Together

To Tether:

To (Twisted, tangled) tie tighter,

To trustingly, tenderly, truss.

The View from the Porch

You will say;

“oh but the subway shakes life so unpleasantly, I’m glad to be rid of it”

But from your porch, I see life stretch for in three directions

No spot uncluttered by man’s creation

People packed densely as wet sand

And the sun gently warms my face as I observe a real life street in New York City

And consider what it means to be a participant in all this

And when the day cools and the real sun is eclipsed by a halogen one

I feel the shine of the room on my back

The warmth of the soul you’ve invited me in to.

Even the sound of the subway has become a heartbeat to me

It whispers;

“You are here! This is now!  There are things worth celebrating!”

I thought I would be concerned, on starting this next step

Away from the comfort of your porch

You rest your head on my shoulder

My heart feels full and the corners of my mouth light

If I can’t see the road ahead for us it is only because

A light of such dazzling shines down it

That all I can see is happiness.

Event Horizon

I miss the apocalyptic approach of the horizon.

The hunger is the same, but I can’t muster the same impending sense of doom.  I could run straight at it and still never come close. An ending at this point would be nice.  I used to crave invisibility.  Now I know the beast will find me regardless, but without teeth.

The people who are closest to me all use the same word: accept.  Not as advice, as explanation.  Somehow I am both of these people; somehow I see both of them. 

There used to be a chart.  I had it for a minute, but it was important so I threw it away eventually.  The chart was a circle with arrows pointing helpfully.  I think there were on ramps and off ramps too, but I can’t exactly remember them, which is a terribly ham-fisted metaphor, but totally true.

Transition

A beautiful sunset ruins a perfectly shitty day
I never take pictures
When I’m with other people
My internal logic dictates that shared memory
Precludes a need for proof of existence
Here I am alone, though, and my camera emerges
To capture proof that I existed in this moment
In the future my existence will only be implied
The actor unseen on the stage of memory
I deceive my future
The transitory nature of my mood defeated by
 Capturing lasting beauty

Rant

Quickly close my eyes
I can’t bear this
I blink out of existence
Pictures, videos. Two dimensional images to impose myself upon
On a place that doesn’t exist
On a place that was a lie
But it wasn’t, I insist
And I push myself forward
And the pain is so real it burns from within
And I can hear laughter
And I can hear laughter
I can see everyone but me
I can see
I can watch them interact with everyone but me
They never touch me
I never speak
And my eyes burst open
To reality darker and empty
I shout desperately to justify myself.
The judges, bored with my absorption, drifted away years ago
Cant you see? No one gets me
Everyone else is crazy not to think this way
Everyone else is fooling themselves.
Either way, the walls of the asylum divide us.
I shut my eyes
The doors to the asylum close.

The Island

Where I'm from is hard wood floors and the color burnt sienna

and people that can tell the difference between burnt sienna and brown.

Where I'm from is loud for good reasons

and full of sunshine. always the sunshine.

Where I'm from has long bike rides and kickball

and the certainty, the unyielding potent knowledge that the future was bright

Where I'm from is an impossible ideal so built up in my head that my life will never hope to compare. Where did my parents find all those friends? Where did they find money for vacations, bikes, my short but intense obsession with the spanish-american war? My prose fails me; fear rules.

Where I'm from is concrete.

Where I'm going is sand.

For Nothing

Here is this puzzle piece.

See? I placed it correctly here.

A path that leads to an abyss is not a path at all

Stairs that fall away to nothing are not stairs.

Here is this ladder.

See? I've placed my foot upon the first rung.

I can't tell you where I'm going.

I can only show you where I've been.

The Greatest Love of All

I believe the children are the future
Is the motto of cowards
Too afraid to acknowledge that the future
requires a possessive pronoun

We effortlessly own our present
Even in dire circumstances
We oblivious masses feel free to make world shattering decisions
Using whatever whimsy we choose to employ

But when faced with future decisions we lose confidence
The infinite aspects of the future
Create a gaping maw, let’s let that be someone else’s problem
Maybe our children will own their future.

to take hold of suddenly or forcibly; to grasp

In middle school I did not have control of my life
I let others dictate my actions; thoughts
Puppet

He showed us dead poets society
That guy from Mork and Mindy
Putting words to my most secret yearnings

Now I control my universe
I own my failures
To make my successes more real.
I seized my life.

So why am I disappointed?
Because seizing the day is fucking impossible
The harder I grasp the quicker it slips away
Mork lied.

If I find a bag of gold coins
That turn out to be chocolate
Can I really be disappointed?

A Thought, In Passing

if while sick, sad, angry, frustrated, she still enchants me,

what else remains?

Opposite

What is the opposite of the tip of the tongue?
Buried beneath teeth, hidden harmlessly in the esophagus
Known but unwilling
Able but unaware

What is the opposite of being stuck in the back of the throat?
Hurled forward like javelins wobbling
Burdened objects midflight
Inaction meets unopposable force

The opposite of the nick of time is
Every other moment ever.
The opposite of beating a dead horse
Is a lot more complicated than bringing it back to life.

The Cheque Comes

As we creep closer to cliché:
I feel I must set straight some items on our tab.

Like the way I catch you looking at me
As we sit silently on the subway.
Or when we walk.
Or as I am absorbed in my plate of food.
And out of the corner of my eye I feel you
With a half-smile and photographic eyes.
Staring through my stupid serenity.
I must protest; my guard is not up around you.
You see my soul.

Like the laugh that tumbles
from your lips so frequently in my presence.
A noise so satisfying
That the ability to generate it
Is stupefying.

You ask me, sometimes:
(and I return the favor on occasion)
Doesn’t this or that scare me?
I tell you honestly:
When we are together nothing scares me
Except subway rats
And the perpetual danger of killer statues.

When we separate small doubts creep;
That scares me.
What spell have we cast that insulates my brain from fear?
The answer to that question lies in cliché:
And as I’ve said, there is a tab to be paid first.

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.