What Are You Thinking

The table’s candle can’t burn fiercely enough to illuminate us beyond what the lights show
You smile a sort of half smile and break our gaze
I fixate on the way that your cheek curves to your chin
The way that your neck flexes lightly as you blush

The words come quicker now
To spend time with you is to feel warmth emanate from within
Burst forth from the deepest part of my form
Making me sleepy, full, content

You are at the center of my mind
Like a bonfire
When I move away from you
From here, from now
It gets cold and dark.

Worth It

A neon-orange inflexible plastic ball repeatedly smacks into my face.
The spectacular moment directly before impact, where silence exists but for the crinkling of leaves under my tensing shoulders.
I prepare for launch again.
One orb in each hand

I exhale

My left arm shoots up, weaker, less accurate. The sphere rolls off of my fingertips and soars upwards.
I am perfectly still

I inhale

My right arm shoots up, full of fury. Unleashed from my palm, the ball barely grazes my outstretched fingers.
Though both headed in the same direction, the first ball must sense its doom. Though travelling upwards still, gravity insists on imposing on its flight, and it slows.
My arms have both crashed down to my sides, and I brace for impact, the electrifying crack the flying globes make when one pushes the other higher in midair.
The intensity of the moment is too much. I squeeze my eyes shut and listen.

The balls miss each other, their trajectories simply off, a fact that eludes me in my child-like anticipation.
The first ball lands harmlessly a few feet to my left.

I open my eyes.

I exhale.

The second ball hits me in the face.

I inhale.

I start over.

For You

I didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done
If I had never met you
This is who I am
This is how I’m happy

This is about you
But it isn’t for you
It isn’t for you

This wasn’t my plan
I was going to be in the city and single
and at peace
Ha
Peace

And now I replay every sentence I said
And I’ve already decided to hate how I acted
Yesterday I was the ideal boy
Today I’m clingy, insecure, too nice.
Today I trip over myself running from my feelings for you
Will you judge how quickly I turn back around
When you decide to call my name
I will.

Damn it.
This isn’t for you
But I’m writing it for you to see

A Year of Light

In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal. This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be further than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn't very far, so such signals are too minute to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born 600 light years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse

That quote is one of about 10,000 quotes from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I must have read the series of Hitchhiker books all together around 50 times or so, and every time I reach this passage it strikes me as something that would be true. That is to say, if space travel were something that was happening, this phenomenon would be all over the place. Douglas Adams, I concluded, must have been from space.

Now that I’m older I begin to understand that passage in a far different context.

Individual memories have always shifted in and out of my head – presently floats along bee stings while picking raspberries at our old house, and now meeting the teenage mutant ninja turtles when I was five. Each present-time stimulus dances around my sub-conscious, whirling rapidly until it finds a memory to connect to; that rock reminds me of my stitches in 7th grade, that lamp post of a house party in high school.

Now I find entire eras, entire genres of people, floating in and out. I’ve been a part of so many communities that it seems I can’t keep them all in my head simultaneously. NFTY, three summer camps, Public School, College, Salt Lake, Israel. Further sub divisions – oh these are my Boy Scout public school friends, these are my hiking Salt Lake friends.

I am not yet a quarter of a century old and some eras of my life seem poised precariously on the outskirts of my memory. I have a strict policy of only accepting facebook friend request from those I know personally, and yet my friend number sits at over 1500, a number that is at once both reassuring and daunting.

And that’s the crux of it, I suppose. Today is the anniversary of the death of a person who at one point existed within a community that solely owned my heart. At no point did that community relinquish its grasp of my heart, but slowly others grew within it, and that community, though still a part of who I am, no longer has full possession. That realization leaves me feeling…guilty. Almost as if it is a betrayal of my friend that what bound us at one point plays a lesser role now, less than ten years after the fact. If I intend to live a long and satisfactory life (and I do) then what do the states of my past relationships say about the future of my present ones?

There are some days where I feel like I am 600 light years away from my home.

May her memory be for a blessing, this year and every year.

The Plate's Purgatory

Isn’t the absolute emptiness of a perfectly clean plate too tantalizing to bear?

Indeed, a plate left out invites either quick use or storage, for what does one need with a left out plate?

They clutter the room, fill it, empty ideological calories in a reality-based culinary environment.

Such joy could fill the plate!

What concoction of hopes and toil, of admiration and courage, endurance and honesty will make this plate worthy of its ceramic throne?

This plate sits empty, poised precariously on the edge of the counter, throwing its entire soul at getting

Fed.

Loser

my memories frolic, just forward of my fingers, on the edge of oblivion.
i desperatly cling to them. each moment captured a small victory, a smile
but just as quickly they dart away

the world does not remember my daily actions,
my stolen glances, my quiet conversations under a willow, my fleeting friendships
my cliche existence
this is fair: there are many people, many more influential, active, Important
the world holds no obligation to me
as much as i might want it to.

so here we are
a war wages on
a war that i will lose
i wave a white flag, sobbing,
"can't you leave me with just a few tattered remnants, things for me to hold on to?"

time marches on.
i must make new memories
to replace my fallen soldiers
to buttress my sanity

Albany

If I close my eyes I can smell your detergent.
I can't ever find that brand.
My laundry never smells as good.

What the fuck is honesty
Seriously though
Who knows me?

Happiness is being terrified?
Big leaps, I suppose
That’s why they invented hanging roller coasters, I suppose

I would like to work at a gas station
And sip tea
And disappear completely.

I am the prison warden.
The inmates don’t run the asylum anymore.
There is a certain sadness to that.

The Lilacs Will Bloom Again

It's not fashionable to love this city. Not in winter.
New York you love, or you dream of Miami and LA;
Here you languish in roadside snow,
Resentfully bundled against the sharpness of the air.
Well.
I was a toddler here, in a little house on Vick Park A,
Before we moved to a quiet suburb to escape the bad schools,
The crime rate,
The busy street. And although my vowels never learned
The local flatness - in spite of the fact that
I have never seen a garbage plate - I am a son
Of these cold buildings and salt-veiled streets.
I have fallen in snowdrifts at Mount Hope Cemetery,
Clutching a camera spun with Kodak film,
On my way to photograph Susan B. Anthony's
Flag-spiked grave, and twice
I've donned glitter and white sweatpants
And glitter
To sing as a snowflake
In the Eastman School of Music's Nutcracker Ballet.
It's not love I feel for Rochester, nor shame,
But a kind of fierceness - even in January -
An unexpected loyalty or faith.

Tomorrow

Light finds an ecstatic stench
Beautiful Ruckus
Shadows ring the joy
Outside is only Darkness
Darkness extending in four dimensions

arms flail wildly
searching for bodies
for light, for heat
hoarding

The doors will open
the lights will go out
it's always the same

7 Attempts

I.

I used to tell the story of our first kiss as black comedy

But now I just say “who even remembers?”

II.

Your guard was up

I should have sensed

We cried and giggled in the darkness

And I should have seen it

You were safe

So fucking safe

I kept your reading

Its so fucking trite now I want to laugh at you

But there are tear stains on it.

And the top of the stairs in front of everyone.

And my cheeks red

And I should have seen it coming.

III.

Mortified by our act, I flaunted you

Which was more insulting, the revulsion I aimed at you, or that which I aimed at myself?

IV.

Sanctuary stairs wells and Basement Floors

How did you do it?

Even now I marvel at you. From my elder vantage point every action of yours was pure.

You toiled against me, against my insecurities. You pedaled hard beneath it.

I remember the color of wood on the kitchen table

And the cover of the the book you read your brother

And the corner of bathhurst and blore. And the apartment on 17^th and dupont. And buying cookies with you. And the way you felt when you hugged me for the last time.

In my dreams I write you a note telling you that I loved you the most.

In my dreams, you don’t remember who I am.

V.

“It was never you, it was me.” I say in passing

And you are too nice to reply sarcastically.

VI.

I was like a kid in a pet store.

But you were the Dog and I was the chew toy.

I would have followed you anywhere

Even after you spit me out.

VII.

You’ve shown me my weaknesses

And I hate you for it.

I’ve already ended it in my head

But if I let you fail

Is it possible to succeed?

Five Fourteen

If ever anything innovative entered our imagination

Dizzying displays of darkness daring to delve deep within us

Would we wrestle within it?

New is nervous. New never knows.

And anyway all anyone answers is always

“So? Someone sooner said something sillier, sexier, smarter”

Life loses luster learning limitations

Yet you yearn

Break Bonds! Be Big! Bully boring beyond its bounds!

Dull dies during displays of daring

Fortune favors the fearless, fun follows the free

Reforming regrets, we resolve:

We will wonder wider, wish wisely, warmly welcome all.