Oh My God I'm Feeling.

Out there, people are trying to shake the idea
Of God down,
Make him come out of hiding;
Scream hallelujah
And hope he will illicit something.
I, on the other, or one
Of his or no one’s hand(s)
Stumble across old or dusted fates
Try to decipher, try to
Remember

HOW I EVER UNDERSTOOD IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Because suddenly, there is a break
In my wing’s wind
And there is:

You.

My clocks fall from their walls
And I am deep in your hands, in
Their hands,
The mastered clicking, setting, interrupting hands
Displaying our only minutes.
But I will not refuse them our
Presence, here, in the quiet
Between pressing breathes and
Warmed lips.
The clouds are parting, the
Gods are shouting for our
Attention
But we, but I, am too apt
At ignorance
And instead, fumble over
The lightening rods being hit inside
Every strand, every colored vein
In my being when your
Soul brushes mine.
If this isn’t fair to them (to whom? To everyone excluded. To everyone.) and the
Stucco ebbs of pre-war buildings
Fail to house the growing
Pound of what fills my heart
Then so be it that the open sky
With all those
Brilliant, pulsing stars beating
Down on the most beautiful,
Ugly comforter you ever saw,
Be our only cover.
Be it that the trees are the only ones who understand
The way in which I sway.
Be it that the tides are the only
Motion-fueled creature who
Understands my lack of bounds for this.
Be it that every sheer infinitesimal fiber
Attach to every cell of my skin to
The foundry that birthed and forged
Your very being.
Be it that, so let it be.
Please, let that be.
For with every well-composed work
Of prose comes five dirt covered
Chapters beneath
And with every mussed, dog-eared
Corner,
My fingers only long to turn
Them over in you more;
Tired of ever counting
Clear indications.
Should it be that those
Who believed They were making
Us, made us, then, so be it.
If whatever hands, or no hand(s)
At all, took a handful of
Flower, concrete, and soil and
Created

You,

Then by Them, by God,
Those hands created me.

　

　

POMEGRANITE.

I dig first into your

(you nipped your lip a bit, and too hard, and so allow the crimson) red,

Fleshy skin, and with my broken fingernails
Softly peel back
Piece by white, smoky, sultry
Piece.
Underneath, each individual
Pulp converges with the sudden
Gasp of air, releasing also onto
My fingertips their fiery dye,
Running down my palms, to
My wrists, then finally,
To my lips.
Small, teardrop seeds scatter
About, each new, airy, open
Compartment
Shows the signs of the pulp
It had just housed, now blood let
And without weight.
The inner flesh carries the
Great shape of the inner,
Wonderful, cavernous workings
Of an (artichoke) heart’s soul.
And with each smooth, bulbous, bursting
Pod I remove, place gently,
Let burst suddenly, behind my
Teeth and with my tongue,
Feel sudden, feel tart, feel cold and close

And yours.

Here's Looking At You, Kid.

I felt the purple sky come down over the buildings when the light turned green and you held my hand. Your smile reverberated off of the street signs. The smell of coffee fit well between our touching fingertips and kept our words company. (Lets take it slow, there are far places that this could go, could go.) But I won't pretend your hands holding mine and swinging me across the dance floor didn't spark our two hour conversation later; that our time spent making jokes at diner tables didn't lead to kisses over songs of Clark Gable; that our kisses didn't lead to long talks of how incredible that we were us and we were all we were. Ourselves. A word we figured we knew to ourselves and with other people, until we readily admitted while we laughed we didn't have a damn clue about until: now. You led me down the sidewalk, shivering,cold with the weather's drop, and made me fight for the side closest to the road, never letting my hand drop. And your crazy, and anxious, and have beautiful, deep, knowing eyes. Your face tells me everything: you have been through much and have found yourself lost inside many faces; that your smile is as much a part of your disaster and it's that demise of human condition that brings this higher. Your young and witty, laid back, energetic, beautiful; but you're dark, and intellegent, and bemused by the more cynical yet beautiful things. But I am crazy, and anxious, and want to know you. We kissed over my closed front gate and I grabbed your face because the feel of your skin feels, just right.

This feels just right.
Let's take it slow; there are many far places that this could go.
Let's go.

(I looked in the mirror tonight and saw a woman so different that she looked like me. And she was happy to see me.)

Mind Vomit

Brightly colored yarn

All stitched and hemmed together

Leave the rhyme out of this.

The walls, they smell of chalk

And not of you.

Grape seeds and pomegranate leaves

Find your foundries, and leave the

Rest of us be.

And whatever this was that was bothering me inside, has been left to wilt, left to die on the sidelines. Because it isn’t as if I hadn’t been there, been there, been there before. And it isn’t as if, I never will again. As much as we all want to move up and up, ever on and forward, we can’t pretend we’ll never run the same old circles. But whatever good things we have, we can only hold them as tightly as we might moths: however quickly they may lose their shining scales against our greedy, holding shells, oh well, oh well. You tighten, you lose. At least the earth gave them permission to float at all. At least, for a moment, we can say we had it all. Just as lightly green Luna moths dance around in or around my head, the hands of my clocks let lose the blocks they hold fast to and drop. Where is that moon, where is our tide, they ask, at last? Gives us our tides, our ticks, our seconds so that we may continue on our path. But the moon, oh she was so busy, unable to fill up her wine glass. Those days she needed off, she gripped her temples hard and said just leave me alone! But the world it kept on turning, the sun he never stopped burning, and the two danced wildly in dizzying perfection around her. Poor moon, always with no one to toast her a job well done, and all those fans looking up from their back porches asking this is what I want, this is what I want, what the hell do I want? But, no. She has no face, no hands, no wine glass, no state of imperfection. The moon, she is simply the moon, and no latent amount of word and poetry will give that to her. And let that be a lesson, to all of us spending our time groping for the moon: we had it in our possession the whole time, we just mistook it for our shoes.

Give Me My Words Back, That's All I Ask.

It was two summers back that I dug my fingers into the thick blades of grass of your backyard, when that rabbit hopped by. The rabbit that I always told you wasn’t wild. His ears were too long, and his comfort around people was too strong for any sort of natural tendencies. You rolled on your back, donned with your headlamp and raincoat for no reason and claimed that you were ready for jungle exploration. I looked at the grass and asked you why domestic rabbits weren’t enough, but you laughed instead of answering. Two summers. It was two summers ago when I had no job, and you had too many, so that when I came to visit, I would spend hours out on your back lawn, reading books until I fell asleep on the warm concrete, or waiting around on your living room with the thick carpet in-between my toes.

Your house. We were in love, back then, in your house. I never told you, but in the beginning, your house scared me. I watched it from the corner of my eye. Filled with family photographs and other normal things like sewing rooms and toys from when you were six. Boxes of car magazines and assurance that one day you would amount to something. But sometime shortly after we began snapping photographs on the boardwalk of southern New Jersey, I started to love your house. The way your mother’s rocking chair still swung minutes after she got up to cook dinner. The way the house’s floors muffled the sound of a hard walker’s feet. Your room was where I felt I fit into one of the only niches I could find in your life. In the room where the grey walls showed off photographs of bikers, trucks, trains speeding to this country or that. Boxes upon boxes piled up to the sides of your bed, filled with vintage tinker toys; that particular box of old keys you kept on your bedside dresser. Right over the drawer you used to keep our scrapbook, my letters, and my picture inside of. To the right of the corkboard you kept magazine cutouts and photographs of family and friends. Your clothes spewed forth from your closet that was never cleaned, and your bureau vomited t-shirts and dirty shorts from hiking trips. Bike chains and gear parts covered the floor, tripping me every time I walked in the room.

In that room, one night, you pulled out your box of keys and I asked you to tell me which one would be the key to your heart, if it existed. You pulled out the smallest, most ornate one. This one, you said. I put it on the chain around my neck. You always wanted to close two locks around one another, to show the rest of the town we were in love, closed and set. We used padlocks, but combinations for its release were always there. You attach it to the side of a bridge, you would tell me, and then we’d be just as romantic and hopeful as young couples are in Florence: where that mass of locks, all huddled around and among one another, keep people holding hands. We both visited Florence, with different people, different years, before we knew each other. We both wanted to carve our initials into tree trunks, but you wanted to on our college campus and I thought that juvenile. Meaningless. I wanted to carve hearts all over Keene Valley, but you feared for the natural surroundings hikers craved to be unmarked, so in a huff I let it be. And so our initials exist only a bridge in Connecticut somewhere, the same day I told you to pull the car over on the side of the highway: I had lied about something. We could only do things on the run; but serious conversations couldn’t be helped when nothing was meant to matter, and so the sides of roads became stomping grounds for things amiss. Blinking caution lights reflecting tearful conversations, serious misunderstandings, or unzipped jeans.

But that is where it all ended, wasn’t it? Pulled over on the side of the highway, our tears spilling over the gravel. The words were meant to come flooding back, and instead that was where they stayed. Next to your car, on the side of the highway.

With your headlamp on your forehead, you smiled, that day, two summers ago. "Maybe I'll get to go to Iceland this year. Or Prague, or Africa." You smiled at the sky, and even then, two summers ago, you were already gone.

The Things I Gave Up

1.
I will not settle for lack of words.

I AM NOT A WORD
I AM NOT A SENTENCE ON A BLANK PAGE
I AM A PERSON
AN ENCYLOPEDIA DRIPPING WITH AGE
I AM CONSTANTLY BEING UPDATED
RE-EDITED
I AM THE EDITOR,
THERE IS NO WHITE INK HERE
THERE ARE NO DOUBTS TO THESE FACTS HERE
AND HOW DARE YOU TRY TO EDIT ME
LESS CURSE WORDS
MORE GOOD THOUGHTS
AND SO YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD CHANGE
AND SO YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD
READ
AND SUCK AWAY THE MEANING
BUILT BY THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF PENS
CREASED MILLIONS OF FOREHEADS
LICKED UP MILLIONS OF TEARS
SAILED MILLIONS DOWN THE RIVER
BUILT PEOPLE TO SHOW PEOPLE TO KNOW PEOPLE TO SHOW THAT WE ARE
PEOPLE
WE ARE PEOPLE!
WE ARE- JUST- PEOPLE.
AND WE ARE ALL THAT IS PEOPLE.
WE ARE ALL THAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN
ALL THAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN TO BE WORDS
TO BE CONFIGURED AND STUCK TOGETHER BY WORDS
THAT ARE CREATED IN THE PITS OF OUR STOMACHS
AND PUMPED THROUGH THE WOUNDS OF OUR HEARTS
AND WORDS
WORDS ARE STUCK IN THE KNOTS OF MY SHOELACES,
FALL FROM THE FOLLICLES OF MY HAIR
AND WORDS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD ARE SCREAMING
WHERE THE FUCK DID WE GO WRONG?
DON'T RUB YOUR WRISTS TOGETHER
MAKE FRICTION AND TELL ME
YOU'VE CAUGHT MY SCENT
DON'T CRUMBLE PICTURES IN YOUR FISTS
AND TELL ME YOU KNOW JUST WHAT MY SKIN FEELS LIKE
YOU KNOW WHAT MY SKIN FEELS LIKE
MY SKIN FEELS LIKE
PEELING

2.

I WILL NOT SETTLE FOR LACK OF WORDS.

There are many spaces on my walls that haven't been filled; I feel that someday, they will talk to me and tell me what they'd like to represent them and there's and maybe someday they will be able to tell me the roads they've walked and the families they've started and maybe behind that I'll smell the rot of the concrete and know that one day, one day, a long long time ago, these grains were in the eye of a friend who no longer likes Napoleon because of his terrible taste in clothing; so the grains would will themselves to be flicked away from the forgotten man's tear duct and decided to sail away with the tides just so that they could be here, listening to me now, holding up my walls while I try to hold up mine, while I lick the linens and try to get a taste out of something; anything.

What I Spent Hours Writing in My Journal At Washington Square Park/Jack's Coffee House

Knowing everything will inevitably change never keeps people from lamenting about the fact. With the recession forcing doors shut, and the streets filled with people who don't know that the Washington Square fountain was, until recently, 20 feet t0o the left, it seems we as a general populace, will always remain in the dark about ourselves. With innumeral factoid sheets spitting in our face how many jobs have been lost, the question of "how will consumerism save us now?" seems to loom, static, in the background of all we do. But not just at face value. With my friends and family all hoping to achieve great things (and, unfourtantly, success in this country normally goes hand in hand with money) how will anyone figure a way to be happy, or, at least, be content? I am extremely lucky (?), derranged (?) enough to have no real direction, nor any immediate goals. Just to: be. But I do feel I have been keeping a tad bit quiet for much too long, in a couple of ways. This will change. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" sounds from my left, as more laxidazical New Yorkers make fun of the many passerbys, photographers, people with cameras, and other New Yorkers simply minding their buisness. It's actually buiser than it ever has been here, though ironically, far less musicians and more street lights. There is also strangely more "Passive Lawn, No Sports" and "No Dogs Allowed" signs that are strewn about the park, to protect the immediate dollar at work on the grass that will at one point or another be the wrecking ball of this and every city. But I digress. "All Along the Watchtower", now; the men playing the song on a mandalin and acoustic guitar wear reflective sunglasses, sporty in their shades, laughing and awkward with Bob Dylan's words falling from their mouths all over the place, and too late. The Village has changed. An untrained pitbull to my right coughs up phlegm, barks excitedly, and gets hit on its snout by its two European owners; "No, no, no, no!" The men playing guitar play more Dylan covers, assuming everyone around them aren't drawing the connection to the area, and think themselves smarter for it. Across the way, two men in breakdancing outfits make quips about white people, as a white crowd claps them on. It smells like hot dogs and tobacco smoke. A man on a CurrentTV episode claimed that he hated to be the one to break to the nation, but this, from an economic standpoint, is monetary normalcy, if we've ever seen it. Which we haven't, so we as Americans all look at one another curiously wondering what in the hell to do now. But no one really pays attention to each other, and even when we do, we all shake our heads to any sort of alterior motive. But that's most of it for you. Of course humans are innately good-- but, just as John Lennon also reminds us, "we all have violence inside". I believe the chemical reaction these two extremes make gives us passion. I just hope one day I'll be able to harness an inbetween were I can speak as well as act. I hope one day this country can speak as much as it can act, and understand as much as it yells. Two girls slowly creep up to the man playing guitar. The man has a voice that could cut through bullshit, if there was such a voice. If there was such a need for such a voice--and there should be--but some could argue either way. A man is selling photographs of the old Village. This was my last Summer in the city, maybe forever, but who can really tell these things for sure. Not too much longer until a new city with less obvious motives. One that doesn't try as hard. To Jack's Coffee, if it's still open.

----
At Jack's.
I don't know if I'd have faith in coffee houses anymore if it wasn't for this place. Seems like everywhere else is just horribly half-assed, or simply put, dull. Best damn coffee here, though, really. Rose bought African Dwarf Frogs for our suite. So awesome. Ok, so I'm really going to miss the slowness, the relaxation, the...Ana! of the city! But really though. I like how close she and I have gotten. The city, and Ana, and me. I hope I get my writing groove back. Once I'm at school and am forced to, I'm sure I will. You see, I'd like to be able to set goals for myself for this year, but I can't figure if it's worth it or not. Might as well, I suppose:
1) Hang out with as many friends as possible (within reason!)
2) Do well in my writing classes...well, all of my classes!
3) Get most of my senior thesis out of the way this semester
4) Figure out something awesome either as an internship, or a class for next summer. Bushwacking, etc.

---
Now, in real time, it is 2:04 A.M. The cabs are whistling, the dump trucks are rumbling, and soon I'll be in a real bed again surrounded by friends and other random people alike. Every year lends new suprises, some very good and some bad, but given that this is my last year, I will try my damn hardest to do my best to make it memorable and generally good. I feel I have surrounded myself with people who can make it that way, though. I feel I accomplished a lot with myself today, even just with walking around, drinking coffee; because when I came home I without thinking researched volunteer opportunities, and signed up for 2. I am also now seriously contimplating taking courses after graduation to work with battered and sexually abused women, because these women need help, and I truly believe I could be someone they could talk to too.

You know, I honestly do not know what I want to do with my life. All I know is I'd like to make my life a good life; and not be a good person because I think others want me to be or because I'm comparing myself to others. But because I simply know I'm an alright gal, who just wants to help people out. I was there once, too, where too many people have been and should never have to be and I know I appreciated the helping hand when I got it. I would simply like to return to the world the favor.

I am here as a consiquence; I only hope to exist here as a favor.

Goodnight, and good luck. To me, and you, and everyone here.

Σειρήν Seirēn (The Siren)

The bareness of my legs confronted the texture of the sheet and my shadows on the bedroom door are orange. The fan forms itself in my silhouette. The streets outside glitter, splash unnecessary light onto the walls, onto my face, onto the week before I knew I could live without you.

My eyeglasses knock the hard tips of my eyelashes, thick with mascara; I wear fire engine red lipstick hoping I can smoke signal you from here (Can you see me?). Those are my teeth buried in the sky, behind the shooters; the quick, flashy, moving stars. Those are my lips signaling sunrise. Red smears across the skyline. But vinyl sleeping bags keep your eyes shut, your head lolled away. Thousands of hundreds of steps of miles of meters away. The idea of stars will catch your attention quicker than the thought of my naked body here, tangerine with the street lights. I’ll keep the extra blankets at the foot of the bed for you. You will forget warmth is where I keep huddled. Instead, I will be forced outside, swiveling my hips in the witching hour air; just beyond the trashcans. Next to the stone steps. Just to the right of the Asian-Fusion outdoor seating. Air conditioners will leak on to the sidewalk, start currents, form rivers under my shoes. The water will mix with leftover coffee from street venders and then you’ll smell me. Somewhere in the stink of pressed coffee grounds and soil thick with the vomit of worms. In between snapped twigs. In between Birch tree bark held taught with paper clips. I’ll just keep singing my song, until your ship comes crashing home.