Category: Poetry

i’ve been dancing in the streets
to songs you don’t know
with hair too crazy to be kept
under any sort of hats
and a neck just perfect
to wear the longest scarves,

i’ve been looking for you
in places i know you won’t be
and i’m learning to let myself be
happy a word i heard
from a tongue so foreign
though not unlike your own

let us lose the demarkations of age
relaxing beneath the weighty shadows of memories
i’ll find you in a thousand metaphors
borrowed from other authors
with fireflies flickering and fleeting
buzzing about our heads,
some kind of external performance
of the fizzy dancing of beers
in our minds and our stomachs
or the fluttery and fancy-free
landings??proving grounded
is more realistic than on-wing
and comfort could replace chaos
in the glittering stars of the latest,
greatest dramatic plague: love.

Sad thoughts and good mem-
ories as I realize
this year, i won’t fringe.

i have a theory, we leave traces
of ourselves and others
for the both of us to find
like some sort of hansel and gretl
shaped mystery where
the witch is only inside of our hearts
and whats killing you, boy,
is killing me, too.
so, we left no breadcrumbs
because home is a place
we wish not to return to
and we forge separate paths,
hoping that happiness
will grow in the hollows
of that candy cabin castle
we built with dreams,
now tasting bitter and
clinging to the scars of my tonsils.

this is the moment of truth
and it comes only at night
waking me, leaving me
tinged with my sweat
and anxious, as though i
could remember a nightmare,
but … i don’t.

the slippery whisper of memory
tells of the unextraordinary
small moments of living
like that time in the grass
or the ever-brief public encounter
we exist, together.

and except for the first time,
i have forgotten this forced absence
i dream of you as though
you were dead, but you’re not
so you sit silent, and
i revive only your ghost.

my finger chased its shadow along the rim of my glass
as i slowly sipped on the drink of the night
the warm air circling me–
the slow embrace of my best friend, the city,
and my brain encoded these patterns
before we fell comfortably
into our imaginations reality
of apartments with unpacked boxes
and matresses strewn across the floor.

when i rediscovered you,
i was spinning with the words
of my favorite author, the original
namesake of pleasure, and her poem
not quite epic in length
(though perhaps in style)
searching for some hint
of my identity in a beautiful,
albeit false, reality.

perhaps, before we lived this life
our failures in trust
separated us and the
psychosis which you now deny
illuminated my figure by candlelight;
and, my eros, you hid
behind a veil.
maybe our love faltered
beneath the weight of my
doubt and your unforgiving
heart crushed what remained.

a death and rebirth renewed us,
you relegated me to your echo
as i lingered on every word
and within the still waters
i held you so captivated
until you bored of even yourself
and the limitless stories
i wove to occupy you.

you mourned for me
in the emptiness of the new lives
we lead alone, the lament of your song
drawing those who surrounded you
to offer words of comfort.
with new hope you looked for me
although you knew it meant to lose me.

in the end, you demanded me.
tearing me from unconditionality,
while you mimicked her in both
rationale and jealousy,
until you both held my body
so tightly from either side
that i could not see myself
at my center, again murdering me
in a vicious story of us.

our souls and minds have lived
these stories in the myths of those
poems whose subject remains a
delicate mystery. and our hearts
have retold these tales
in so many different
solemn encounters with
the cold whisper of those
whose accelerations of breath
were still meaningless.

now, we find ourselves
in the retrial, budding strong
in each day’s growth
cautious of our memories,
and accepting the pain
as a complement to our hedone.

now, i imagine each dream you had to be terrible,
echoing with our laughter as an afterthought
against the hollow push and pull of all you held inside,
storing it near the sinking feeling that you would never be home,
home as in that feeling i experience when i’m entranced
or home as in that place you experience when you’re comfortable
i wish i could explain to you the feelings i could never show you
because they never belonged to you, and that somewhere
a sentence could make the ecstasy compact.

in the darkest of dark nights
we hold each other
through the conversations
we’ve maybe had before
but in the solemn hollows of our story
i have no questions to ask you
i love to learn you
not in the pathways
of your history
but in the wholeness
of you, as you are
laying next to me
on the bed and clutching my hand
draped over yr chest