| (no subject) |
[Friday, June 19th, 2009; 03:31 am] |
it takes soul to unravel the way i do,
slowly, traveling through waves of uncertainty
tide by tide, measuring possibility
in spoonfuls of luck and swagger--
cigarette by cigarette, sin by sin,
swinging from passion to passion
--no shame!
just like the dilettante i am. |
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| dissonance and resonance |
[Tuesday, May 19th, 2009; 11:35 pm] |
walking round slow
circles, pacing
and retracing the empty steps
i've taken this spring
and trying to learn
tonight's lesson:
no more questions.
every mirror returns the same
gaping empty stare
that's been pasted
on my face since december '07
and the ensuing year
of trying to harvest
apples from trash heaps
through seasons when pieces of skin and resolve
flaked off and floated away
like ashes from a house fire:
almost recognizable through the grey, grey dust.
i could make a museum out of everything i've lost.
all of a sudden i am twenty years old
speaking in a slang that is not mine;
something inside me is misaligned
and i'd try to regain balance
if i could only find the time--
but instead, strange bodies find their way into my bed
and i can't help letting myself sink into their skin,
i'm so desperate for a form to lean against.
by day i stand, pale and spotted, nose to the wall,
hands tied while negotiating a plea bargain
with a god i've long forgotten--
i've never held a grudge quite so long.
i'm counting out my last few pennies
of perseverence,
wondering how long they'll last me before
i have to start begging,
grasping for anything i can possess.
i am not looking forward to this. |
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| iv. the sweet |
[Wednesday, May 13th, 2009; 12:42 pm] |
"should i go?" you asked.
i said no--
because i didn't want to be alone,
because things were still moving,
because of the way it felt to be in your arms.
i remember: you felt good,
and i only felt sane with a pen in my hand.
we fell asleep like twins that night,
covered in deep red sheets
coiled together under lights.
we woke up new and dirty.
it was hard to be apart
from you after that. |
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| at one |
[Thursday, February 5th, 2009; 01:12 pm] |
there is something magnetic that exists in our bodies,
a spectral lodestone of any possible charge
pulling us toward ourselves and our family
(i.e., every organism existing by and large)
in a hospital room
there is a white metal bed
and a plastic covered chair
a window with no curtain
(if you've got luck on your side)
and a table for one.
here you can understand
the meaning of isolation,
a tunnel with no end
in sight-- cavernous and thin,
but deep! and unthinkably clean.
here you may be reduced
to the sheer existence of
yr wholly mortal viscera
(growing and decaying in a
startlingly membranous paradox)
stripped clean of its
mucus, piss and shit,
its sanguine residues
aided by and pumped full of
noxious
sterile fluids.
this is what you do,
where you take your bodies to
realign and rejuvenate,
isolation in a Clorox cocoon
with only a television
and a tray of old food
for comfort--
what refinery have we run our lives through?
how can we commune
in the absence of couches
and colors and bookshelves
with others, with brothers
sisters, and ourselves!--
father, mother,
perhaps i was not sat on enough laps
as a child.
who destroyed the village that would raise me?
where can i go to be held? |
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| the thing about life is |
[Friday, December 5th, 2008; 04:51 pm] |
today i ate some amphetamines
and decided that meditation is really
just trying to get your mind to shut up for a second
and hypnosis is the same as focus
then i caught a lizard for the first time
since i was nine years old
and i think i traumatized it so much
that it fell asleep on my sweatshirt
nevertheless i sang it a song in a mangled cuban accent
which included the word "amphibian"
hey, did you know that jack kerouac
wrote on the road on dexedrine?
when i take my vitamins,
my piss turns bright yellow
and i always remember my dreams. |
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| yeeeeah biology |
[Tuesday, November 18th, 2008; 02:34 am] |
in a life kept tight like chromosomes,
each day may be a clone
of the one before it
if you're not careful
once i was very high and i asked god
to be my topoisomerase
cause i wanted to unwind
to spring out of stagnation
and into something like chromatin--
cause when you're all balled up
you can forget about a chain!
you're already a slave
to your everyday life,
shackled by routine
so always seek the random
living on the fringe of normal
entropy in every day
will make your path rhizomal |
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| eleven a.m. |
[Thursday, October 30th, 2008; 10:08 pm] |
the sky's the color
of an amphetamine hangover
in october--
an ostentatious blue
that won't stop buzzing,
bearing down hard
on your tender, still-swollen pupils
with its razorblade sunshine teeth
force-feeding you a heaping spoonful of truth
that you ain't quite ready to swallow
(but nothing really makes sense
the day after a night marked
by 150 milligrams of a heart cracked
wide open on fast forward
and all you could say was yes |
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| lundredi |
[Monday, October 13th, 2008; 08:21 pm] |
i sit naked and patient
waiting for kids
with rich daddies and mommies to
get their education
my body's their subject so
i sit real still
to keep my mind from atrophy
i try to tame it--
make up poems,
conjugate verbs i
learned earlier en français
nous allons, vous avez.
regardons! écoutez!
--sometimes i think about being
in bed
with a lover;
other times i listen to the
scratchscratchscratch of pastels
on expensive paper
(25 cents a sheet)and the
soft who!s of air
that fall out of their lips--
red dust flies everywhere.
you do this, you learn to
become engrossed in the shadows
of the wall you're facing,
how they stand, bold and proud.
connect the dots of pinholes.
make your own
constellations: the pyramid,
the benzene ring,
the lovers one thousand
miles apart.
in the professor's sketch
i am beautiful--
young and whole,
contemplating some grand mystery
of life. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sunday, October 12th, 2008; 08:11 pm] |
i was eight years old and she was twenty-two. it was 1997, years before either of us knew what a CBC was, what a bone marrow aspirate felt like, what it was like to lose an entire head of hair.
we went shopping at queens mall in jamaica. she waited, bored, while i tested out yo-yos and hula hoops at the toy store; i waited, bored, while she tried on clothes in dressing rooms. at one store i announced, loudly, that i wanted my breasts to look just like hers when i grew up: "they're so perky!" at another store she thought she'd lost me-- until she saw me posing in the front display, pretending to be a mannequin and gathering a crowd. that same day, i left my bag from claire's in one of the dressing rooms we were in. by the time we went back to look for it, someone had already taken it. we went back to claire's and she bought me another $32 worth of cheap sunglasses, glitter, and blue lipstick. i jumped off the escalator going down and landed on my hands and knees. at the candy store, i opened the latch on the tube full of chocolate candies to try one-- hundreds of malted milk balls spilled, bouncing and rolling across the floor. we came home at the end of the day, both exhausted and relieved.
back then i slept on a cot next to her bed when i stayed over. her hair was still brown. my hair was still straight. i watched her brush her teeth with her left hand and tried to do it like she did. i tried on her shoes, her shirts, her skirts, and they were big on me. when we went to get our nails done, i always picked the brightest colors.
that same summer, we were in astoria, on steinway street. a man sitting on a bench saw us walking by and asked her to marry him. as we walked past him, we considered it, discussing the possibilities: "we could have our honeymoon on the bench." "yeah, and you could have bench babies!" we laughed so hard our sides hurt. i looked at her and i thought to myself, when i grow up, i want to be just like her. |
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| bill |
[Monday, August 4th, 2008; 11:48 am] |
my stepfather threw magazines around the waiting room
when we waited four hours for our insurance to come
through on the day the doctors suggested leukemia
but he also cried when i made a speech on capitol hill
he curses my mother and me out sometimes
but he's taking me to see some siamese kittens
that live in the backyard of an old house
he told about how he held
one, blue-eyed and bobble-headed
in the palm of his hand
he might even let me bring one home
even though he's allergic |
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| (no subject) |
[Saturday, August 2nd, 2008; 05:13 pm] |
oh, what a bloody revolution!
this country is barren again,
the storms have come and gone,
and the moon looks down upon
the profound newness of our land
yeah, we cradled it, embraced the pain,
the feeling that can only come from
being scraped clean and rubbed raw,
purged of our excess means and might,
of these luxuries that cater
to unwanted specters,
those bearers of a tethered future.
we know what these riots are for. |
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| 577 elm street on a saturday morning (written april 2007) |
[Thursday, July 31st, 2008; 11:17 pm] |
i looked up at the curtain,
sun-aged white with
snowflake eyelets.
two little girls
in pleated sunshine
skirts.
morning-songs and cups
of coffee,
things your mom told you
in the kitchen over
pancakes. her
coffee, her cream, sugar
(two teaspoons, the spoons that
are smaller and not the tablespoon!)
the smell of lighter fluid on her hands,
tobacco on her jacket
coming in from the cold.
she is home,
she just got home.
she is home.
she is my home. |
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| don't know if this is done yet |
[Thursday, July 31st, 2008; 11:11 pm] |
crack me open and here's what you'll see--
dirt and paint-stains,
not-quite-black ink-stains,
daisy chains,
the remains of two decades
of freckles, tears,
and fistfuls of red hair.
sunlight swept up from the tile floor,
seeds that sprouted from the wet black earth.
a picture of my parents
in a locket i never wear;
condoms, first kisses,
shelves full of spices and dust,
maybe a couple of empty syringes.
not enough discipline
and too, too, too much trust.
there's rust on the hinges
of this open door
that never shuts
and lets
so
much
in. |
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| (no subject) |
[Wednesday, July 30th, 2008; 01:10 am] |
cada beso que me daba
parece como amanecer
siente como despertar
y saborea como la miel de un flor;
los guardo en un buzon
fabricado de nubes que queda
en las atrias
de mi corazon.
y cada vez que me ponga
inquieta o triste
paseo por mis venas
sobre ondas de sangre
hasta que pueda
acordar lo que me regalaste
antes de que fuiste. |
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| (no subject) |
[Friday, July 25th, 2008; 10:57 pm] |
we shared a dish that some call love
but then the sour overtook the sweet
which weighs more, feathers or lead?
well we had some wings but they grew heavy
still we dragged ourselves together down this path
till the stars all fell from up above
and crashed--
i don't know if they survived.
so if you see him by the sea
or in the forest among the trees
or maybe walking down the street
remind him that i'm a fan of sharp knives,
and that i do ninety on seventy five. |
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