The love of a grandson
to a grandmother
is a special bond.
It cannot be broken.

A grandmother's presence
in the eyes of a grandson
makes him behave
more like he should behave.
He looks up to her.
I look up to you.

I often wonder
what experiences you've gone thorough.
What has made you into the you today?
You've gone through so much yet,
I've only known you
for 22 years of it.

Through that time,
you've shown me
what a great grandparent is.
You attended most of my
Concerts
Plays
and Musicals
with loving support

Every birthday,
Christmas,
Valentine's Day,
and Easter
without ever missing a beat
you would contact me.
I thank you
So
SO
SOOOOOO MUCH!
I often feel guilty
for not always contacting back.
I really need to get better at that.

As a kid
there was nothing better
than looking forward
to your Christmas presents.
The science toys,
the cookbooks,
and of course,
the Hot Wheels.
There was nothing better to me
than knowing
that I would get a new track to put together
or a new car.
As I've matured,
so have the presents.
the Alinea cookbook
is like a sacred document
I look at it often
and it always amazes me.

Thank you for inventing
"Grandma's Orange Stuffing"
Its always my favorite part
of the Thanksgiving feast.
(Way better than dad's)

Although this poem
isn't very poem-y
I hope you enjoy it
for the rest of your life.
You're the only real grandparent I ever had,
and I love you with all my heart.
Thank you for all you've done.

I tear through cobweb-curtains
in the attic of my mind and gather
dusty memories and things long lost
I never thought I'd find

Delicately, I collect old photos
of forgotten smiles and love letters
that once set my heart alight
and broken lamps, love-stitched quilts,
worn cookbooks with my mother's
notes, and my trusted, rusted trike

I pack them in a cardboard box with
a smile and a wish, and with pride
I tie a balloon for every year of my life
and watch the memories rise

As the box wanders into the clouded
arms of the blue father-sky,
the shackles on my ankles are undone
and as I take weak steps like a newly mobile
fawn, I know that I am free and my
haunting is now gone

beyond the whiskey
and the beer drank along the familiar
path, with memory stressed
as to no accomplished ego coupling,
drunk indeed,
but rehearsing the familiar path
that thought de-activates
and there's less of identifiers required.*

in terms of gambling,
in familial setting,
betted:

watford (21-20) home to newcastle
(5-2), QPR (6-5) against wolves (9-5 to win),
barnsley v. rochdale (draw at 11-5),
chesterfield v. millwall (to win, 11-8),
oldham v. bury (draw at 21-10),
port vale v. bratford (home-side 8-5),
coventry (13-10) away winning against southend (13-8),
plymouth (11-5) against bristol rovers (evs),
accrington (13-10) against exeter (13-8) too,
manfield (6-5) winning against luton (9-5),
portsmouth drawing with oxford united (21-10),
wycombe with leyton orient (11-5) too,
yeovil beating crawley (13-10),
dundee utd. losing to kilmarnock (11-5) -
scots wish me luck,
motherwell drawing with ross county (19-10),
brochin losing to aidrie (11-10),
montrose winning over clyde (9-5),
hamilton losing to edinburgh's hearts (6-5),
finally...
burnley overcoming derby (13-10).

if i got all nineteen right, i betted 2 quid
and won a million,
split it down the middle with my father,
bet for two quid, quid each, half a million each.
my father is a cautious gambler,
bets spare change to get pennies for a million
exchange, i only desire serious alcoholism,
i am a true scot between the two pulling
two pence apart to create copper wiring,
scots are the jews of the north, after all:
i don't gamble, i play chance,
the chances of me being prophetic about five
football scores will be a, a ref. to the guinness book
of records.

i aimed high today, feminism still hasn't the foggiest
of house husbands, lazy lions,
it's still thursday pay-cheque day for the women,
i can cook a killer korma (added late
grind cashews), and a serial killer kashmiri masala curry,
organic chemistry experiments 12h a week will do that to you,
you'll enjoy cookbooks more than chemistry textbooks,
too many esters i say, spices v. perfumes, your choice
the pakistani in my off-license looked amazed i was wearing
hindu perfumes after having cooked a meal he could
recognise that wasn't a concentrate of strawberries:
find a needle in a haystack, yes... find a berry in a haystack...
no.

i love hindi cuisine, much aroma that deviates from
what europeans claim to be aromatic:
pig sweat and oxen salivate a taste for synthetic
odours when an analysis of cardamon justifies aplenty
likewise: what opens necessary porous areas
of the skin as necessarily sweet
does not necessarily invoke a sweetness for the tongue
to match: fat cows better than anorexia voodoo
of *******-champagne girls i'd tell you.

Rock n’ roll music, Folger’s, and paint-smeared hands.
Dresser drawers filled to the brim with undeveloped camera film.
Blue bonnets and overgrown grass, pecans and crunching fall leaves.
Dirt roads and river-rocks, typewriters, polaroid cameras, and feather-quill pens.
Those hand-me-down blue eyes and brown ones that are “sometimes hazel.”
Crystal clusters and Lord of the Rings.
Countless mosquito bites and play-pretend games in the clubhouse.
Early-birds and night-owls.
Trudy; and Randy Hayes.
“Don’t touch everything you see,” and “If you say you’re bored, I’ll find work for you to do.”
Sweet tea and okra and southern dishes blackened and drenched in cheese or gravy.
Grandma always burned everything to make sure it was fully cooked, and to her, it was never burned, just “well-done.”
Cigarettes and carpentry and cookbooks. Wild blackberries and birthday parties at the lake.
Sleeping in all day and staying up all night and procrastination.  
Shepherd's Pie, potatoes, and four-leaf clovers.
“Nil Desperandum. Never Despairing.”  
I’m from a whole house that eats eggs for breakfast, and I’m allergic to eggs.
And trees as tall as buildings and buildings as tall as trees.
“You should never take the lord’s name in vain,” and “Jesus loves you, so you should love others.”
Day-dreams and stargazing and thunderstorms.
“All or nothing,” and “There is no try, only do.”
Old family pictures in dust-glittered frames.
We are crystals. We have facets, each one makes us who we are.
With only one window of our lives to express, we’d merely be glass.
I am a part of each of these things just as much as they are each a part of me.

Our politicians preach hope
While our nation struggles to cope
Stacking woman into binders
Deaf to all but hired reminders
Treaties & agreements for peace
While riots rage on in Greece
Told that we are doing just fine
As more join the food stamp line
American banks engorged with greed
Planting in free soil a debt ridden seed
The next Great Depression has already begun
& It matters not which candidate has won
With our cancer ridden healthcare
Attempts like duc-tape to repair
Voting to raise the debt ceiling
An American father kneeling
Praying to God to find a job
While outside “we the people” form a mob
The 99% chanting in the streets
Stubborn legislatures don’t budge from seats
C-span listens to recipes from cookbooks
A dull murmur of televised crooks
Unemployment continues to rise
Prophets sure of the world’s demise

It's rather cold in here. So I went to check the heat ducts. They were buried beneath a tangle of lies, deceit, and old cookbooks left behind from the family that once lived in this place. It was no easy task, mind you. I dug through the shambles for days - shivering and blowing hot breath into my palms, now coated with a film of forgotten moldy pasta and an affair gone wrong. After a time, though, I finally reached them. And it was not what I expected. It explains the reasons why I am cold...

You see, it wasn't the dead bodies so carelessly crammed in the heat duct that made me cold. The mummified corpses of parents holding their children, the children holding their cat, and the cat holding a half-eaten and long rotted rat inside its stomach. It was what they were whispering. A whisper of a melody of truth that sent a chill so frigid and lifeless so far deep beneath my skin I feared I...'d freeze right inside that heat duct, forever sealed to a fate of the shells before me. It was a traveling tune.

The milk man on 4th and Main heard it as he locked the door of the lonely housewife behind him. The postman felt it resonate in his mind, already crowded with a million voices - many telling him to load his gun and end the monotony. Tears of the local priest fell as he danced to the haunting melody breathed from the mouths of the dead, dancing with his hands on a member sworn to celibacy. A nun in her habit drowning in a habit that only the Lord and the devil know about, she heard it as well and peered cautiously at the others in the convent, criticizing them with her mind knowing full well she wasn't the only one who heard the whispers.

The whispers echoed within this heat duct, within the house, the town...the world. And they were oh so cold....

We grew up in the muddy puddle
That was our coffee
In a begrimed little café.
We ate in little bites of each other,
Rolled our tongues in our mouths,
Tasted each flavor and each seasoning.
I gulped you down and digested each little mishap of you.
I undid all the sordid belongings residing in your mouth,
You were the embodiment of shame and failure,
And I made it all such a part of my gut,
That I haven’t shaken it off
Thirty years hence.

How did I make it to here?
This is such a foreign rest.
The only familiarity was that,
Which settled around the corners of your eyes,
In the crevices beneath your *******,
And the clarity of your skin.
There were snacks,
And books.
You had your brown sweater on.
Your moist brow was so restless that day,
That I was reminded of all of my desperation,
All the stories I hurled at myself,
All the children I knew were all right.
Oh Nara,
Your brow vanished all that I held true,
Even you, Nara,
Your brow swallowed you whole.
Oh Nara,
You killed a part of me that day.

You exploded into chemicals,
That stuck onto my skin.
Into hot tea that surprised me every day.
It crept into the jasmine oil smell of her hair.
In the sweat of her neck,
Into our lazy evenings filtered through with years
Of careful exclusion.
Everything I owned was only me
When I was naked, and writhing,
A baby in the womb of something so desperately motherly,
That it forgot to give birth.
She noticed, Nara, she noticed me.
She noticed these hands shaking through everything they did.
And she hid.
She hid into her red, pleated saris,
Into cookbooks and cakes,
Into soft butter, and hardened cookies.
Everything has been seeking to destroy itself since, Nara,
Cigarettes would paper itself into existence.
Now it burns smoke and blindness.
The trees move in fast forward,
They are arthritic fingers
Grasping for something,
Long since out of their reach.
Acid has been running in the veins of this house since years,
The wood is out of place.
The rot in the bamboo tables is only concealed
By the tinted glass.

And sometimes, I sit at the cadaver porch,
You are a mindless zombie of a woman,
Who decides to stay with me,
And leave me alone.
Destruction had become your favourite hobby when you were that real.
When did poetry become so important to you that
You quite forgot me?

i don't mind the precision of such quests of investigation, i hardly think you constantly think to keep scientific facts afloat, for me thinking and scientific factual itemisation is like an iceberg, the former above water, the latter beneath the water... snorkelling beneath the water will not change your thinking as such, the upper part seen will still remain the same sized self that you are, readied for the new experience and the closing of all scientific books... you're hardly the ghost thought of libraries, you're the living body among cookbooks and bars; the iceberg's torso and other limbs will remain beneath water, encountered by medical students - if i were you i'd care for the titanic about to hit that head of yours bopping above the waterline, much smaller and smaller even still, while shrinking with all those theories concerning a single sound so italicised as the ego for grandeur of "theories", how about sesame street alphabetical arithmetic? if only the verse, an ***** of kindness in your head where knowledge of chemotherapy actually is in someone else - under the grand curtain of life's theatre... selfish ******* selling crap and islam; what? he came from the merchant class... what's he selling me? i didn't even buy a crucifix or an icon of a saint from the tourist shop in the ******* vatican!*

slavic eyes are reminiscent
of the mongol conquests
and reintegration via copulation
with the germans.

The taste of stale cigarettes
On her lips
Mixing with the stinging cherry
On my own
Is a flavor I'll probably never forget
Or trade for the world

my life in cans of arizona on the desk on the floor
cliff bar wrappers and crisp bags and old bits of
tissue my life in clothes littered everywhere                 scrunched pieces of fabric
        my bedsheet pulling off the mattress a box of
granola bars flattened on top of another old socks and artwork
pennies and cups i’ve yet to wash my       life in open windows and closed jars a
container of cough syrup and books i haven’t read my life in old papers and
boots broken plastic and bubble wrap my life in textbooks and
wires and cookbooks and hats and cans of arizona and things that should be in the bin

i
don’t want to leave
i just
want to be back there

I hate that I know the location of the dumb moles on your back,

and that you told me about your grandmother's dementia,

or your mother's philosophy that no act is selfless,

I hate that you told me your most embarrassing secret,

or that you make me read cookbooks aloud on a Sunday morning, when I'm wearing nothing but your t-shirt from the night before, and every time I say a different ingredient you moan, or giggle, or gasp, or grab me and tell me how hot the way I say coriander is.

I hate that you wore ugly pajama pants around me,

I hate that you showed up, drunk, on my door step at 4am after ignoring me all night, and all you wanted to do was cuddle.

and that the next morning I called you a ****, and a ****, to your face, for making me so confused about whatever is going on with us.

I hate that you said "maybe we should take a step back, because I don't wanna be a ****"

(aka because you don't want a relationship.)

well, neither do I,

I never wanted this.

I was 4 months out of a 3 year relationship, enjoying my new found freedom.

I just woke up after a typical one night stand,
to all of my favorite things,
in one room,

your room.

I never wanted the guy I had been sleeping with at the time to turn off my "whiney pop punk", just to find the exact same cd in your collection days later.

I never wanted to find out that we have the same favourite bands, or that we both like films too much.

I never wanted you to offer to sneak home from work at 10am to drive me home, just so that I could have a few more hours sleep in your bed.

I never wanted to be attracted to a guy who is the total opposite from my usual "type",
or who reminds me of my dad.

I never wanted your best friend to tell me that he wants us to date, even though you're not ready for a relationship.

because I'm not either,

but now,

are we stuck attempting to casually **** other people to avoid what might be happening?

after all, in the span of one evening you ****** one best friend and I ****** the other.

I messaged you at 5am on Saturday,
after I'd had a ******* *******,
and you told me to come pick you up from some girl's house so that we could go back home to yours.

you told me that you didn't wanna hear my *** stories anymore.

you'd message me on a Monday afternoon, fishing to see if I'd ****** someone else on the weekend.

you told me one Saturday night that you wanted to spend the entire Sunday together, in your bed, watching Star Wars and ******* all day.

and that during the walk home, we could keep warm by making out.

you even messaged me to tell me that you kissed a girl, but that you then decided to go home and message me instead.

my friends have begun to hate you for all the head ******* you do to me,

and even after I changed your name back from "******" in my phone,
you still **** me around,

I don't even think you like The Smiths,
so I don't know why I care about you in the slightest,

I guess it must be because I think it's cute that when you talk about eating meat, you say the name of a vegetable instead, just to try and please me.

or maybe because whenever we are about to ****,
you say "tell me what you want"

and after I respond, I ask you
"what do you want?"
and all you moan to me is

"I want you".

or maybe just because we are kinda sexually compatible.

after all, you said the way I grab your **** is "magical".

our discussion last week, drunk, in the club bathroom.
when you yelled loudly about
how great I am in bed,
and how you hate your ****** job,
and that you've never been single as an adult,
and you just want to be free for once in your life.

and I said I was the same,
all I want is a life free of consequence,
doing whatever I want to do.
no
strings

we agreed that we both wanted the same thing,
and then you watched me leave with another guy.



I have to stop myself from thinking about the things that you say or do,
because I'm confused enough as it is.

like the fact that you messaged me to apologise for not having sober *** with me saturday morning,

or that you finally went down on me for the first time friday night,
(it only took you 3 months)
(some stupid part of me thinks it's because you like me,
but my common sense tells me otherwise),

I honestly don't know what we are doing,

and you probably don't either.

Divide the moon into two halves,
You'll find inside a million lamps,
Also cut the heart into two halves,
You'll find inside blood and valves.

Romance is trapped in a Shakespearean novel,
He buried it under the centuries with his shovel,
And the modern fast pace modified the human brain,
It's only a repetitive pattern of falling in vain.

Juliet has a husband, he's older by twenty years,
He's never home, she's always out shopping new fears,
Romeo is jobless, searching ups and downs for a key,
He heard life starts in the aftermath of a dream.

The old witch sitting in front of a glass bowl,
Now broke and retired, all her cookbooks are sold,
And the wolves are out, ruling the woods,
Magic's density in the air, isn't as high as it should.

So plug the stars out, pluck all the electric flowers,
The universe is now running low on power.*

● ● ●

Gracious,

I've hardbound copies of

Tasting Paris

and

Koreatown

side by side.



No

I don't want some

"delightfully delicate" fusion

of these

opposite ends of the earth.



In equal measure

I am torn in two

and thus

it seems

my name

holds true.



All this world's time

is not enough.

It has been stamped with dispassionate blue ink,
Signifying its future lack of suitability to sit on the shelves,
Having been elbowed aside by this and that year’s thing
(And the book had not been checked out since the mid-seventies,
Perhaps some young man all but short-circuited
By the prospect of a bathing Julie Christie,
Or some female counterpart shedding bell-bottomed tears
Over doomed love, which, in her cosmology,
All such things were fated to be)
Placed in some temporary cardboard casket
Which once held bananas or copier paper or ancient time cards,
Sitting cheek to elbow with cookbooks, breathless biorhythm tomes,
Buffeted about forces unseen and beyond its control
As it faces the uncertain and uneasy prospect of possible reclamation.

I’ll talk about the way I’ll never let you step into a puddle again. When it’s raining out, don’t forget to call me. I’ll rush to your side and carry you on my back—don’t ruin your shoes because of a little bit of water. When you’re hungry, tell me what you’re craving—I like to read cookbooks during my spare time just to keep up with your taste buds. I’ll write you letters if we’re ever apart—to my love, from your love. Three, two, one, I’ll count down the seconds to your birthday and surprise you with a cake I worked meticulously on the night before while I suggested you go out with your friends. When you come home, the house will be clean and your bath will be running. I can take care of you—I can’t take care of myself very well, but scout’s honour that I learned how to treat diamonds during my time in boy scouts. When the sun is setting and it’s time to retreat to bed, don’t forget to sleep in my arms; I wait all day for the moments where I get to hold you. Have I ever told you how much I like to watch you sleep? Sometimes you adopt the softest snore and you always, always, always wrap your body around mine as if you were afraid I would leave. What you don’t know is how afraid I am that I would wake up and you wouldn’t be there—well, I’m awake now.

And you’re not there anymore.

It starts with a needle.  The needle could be anything: a bad breakup, the tyranny of your father, physical bruises in unmentionable places that a person you trusted created.  Then, it floods your veins and this very thing soaks my being with a rainbow.  Now, your pasty skin is turning colors, from purple to red to green to blue.  You know that having waves in your body is wrong, but it is not from a single substance alone.  It is more of a feeling, a pulse, a sensation.  It feels like a shard of glass that saws ever so effortlessly between the layers of your flesh because it wishes to get to what is underneath.  This emotion is overcome with desire, but sometimes it still makes you want to stop breathing.  Sometimes it makes you believe that laying yourself to rest in an easy place where no one would find you or even try to is the only way to deal with it.  It comes and goes for no reason when you are depressed, and it is the factor that drives you to the edge, as well as the very element that keeps you from jumping. While, in one sense, you are no longer you, it may be changing you for the better.  After all, this type of person and item can be fixed, altered, morphed into a better human being and thing.  This creates a tighter and stronger bond between people who are in the same place.  It allows stories to be told that would ordinarily be hidden on a dusty shelf among outdated cookbooks and magazines.  Roots of intolerance can be severed when we realize that everyone experiences this, and it may cause us to view everyone as a person rather than a label.  Because we are damaged, we know that we will ascend from this place of despair. In essence, brokenness is a paradox; it makes you feel like dying would be easier, but it is also the only way you know you're still alive.

He learned English.
By rereading
The instructions
The ingredients,
The head office addresses,
The countries of origin,
The nutritional estimates,
And the sizes and weights
Off the back
Of the heat and ready to eat cookie dough packages,
In aisle 5.


He studied the words
And salivated over the contents
Progressed quickly
And memorized the recipes of other
Easy to bake products.
Pictures of cakes and butter tarts in his dreams
A joyful discovery,
The sweet promise
Of the full shelves
In a giant grocery store,
Two blocks from the single room
He made into his home.

He was hungry. Always.
For all things,
And motivated by nightmares of wolves,
Packs of predators in his dreams
And his empty stomach,
Ruled him with a continuous hum,
A sort of tinnitus of his entire body
And so
To spend an hour in the dessert section,
Of a building full to the sadistic edge of its light fixtures
With food,
Made him drift again
And wish for better things.

Eventually he graduated to cookbooks
Second hand bookstores,  
Memorized ‘from scratch’ the recipes of hundreds of dishes,
Crispy potato skins, eggplant caviar, chicken- avocado and tomato soup,
He became a code breaker,
An industrial spy with intent
His focus narrowed by near starvation
Within a year he could recall
And write down
4500 different ways to prepare food.  
Each day he would memorize one or two new recipes,
An exercise
Where he learned measurement and actions.
He taught himself to stir, to ladle, to sear,
And he learned to convert grams and ounces and cups,
He knew temperature equally in Celsius and Fahrenheit,
He learned to sliver, to filet, to carve, and
To put butter under the skin of a guinea hen,
And roast it into a golden delicate anticipation.
Allant knew how to prepare.

On January 1st when all of New York stayed in bed
For a few extra hours
He approached a food truck in Brooklyn,
Whose owner was tired and hung-over.
Using the universal sign language of calm strangers,
Along with his easy charm
He convinced the weary man to let him cook.


Within 15 minutes he had made grilled peaches and split sausages
Over which he poured a light sauce made from
Orange, mango and mustard.
The food truck owner tasted a spoonful
And devoured the magnificent creation in two bites,
The look on his face as if he had seen God.


Allant went from truck to stall to indoor grill
Until line ups went around the block.
He was grateful of course,
Grateful for the hunger,
The night sweats brought on by memories
Of evil beyond belief,

He worshiped his good fortune,
Spoke loudly about freedom as a gift,
Loyalty as a lifelong obligation and
Guilty that the world had given him a chance.
He became
Unshakable in his belief
That others must be helped.
So he made the immigrant promise,

And never for one second
For the rest of his life,
Did he ever refuse a tired man a seat
A hungry man a meal,
A broken man an ear,
A lonely man his comfort,
Or an angry man his smile.
This ,he said, is the dream.

Power deceives,
And ill minds contrive.
Follow as you are lead,
Be happy to be alive!
Pay no attention to foul deeds,
Schemed and completed behind closed doors.
There lay flowers and candy for those,
Who forget wrongdoings forevermore.
Beware of hungry beasts,
That knaw on your tender mind.
To those who create of their own free will,
You are likely the last of your kind.
This angry world has no room for lovers,
For those who cherish and support.
All too often, it seems like fear,
Is the last, and most effective, resort.
False lives are drawn up,
And strung upon coathooks.
Observe beyond and you will see,
These lives were derived from cookbooks.
Cookie cutter lives.

The Hidden thought

It is said our unconscious fear of death
pushes us forward to achieve something before
the great Nothing descends,  
for writers this is prescient they struggle to leave
behind words on paper, and not erased
as leaves on trees when the cold wind blows.  
Others skydive from mountaintop cheating
the reaper, yet hope to live long enough to tell
their story of daring do.
Architects fear death too, that's why they built
the tall skyscrapers that will stand the test of time
and celebrate their foreverness.
The chef in his kitchen thinks of death when he
prepares a meal a signature dish where his name
will appear in cookbooks.
As it is unconscious, most people are not troubled only
when waking up at four in the morn before
birds sing and you can taste the stillness of death.

One interesting thing seems quite clear:
the number of cookbooks appear-
     ing for people to buy
     seems equalled by di-
eting books, year after year.

thoughts upon my newly acquired orphan state.  i am fifty two and then a little more it should not matter that  i can  no longer knock and open that door to sit in the corner and quietly speak of matters small and large, joyous and bleak....it should not matter for now i am grown  with others to love a child of my own.... it should not matter  but oh how it does... it leaves me speechless, somedays and sometimes turned inside out....on a raft  alone in a sea of  thoughts.... all this in a grief so quietly my own... yet we go about the closing down of a life eighty years and more, taking things so precious to the local opportunity store... consoling ourselves with the mantra that mother loved her charities as we give away the clothes she wore.... we pack, up the unit in which she lived.....pore over the photos showing the love of the life she lived...we converse about memories and family lore...we laugh, we cry, we laugh some more....we note that the  photos we love the most are  those of her holding grandchildren  on  lap and in arm... we talk about the fierce, fierce love that would allow no lasting harm... to befall those in her care...we also talk about the fashions of clothes and  of hair....then... there are the silences so profound...... when we all realize once more she will no longer be around....at least in the physical....in our hearts she will alway be near and dear .....we pack up her rugs and chair....her cookbooks  and clutter, bed bath towels, a myriad of things  in my mind i hear her mutter... such a fuss, such a palaver!....finally all is done...
her  place a shell....empty and forlorn ...we walk out the door as we quietly mourn.....we three orphans, my brothers and me....
stand in the moonlight and stare at the sea....all thinking the same ....poor orphaned me....

he counts the money
I count calories
he dresses up like he always has a board meeting to attend
you can usually find me in pastel coloured tees and black tights
he eats like he is on a diet
I eat like I just broke up
He leafs through big old dusty encyclopedia's
I have my nose in one of his mothers many cookbooks
he drinks spritzers and tonic
I have the weirdest craving for Smirnoff
he sits in his lazyboy and flips through the news and sports channel
all I have been watching a lot of is Gordon Ramsey
he lost a deal
I lost my recipe cards

Rock n’ roll music, Folger’s, and paint-smeared hands.
Dresser drawers filled to the brim with undeveloped camera film.
Blue bonnets and overgrown grass, pecans and crunching fall leaves.
Dirt roads and river-rocks, typewriters, polaroid cameras, and feather-quill pens.
Those hand-me-down blue eyes and brown ones that are “sometimes hazel.”
Crystal clusters and Lord of the Rings.
Countless mosquito bites and play-pretend games in the clubhouse.
Early-birds and night-owls.
Trudy; and Randy Hayes.
“Don’t touch everything you see,” and “If you say you’re bored, I’ll find work for you to do.”
Sweet tea and okra and southern dishes blackened and drenched in cheese or gravy.
Grandma always burned everything to make sure it was fully cooked, and to her, it was never burned, just “well-done.”
Cigarettes and carpentry and cookbooks. Wild blackberries and birthday parties at the lake.
Sleeping in all day and staying up all night and procrastination.  
Shepherd's Pie, potatoes, and four-leaf clovers.
“Nil Desperandum. Never Despairing.”  
I’m from a whole house that eats eggs for breakfast, and I’m allergic to eggs.
And trees as tall as buildings and buildings as tall as trees.
“You should never take the lord’s name in vain,” and “Jesus loves you, so you should love others.”
Day-dreams and stargazing and thunderstorms.
“All or nothing,” and “There is no try, only do.”
Old family pictures in dust-glittered frames.
We are crystals. We have facets, each one makes us who we are.
With only one window of our lives to express, we’d merely be glass.
I am a part of each of these things just as much as they are each a part of me.