sharing a spot of brilliance with you
yes, it will touch your internals
only if you want it to*


Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the ******. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”                       ― Rosemarie Urquico


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S T, 5 July 2013

Duck beach
Drinking on the the sand
Fleeing corolla
With 30 beers
Finished before we made it back to duck
Thrown in cop cars
Blowing over a .2
Not getting arrested
Living like champions
Tattoos on the 4th
Which will last forever
Experiences with strangers
Nothing better

He's five years older than me.
He stepped up and became a man
when our father didn't want to be.
When mom was too high and drunk to see
and I was too young to make money
realistically, he
was in the street
making sure we all could eat.

It's a bad place to be at 14.
A brother too young to chase his dreams.
A mother so focused on pleasure,
she doesn't understand the effects of her schemes.

He just wants to escape the Stockton scene
where gunshots ring out like wet towels.
People shouting out sets like wolf howls.
Where the sword is mightier than the pen
and defending yourself just puts you in the pen.
Somehow this boy became three men.
One for me, a man to this day I mirror to be.
One for my father, showing him how to be a daddy.
One for himself because a real man lets nobody determine his wealth.

I have the utmost respect for my brother.
We're not friends on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr.
We know, without saying, what we mean to each other.
Any day I could call him and ask for a favor.
We can have a whole conversation without the need to speak.
He's even the reason why I'm such a geek.
Nobody can be more of a man than my brother, Dominique.

Infatuated
with a woman I won't meet.
She took her own life.

Her eyes,
As beautiful and blue as the ocean
Her hair,
As brown as the Earth's rocky crust
Her lips,
As red as the lava of a volcano
Her smile,
As bright as the light that surrounds us
Her body,
As light and as elegant as an angel
And her mind,
As intelligent as all the scientists on Earth
This is Mother Earth's Daughter.

Round little orbs roll
across the sidewalk, crashing
into another