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.

Finals season.
        Open fortune cookie.

"Do not fear failure",
        it reads.

What are they re-
constructing
from the brain waves inside you.
They say they
can
from the electric signals singing in you,
translate it
and put it up, and then the hot fuzz
appears on a screen
and it is pretty close.

I do not trust the hot fuzz at all. It is not
an image. It is
not me, it is not
what I am seeing. It is
not.

"Racism is over", announced America
and we, like, called it a day and the boys let it all hang,
and hang it did for a bit before they were, too, again
and we said, "I'm so sorry, I forgot about that, too".

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.

Alas a lass at last amassed a past

Roses are red. Violets

         , when violent, blossom; a gathering
         of petals is a flower, of course,
         but

Violets are blue. Roses

         yet, nothing gets me up in the morning
         like a sunny-side up on a face,
         so I ***.

I am running out of ideas.

Not everything coheres.
          Remember: not everything
                         coheres

Nerve cells are assumed things seen
       assuredly. What then are our
eyes? Thinking things
      whispering maybes with
light, guiding
      us towards hopeful
touch, threaded
gently with needle through an other's
      slivered eye: we
return to looking. Silk-curtained. Through small science
glass I have you. Here,
let us speak with colours. Blink for me.

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

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.

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

Breathe- don't matter if air is fresh
Colour of my lungs- canvas is flesh
phleghm look like thick paint- god, cigarettes
you hit a blunt a lil' much, rather just sweat

out the toxins 'fore problems prevent more mopping
you promised you wouldn't puke again on floor, 'member Mama's calling
She says your sister said hello- is everything great?
said sure- just as soon as I remember where my mind is at again

Tsukiyomi is a dream in which each knife issa.

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.

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.

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.

The young one's are maddening. I must watch them come
and go as if they never know anything, but their teeth are libraries.
We could make out sometime and maybe I'd gain your industriousness, and you
my clean heat (which would otherwise make a mess of your face). Space
is limited, I am intended to say by my role as their elder, instead I
ask if it is cold outside. Would you like to come in. There
is a fireplace in the corner if you like. But only if you like.

If nothing else,
we are propelled,
by this sense of wonder,
to seek always,
the next weight in the sky,
and watch how it drags us,
and watch how we drag it,
former easily latter barely,
to the next eclipse,
the next end of light,
the next collapse of things,
into deep pits of nothings,
shudderings of spacetime,
blips in experiments,
like little heartbeats,
ultraviolet on Mama's stomach,
before she was Mama, things,
like this: which drag and are,
dragged, counter point melody,
a repeat sign at the end of score,
without end.

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

Why are we responding to things. Imagine
statements in vacuums. True or false, finally
quiet. You can shut the **** up now. Thank you.
Thank god, everyday, for the blue at the tip of your *****,
the green insides of your ****. The colours are prayers.
The world is so much, remember, why black and white it.
            I don't really care about old films.
            I was pretending I was someone else.
            I might have slithered, I might have been
            might have been a snake. Blue.
Green.

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.

People are enthusiastically boring
I wish I could get more sleep
*** isn't interesting: neither are my hands
It doesn't matter when you ***
I believe in the Bible once
Physics doesn't make much sense to me
I'm saying that I tried
I don't like the sort of questions you ask me
Ask better questions
Maybe one day people might fit together
until then, please, ask better questions

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:

Okay, conciousness, will you watch me here alone within these four corners?
No, not the world-- surely we've settled the question of that flatness.

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.

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.../

Personally, I do not really want to talk
of that kind of madness; to distort
                                            to be distorted
is punishment enough, I think; the world
is far too slow enough as it is. To love
is to see too far sometimes. Too near
is nothing but a kiss, which should occur
                                             with closed eyes
                                             signifying nothing.
                                             It is so dark in here,
my love.