Even
If
Ain't no moutain
High enough)

Don't let me catch you singing again
Don't let me catch you singing like this again

Talk is so largely masturbatory I wonder why even bother.
I thought you were cute until you started to talk.

Thoughts are so reckless citizens feckless still
Society got me buggin' but thumpin' doe
If I'm gonna dance let it be in this hell
If we gon' romance, can it just end well

for once it'd be nice to hit it and smile, fill
you up and sip-sip all off of that cup, mo'
drink, drink water in the fountain of your legs
where the youth, youth going, no more shots from the kegs

for me, no more, no more
'ready drank too much- what else is in the store
for the night, is it nice? is it Nike? am I right?
be my wife? Not tonight, but I'mma hit you with dat spice

Yeah     let it all go let it all go go
              let it all go let it all go go
              let it all go let it all go go
              let it all go let it all go go

I mean, yes, of course, yes
I’m so, so hungry
but I will not eat you, no, not
no, of course, not like that.
      I otherwise like you,
                I promise.

I am no good at talking to things that are not myself.

The crystalline brown of my eyes sings certain songs.

And my coffee breath makes such certain impressions on the mirror.

And my coffee skin makes such certain impressions on the mirror.

In the former case, that mirror is me.

In the latter case, that mirror is you.

I have no idea of how I see myself, or how I should see myself.

But I know how you do. I know your lisps, your staggers, your stares.

And the way you vibrate sometimes to see someone such as me.

"The **** is wrong with you", I say to no one in particular being myself.

But I would scream it to the world at large if they would listen.

And yet the sounds would carry to no where but to some gaze of me.

That glint of me in your eyes.

That glint of you in mine.

And we are not talking at all.

We are only kissing ourselves by looking.

We do not know how it tastes.

(What happens when you give a monkey a mirror?)

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.

The window creates a square on the red carpet. This is the sun.
It is not in space. It is not even alive. My eye is though,
breathing heartlessly, it attends to each as bean-sprout
splitting earth. As the young ways we were taught to grow
in science classes. The dying of it when I watered it
too much. There is too-muchness everywhere. With you
my watering magiked a desert. The sky
is good today, so good that it has even created its own
on a carpet. The teacher's foot steps there.

Baby cousin points at my old toy robot
Declares, 'This robot used to be big.'
I say, 'No, you used to be small.'

'What?'

She then crouches down to old toy robot's
height and smiles and laughs,
'I used to be small like this!'

Maybe, just maybe I'll have
one of those little things
and teach them about stars
and boys and girls and words,
but I already told you
I can't live like that,
I think.