Leaving my phone on the
morning strewn bed, the
bus courses by and drags
me along for the ride. Old
high school friends pulse
through my head and I
contemplate their distance.
Every unrecognized human
who seeps into view or
distance causes me to bury
into my phone and feign
distraction. Feign importance,
like someone is paying attention
to me. Until I realize my phone
is my hand and my real phone
is still fast asleep in Asia.

I feel like a ghost today.

Not one word shared between
others as real as me, I figure
I'd feel as lonely at the bottom
of the ocean as I would on
-stage in Madison Square
Garden. 4 hours of work
slithers by like an injured
snake. After exactly an
hour and 17 minutes on a
bus home, addiction knits
the phone into the palm of
my hand like resentful lovers
wishing they didn't need each
other. Only 1 text message
and it's my significant other
slipping me recognition. Old
high school friends pulse through
my head and I contemplate their
distance. I return recognition
to my lover and hear nothing
from her for hours to come.
None of these old high school
friends seem to acknowledge
what I thought was love between
us. I pretend not to care as the
world ignores me and fall back
into the confused trance of
'keeping busy.'

I feel like a ghost today.

What happened to the school
-yard friends? The late nights
spent with nowhere to be?
The happy conundrum of life
as a game? What happened
to freedom? What happened
to freedom? What happened
to freedom?

I hold a sliver of hope that one
day life will electroshock my
existence back into existence.
It's been a beautiful fight, but
lets hope the war is over by Christmas

*** momma, I'm coming home.

no one reads bedtime stories in
cusco, there is no numb preservation of
old heroes, no myths–
maybe because it was built on older gods and they have died
the air chokes the lungs and it rains in a hapless way
(as if to pass the time)

the days go like this
we wake at 4, eat one free meal
have a few beers
find a line, do a line
do so many lines, get impossibly high
and then peter out sadly and disoriented when there's no more to find.

I'll look back on these three weeks as simpler times
with good friends in a bad city, fighting in a way what
can never be changed.
these gods have died.

dear cusco: stop shaking old bodies, cities should
grow, but you tear yourself up,
trying to find something below:
dig up shards of spent ghosts.
lay them out in a thin white row.

Wherever he'd believed me,
it'd been a temperate climate.
Not too cold, not too hot, one
of those Buddhist middle path
days where the weather sat to
meditate. What I'd told him was,
"well, my friend, there is nothing
new under the sun."

He giggled like a 6 year old and
said, "except when I turn over
rocks."

I saw snow this morning for the first time in forever ago and
said a silent prayer
to the beast and the bereft and the preternaturally on fire and
wasn't sure whether I was addressing land or sky
but I was brought back to the time
you pleaded with me
to, for you, recall please a single happy memory
and when I couldn't you cried.

and I can't explain how it's so
like snow that comes to rest in the sky.

I'm just saying that sometimes the mind fails
sometimes the best of us are fickle, fallow, fake
sometimes the sky sends water into the grave.
but the ceremony goes on anyway.

sometimes there is so much a body can take.
sometimes the volcano decides
that we, all of us, should shake.
and the ceremony goes on anyway.