manifesto II

Dogs > people.

Samara Key

Sugar maple seeds spiraled groundward, pelting
the sidewalk, each landing haphazardly
across our path. It was spring and I was
feeling better, if only for the stupid
seeds, their dizzy descent
toward a dizzier world.
I wanted to shake loose from what I knew.
I wanted to learn how
to leave what I love most.

.philadelphia.2.

Like a hot shower, home-cooked dinner with new friends steams up the glass; you'll never see us not peering back out.

.philadelphia.

Another Chinatown (the same Vietnamese cafe across town) has me convinced that pieces of cities are now following in our wake, a toilet paper past tucked unknowingly into the back of my pants.

.new.london.

All the hispanic children on the pier, so ready to race you, cover their ears when the train arrives.

.cape.cod.

From the catwalks above, all our actors' skulls are crosshairs, waiting for the lightning.

.boston.

The roads here, like our crisscrossing emotions, have never been tamed.

i owe y'all some decent blog posts...when i get a chance.

.manhattan.

Inside concrete tunnels, you are oxygen, being carried into the heart of this city.

.butterfingers.

You like to throw your weight around, but I can't ever catch it.

jesus!

after this week, i'm never gonna want to tattoo again!

afternoon

felt like august only
it was april. you shed
your clothes like
a good tease, one layer
at a time. summer
sweat on your skin.
all we had was time
to give each other,
these few hours
in a room full of
the sun's glare,
and nothing else
mattered.

.these.bristly.legs.

These bristly mosquito legs, finally shaved free of your bloodsucking buzz, always around my ears.

.fans.aplenty.

All these fans, we're just pushing hot air around us. And you can hear the spinning coming from the ceilings, the windows, the whirlpool where your heart should be. You can hear the windmills making the wind, hoping to attract themselves a little chivalry.
All this hot air rushing around us, gushing out the windows, and hopefully taking with them the stale emotions, still lingering, like a flirtatious glance.

the pursuit of happiness

you are more work than worth.
fool's gold.

.dr.light.needs.right.to.win.again.

All you bitches come to my show on Sunday.

And afterwards, I'm taking a 10 day vacation, but I'll be trying to update everyday with a cheesy dark line, unless I think of something better.
You get a sampler today:

Who knew this picture was a jigsaw puzzle, so ready to fall to pieces?

.always.hungry.

If I could swallow the world, I would keep it in my gut. I would lock it all down, a collapsing star shaking off its last lights like iridescent sweat.
And then I would vomit it all back up, everything dissolved into unprocessed acidic bile. I will pick through the bits for small chunks of you, and I will read gastrointestinal fortunes as if they were tea leaves in your grandmother's cup.
I will consume my past with ravenous hypotheticals. I will loosen a notch of my nostalgic future, the belt of expectations that ties it all down.
And all the time, I am hungry. I am full. Unsatiated.

Your Room and Everything In It*

stay home today--I want you
in your most natural state.

and let me undo all the hard work
your clothes perform.

this can be a secret,
our chaos marked by

the unmade bed and a song
that keeps skipping.

when your mouth moves over me
my skin burns for you.

I wanted you closer, I
don't know how else to tell you.












*I kinda stole this title from Jon Chopan's piece, "This Room and Everything In It."

.knight's.tour.

why do we purchase one-way tickets back home?
an errant knight's tour come back around
jumping over black and white squares
blending all together into familiar grey sidewalk slabs

Remaining Separate from What One Loves Deeply*

Don't believe me
if I'm cold, far
as the moon from you.

I wanted your love
but I'd only ruin it.






*line from Louise Gluck's poem, "Telemachus' Guilt."

.topless.bridemaids.

One of these days, I will marry you, and we will ride your scooter into the sunset.

in a rage

i hate when my house is filled with children. go home!

.constellations.

I used to see the stars all the time. Or at the very least, on a regular basis. And I don't just mean spotting a few every night; I'm talking about seeing all the stars. Every last pinprick hole in the night dome. As if we were all being suspended upside down in celestial sieve, waiting for bits of heaven to trickle in.
There was less light pollution over there. Light still remembered to say its goodbyes and disperse come evening, retiring for the night. Nowadays, it lingers around into the still hours of the night, like the smokey haze of teenage smokers. Your eyes can't really help but cough.

Alcohol was illegal, so most of the parents would distill their own wine in their closets at home. When it was finally ready, they would get all the families together and head for the dunes, the vast sandy skin that covered the Arabian peninsula. It was a great chance to try out their homebrews, which I understand were always rather foul. Some of the adults had simply snuck beers back in from Bahrain. We didn't really care. It was a great chance to get away from any remnants of life. The closest structure was a radio tower miles away.
And invariably, after the adults set up camp, the rest of teenagers would set off to establish our own sub-camp, usually a ten minute walk away, and generally over a dune. In our isolation, we were neither children or adults, and our self-imposed exile was maybe a stab at self-determination, punctuated by our brief return to the main camp for food and lighter fluid.
And that was really one of the other great things about being out in the desert: creating our own bonfire. We could get by without the rules of thumbs and the watchful eye of Smokey the Bear, because after all, we weren't going to burn down the desert, eh?
Our flames stabbed upwards, as if the light were trying to force itself back into the sky. And as fires burned after the sun sank beneath the sands, we would lie down on a blanket or towel, four of us astride, and stare upwards at the stars. I used to be able to point out far more constellations, even creating a few of our own.
Once in a while, someone would get up and feed the fire more palm fronds and newspapers, as if in the darkness of the extinguished sun, we were burning up the world, and everyone reportable in it, to keep ourselves warm.

constellation love poem*

i trace you, freckle
to freckle, connect
each scar with my
fingertip.
my nightsky,
always above me.



*thank you, Mike's post, for the title

.with.balls.

I spent a good part of my shift at work today ogling cyclocross bikes that I want to buy. One time, a coworker of mine gave an excellent description of what a cyclocross bike is: a road bike with balls. Maybe all those picky customers that demand fast, but comfortable, bikes that can be taken off the road had some effect on bike production after all.
In any case, it really would just be a matter of switching out tires: throw some slick 700 x 23s on those wheels instead of the knobby 32s and I've got myself a road bike, albeit a slightly heavier one, with a shifted-down gearing range.

Life should be so easy.
I could switch out some shoes and step outside.
I could win a race. I could be a me with some balls.

the rain

the rain started slow. i kept the window
open, listening to the water hit
the sidewalk. sounded like
pebbles plinking down, manic.

we were fighting again
so all my bitterness
turned the rain into a prophesy.

look: this is why
we wouldn't last.

your love is a dark cloud.
and all that wind is just
me, howling.

it seemed better to leave you than
to stay long enough for you to disappoint me.
how could you not?

I could feel the rain,
it started in my bones.

.diagonals.

With the bed
to myself, I
attempt to sleep on
one side of it
anyway,
contemplating whether
I tend to occupy
the left or right
side of the bed
more often
I wake up,
finding myself
sleeping at a diagonal,
bisecting the mattress
from corner to corner.
Filling your space and mine.

Calumet

I took the brick-paved road to Calumet
where the stone church always looks empty,
even in daylight, that lonely red door
like your starburnt eye.

Who keeps You company these days?
And is it enough?

I sat on the steps, deciding where to go
while the sun fell lower in the sky.
If I find you, I'll tell you
what I really think of this place
that feels like hollow ground
everywhere I am.

.the.great.golf.course.sham.

Going to a boarding school, I lived with relentless parietal rules, which, for the most part didn't bother me, since I wasn't getting any for most of the time. There were all sorts of tactics around it, and everyone knew them all. Some people just knew better than others which were legends, and what was strategm.

My friend Charlie and I spent an evening walking around the campus golf course, searching for couples in compromising positions. That was the sexual hot spot on campus, allegedly, the lover's lookout. Needless to say, we found no one. Was everyone perceptive enough, devious enough, to avoid detection? Were we not being thorough enough? Or was it all a ruse?
Most people, I think, ended up just breaking parietals, sneaking themselves up to dorm rooms and hoping for the best. And truth be told, the duty masters didn't really end up being all too investigative most of the time. I mean, maybe they saw it from our perspective, as an isolated population of teenagers living in dorms. Maybe they had sympathy. Maybe they realized how futile it would have been.
There were cases, of course, where the administration did have to crack down and lay down the law. It was generally once a year. The most vivid memory was my last year, in which a pair of students had secretly installed a webcam in a dorm-mate's room, and when said dorm-mate snuck his girlfriend upstairs, the hankypanky was captured on film. A fifth person ended up ratting out the two filmographers out of his "good conscience". We all suspected ulterior motives of furthering his house-political profile.
All parties were busted: the filmographers, and the lusty lovers. Lawyers were called in. Students were kicked out and reprimanded. Administrative emails from the Dean of Students most likely still linger in a few people's inboxes, gathering mildew, and decomposing into the ether of the internet. Nobody I know of ever saw the video.

I, myself, did have occasion, during a less than well-remembered relationship, to experiment with breaking parietals and doing afterdark explorations of campus. I had my fair share of close calls and times being caught red-handed. Nothing nearly as spectacular as any of the aforementioned scenarios, but a learning experience nonetheless. Perhaps one of the more important lessons learned by a majority of the student population there.
And you can imagine how bizarre it was to go to college, living on campus, and finding that for the most part, nobody really gave a shit what you did or where. Roommates being caught became the stuff of college comedy, commonly commanding it's own code of ettiquette. Did it demystify and deromanticize the entire experience of slinking around a dark campus? of sneaking around rooms with doors considerably less than 90 degrees ajar?
Don't ask me. I certainly wasn't getting any my freshman year.
But for a moment last night, I felt that old knowledge come back to me: the mental notes of which buildings were open late, how to sneak around dark hallways into even darker classrooms, how to lay low when we heard the sweeping of the janitor in the hallway outside, singing a song to herself.

unfinished

rain pecks the window
like an angry bird. the fog
of breath on glass, the blinds pulled up
so the neighbors could see.
somewhere, a siren howls down the wet street.
i undress in daylight.
i pull you by the collar so
you know: this is all my heat
against you.

.blue.room.

My mom put me on the swim team for 8 long years of my life, under the guidance of an Egyptian coach. And he surely knew his stuff, since we had heard some fluff that him and his wife had almost qualified for the Egyptian Olympics team in the past. Their children certainly were part dolphins, we wagered, slipping through the water all the way to the regionals, nationals, and junior olympics. The rest of us were jellyfish, littering the pools like plastic bags.
And what made it all the worse, was that the pool we practised in was a 50 meter pool, rather than the standard 25 meter one that we swam at the meets. The distances we swam were the same, but without that extra flip turn and push every 25 meters, we found ourselves in the middle of the pool.
I used to imagine what I'd do if I suddenly saw a shark materialize in the deep end, slowly swimming over from the diving end of the pool. Nevermind the chlorine content: this was the special shark, bred to punish boys that grabbed onto the lane dividers during the backstroke. And most of the time, I found that I wanted to sink down to the bottom of that pool and just sit on the bottom forever, shark or no shark. It was an empty and silent place.
And then I would hear my coach, yelling at the top of his lungs as we approached either side of the pool. Yelling at us to pull harder, swim faster. He had quite a voice on him, that Egyptian, and we could hear him 5 meters away and half underwater. In all likelihood, we probably did pull harder and swim faster as we approached him, if only so we could turn around and swim away from him sooner.
I haven't swam in a while now, having a brief stint with laps at the rec centre pool with a friend that was trying to get in shape. I tend to either feel that I'm just standing in water being cold, or that I feel compelled to swim all the laps that my body can't keep up with anymore. Nevertheless, I'd love to take that 11 kilometer bike ride out to the quarry this summer with some friends and maybe float around for a bit. Or maybe sneak into the Canterbury pool and hot tub late at night. There's no pressure to pull harder anymore, of course, but there's always that moment, after having jumped in, when I'm once again alone in that underwater room, stuck between a shark and an Egyptian.

.by.the.side.of.the.pool.

boys will be boys.
growing up as one is what you'd expect:
dirt and grass and melted action figures,
ninja turtles and x-men grimacing
with blackened faces and cracked shells
it was a surprise we ever got new toys at all
nothing belongs
to little boys
everything is taken

Vigil

I waited by the window all day.
Streetlights came on, halos
full of moths. Even then
I stayed.

I see no reason to grieve--I've got
this grey world for that.
And if you come home
I'll have kept room for you
where my sadness should have been.

.button.eyes.

She likes boys!

the O.C.

I need to be rich, I've decided.
I wasn't born with good taste for nothing.

.chasing.street.lights.

wet roads
and slick tires
make stopping that much harder
but at
1:30
in the morning
there's not much reason to

.death.under.the.lights.

and when you
are old enough, you
can play at those
old characters, one
tragic death after
another

when the director finally yells
"Cut!"
you'll sit up miraculously
healed, and pushing aside
hospital sheets, no longer
heavy like stones

meadow

the fog rising from the tall grass
is not like the cold breath of god.
and the morning sun behind it
is just yellow yolk. no
romance in how
it feathers the clouds above me.
but i do remember this:
if i love you is not enough then
nothing is.

.fingertips.

these days, i'm never sure whether my fingertips are black from dirty guitar strings, or bike grease

and whether a new hole will wear through my jeans in the knees or seat

whether my scabs will scar, like ghosts of an injury

the signs of usage creeping over my body
when i'm broken, i can be discarded
like an old chain holding onto its links
with broken fingers

mansfield

not as entertaining as the name would imply, a field
of men. or a man's field

filled with what, tomato vines? and maybe
the men run barefoot through

the fruit. they make
paste.

.virtual.memory.

With regards to first shows always kind of sucking, I would like to say, Thank god for the computer.

April

I've spent all my money--is it
the end of the month yet? I never leave
the house anymore. All I need is the dust
caught in sunlight, morning
pouring through the blinds.
In the alley, a dog barks at a man
who yells to the trees.
What were we doing here anyway
other than getting by?

.ivy.over.brick.

Remember that time when you were feeling lonely and out of it? First year at grad school, I think it was, because we were all still around, rooted to the porch and doomed to be townies, but you were making something of yourself. We were pretty proud of you.
But you still called one of us every day, and talked about how you were stranded in assfuck nowhere, and we told you to be quiet, because you were living in downtown Montreal, and that was a hell of a lot more interesting than our one-road town. We missed you as much as you missed us.
So I hope you remember that tape we made for you that one time: the one where we played an old record of 80's one hit wonders in the living room. You know, all those bands that eschewed "The" and any more than one word for a name. And they must have known something, naming themselves after all sorts of geographical locations: Africa, Kansas, Boston. Hell, there was even Journey. You can't top the epicness of that era, and maybe that cheesiness is what made it so appropriate after we had our cheese and wine dinner without you.
And if you dig that tape up, I think we'd all like to listen to it when you come back for the holiday, because we were all too drunk to remember us gathered around the living room on rugs and chairs, squeezing cats and all of us singing at the top of our lungs to those brilliant retarded songs. We knew all the words, and every last sax solo, and lord knows our voices probably ended up drowning out the actual record.

Yeah, we should definitely listen to it when you come back, before newer technology creeps by us like ivy over brick. Before we lose the ability to hear ourselves at all.

Scavenger

There is no other way to say it-- I'll
have to be quiet now.

How we lived like wolves, miserable
for each other, desperate.

Where does love go when finished?
Under the moonlight, half-starved--

you were enough for you.
I'll scavenge for your scent

on my pillow, I'll take

what I can get.

.backyard.treasure.

It seems silly to even talk about it, but I have the recurring story of how my uncle Thomas decided to go his grave early, following the death of my Aunt Tilda. It wasn't as if he had a death wish. No, no, he just had it up to here with life above the ground, as if the sun and stars were the hands of a clock ticking away without a snooze button.
Uncle Thomas had been a carpenter by trade, so he spent a month or so designing his coffin, embellishing it with the standard decor one saw in his living room. And in fact, there were several items that were from his living room: sawed off lamps, his small television, the hideous upholstery that Aunt Tilda had knitted one Easter.
There was a huge yard sale after Uncle Thomas had finished his coffin, wherein he sold the rest of the house and its belongings. Remember how I said one day I'll be able to carry everything I own on my back and move from town to town without a worry? he said to us. Well, it's like that, only I don't want to move anywhere anymore, so I'm just making my house as small as I can make it. Which, in the end, turned out to be the size of small camper. What the hell is this, Tom? A horse coffin? my dad joked. But in his voice, I noticed a roughness like the unsanded wood that Uncle Thomas had been working with. Nothing a few cans of beer wouldn't polish off over a barbecue.
And that was my Uncle Thomas's funeral: nothing more than a large family barbecue, with his friends showing up for the free hot dogs and beer. Us kids knew no better, and ran around poking each other with sticks and climbing trees like we always did, until Uncle Thomas shot off some fireworks to get our attention. Hear hear! Let's bow our heads! And nobody did, of course, but the parents and grown ups all went around and said a little phrase about their favourite memories of Uncle Thomas, which I suspect was just to humour him. My mom wanted nothing to do with it, though, and told him flat out that he was going to be back inside in a week to watch the Lakers game with some Cheetos.
So she wasn't even outside when my Uncle Thomas saluted and climbed into his giant coffin, which he referred to as his Viking longboat, which he had somehow lowered into a giant hole he had dug out in his backyard. My dad joked about the duck and cover drills from their childhood, and that his coffin looked more like a fallout shelter. Do you really want to do this Tom?
But my Uncle Thomas was dead already, so he didn't answer. He just climbed down into his coffin, and expected us to pile the dirt on after him. None of the grown ups wanted to do it, so us kids made a game of it, pretending we were pirates hiding treasure, or squirrels storing away food, or anti-paleontologists, protecting the sacred remains of the long lost dinosaurs.
Anyway, that was the last time we really saw my Uncle Thomas. We talked to him sometimes when we were in his backyard (it was part of a short cut to the creek) and stopped for a while, and one time, we even managed to slide a can of beer to him from above ground, but that hole has long since filled up with dirt.
After a while, we stopped hearing from him altogether. Maybe he finally died down there. Either way, he left the world and all of us long ago, and sometimes, I can't blame him. I think about looking for that treasure map once in a while, and digging my way out of this life.

The Evening I Nearly Forgot You

I turned off the light and listened to the dogs
downstairs, their chorus of yowls.

I was getting used to being alone, reacquainting
myself with the sounds the house makes

when you're not here. The furnace kicks on, angry.
The neighbor's heavy footsteps on the other side

of a too-thin wall. I wanted these sounds
for company. I wanted my loneliness

to fill me entirely, make me
another woman, someone you couldn't love

not even if you tried.

thick be the tension

in this house. how many more months until I move?

.bristly.

I've been trying to learn a Thao song that involves hitting the strings with a toothbrush.
That is all.

nothing good

I'm in one of those moods when I think everything I write has been crap & will always be crap. How to shake it, how to shake it?

.moped.

Music always seems to find you at the perfect time. Or is it that you happen to latch onto whatever it is that seeps into your earholes at that moment? Either way, it always feels a little bit like predestination, even for the most non-fatalistic cynic of us.

So the rejections start rolling in, and I realize that my escape to Canada is being delayed by at least a year: a year to replan, rescheme, and work my ass off in a graduate program to reapply for the Ph.D program.
Orchestrating the mad dash to figure out how I'm going to afford Chicago next year is Thao Nguyen's solo album, which I finally managed to get a hold of, and the last track, Moped, is definitely a winner!
So is the rest of the album of course.

And hey, whatever, Chicago, and the University of Chicago for that matter, are by no means terrible places to be.
A year to plan.
A year to scheme.
A year to crank out a thesis.

.a.flock.of.aprils.

Has it occurred to you to check those headlines from April Fool's? Double check? Suppose that among the batch, there were a real one, hiding like a wolf.
It is the story that managed to push itself out of the membrane of impossibility into reality.
The ultimate joke is in its sincerity.
Nothing's funnier than confessionals.

grooming

the children study you, the morning ritual
of putting on your face. notice
the flesh-tone flecks falling on your robe
when dabbing the nose. see
your British plainness subside to cat-eyed
valentine. they learn:
to lure a man means
claret lips.

.before.semaphore.

Not everyone speaks semaphore, you know. And even fewer people knew and understood it before it was invented.
Two wooden crates set course, sailing off over the vast expanse of the Atlantic's belly, which always rumbles its malcontents deep below. Two buckets of hopeful eyes and restless hands arm in arm across the ocean blue. The year is something or other and two.

Five months to live as a small island, and the entire time, we were staring across the water at our brethren, sloshing ahead just further than we can throw our voices, which were plucked up by seagulls and whisked away to intricate migration patterns, weaving across the planet like lace.
Oh, we tried messages in bottles, but they had a habit of falling quite short of their intended targets. Come to think of it, we fancied afterwards that we had invented the whole notion of setting messages afloat in bottles.
And the one time my brother managed to fling his bottle clear across the gap and over the rail of our kindred ship, it crashed down not on the deck, but rather on the crown of the Gypsy's skull. By all means we were surprised it didn't knock him unconscious, but instead, we watched as he flew into a frenzy, setting countless exotic curses aflight on the wings of the gulls before he finally wagged the bottle in his hand and broke it against the rail and discarded the remains into the sea.
The last time we flung a bottle off our decks was not even to send message, believe it or not. Rather, the ship priest had been growing steadily more restless with each passing days, and had taken by the second week aboard to patrolling where he could, chastising everyone on their vices. As ship chaperone, he was notorious for scolding the children, interrupted intermittently only by his pauses to vomit over the side of the ship.
Halfway into our trip, when we crossed the line between departure and arrival, the priest finally went mad and poked holes in all the barrels of grog we had underneath. He was promptly chased out of the galleys by the furious cooks, but not before he had grabbed hold of one of the captain's private wine selections.
He emerged on the poop deck brandishing the bottle like a demon yelling at the top of his lungs about the sins of alcohol, which we inferred to mean the act of wielding a fine wine rather than sipping it over salted fish and biscuits. As the cook emerged behind him with a cleaver, his face as red as the wine in the priest's hands, the priest yelped and ran over to the side rail and flung the bottle as best as he could at the curious faces aboard our sister ship.
The bottle didn't make it even halfway, of course, and the priest was himself half over the side rail when he was gently bumped from behind by a young girl who had her doll taken away from her three days ago and flung over the side of the ship by the mad priest, who had then lashed her viciously for carrying pagan idols around so brazenly.
We looked at each other and remarked at how clumsy the priest was to have tripped over his robes as such.
After the whole incident, the captain ordered a meeting with the entire crew and passenger constituency of the ship and told us that was the end of flinging bottles overboard for whatever reason.

So for the second half of our voyage, as we drifted closer towards arrival, we simply sat on the deck with our legs passing through the side rail and stared across the gap towards our friends and family aboard their parallel journeys. We waved once in a while, and if the ships drifted close enough to each other, we could make out smiles.
We tried signing with our hands during those moments.
Julie had her baby? Oh my!
George secretly stockpiling salted herring? No!
The first mate was caught with Walter's wife? You don't say!
Julie's baby died and was thrown overboard? That's too bad.

But really, we had no idea, and those were only our best guesses at what was happening aboard their ship. I suspect that we were really just trying to understand our own ship's madness, in all its ribaldry and rancour, its miseries and majesties. We could only expect that they were experiencing it all the same, but we could never know.
So we just swung our legs, let the briny sea spray cool the space between our toes, and stared across the water at the other ship, or the horizon, or the stars; and should any of them drift close enough, we would smile and wave.

short histories

I.
What can I tell you about
the arbitrary lines between us?
We were in love
and then we were not:
Here is you and here is me.
But see in the road
how quickly the deer goes
from dead in one county
to dead in another.

II.
Southbound, you say,
We must be in bumfuck. Look
how all the stars are out.
Only trees and highway and now
the distance between us.

III.
Leaving you was a task like anything
else. I'd chart
your imperfections, I'd navigate
my narrow heart.

.chance.of.puddles.

umbrella in hand
crispy new rain jacket
(doubles as a windbreaker)
full fenders on
your bike - not
to be used, of course,
with the umbrella
concomitantly

and the rain never came
although the wind
wooshed on by
you, doubtless,
felt a little stupid in
your unweathered armour
your pale skin
aching for a little sun
but you let them
stare out from the corners
of their fashionably
racoon-painted eyes,
sloshing and splashing
through the criticism
with your galoshes

you are ready
to take on the world

.old.world.arumble.

If we should lose power tonight, remember the storm overhead. The ancient gods of old worlds and dilapidated peoples rumbling overhead in thunderous discontent. And hey, who wouldn't be? Forgotten and tamed by science, in all your enormous entirety.

It must feel like being a genie,
crammed back inside the
lantern of neglect
granting not
wishes, but shallow skin
deep warmth, enough
to smoothen goosebumps

So if the power goes out tonight, perhaps the sky will once again be visible, and we can pay heed to the cantankerous chatterboxes overhead, nostalgic for the old days,
when the world
and all that is in it
was still huge,
stretching beyond our trusted horizons.

promise

i can see myself anytime, but you
are another thing altogether.
when you left on business, extravagant
China, then Germany, then anywhere
that wasn't home, i thought
i'd never see you again, that
those cut-glass eyes
had seen something better.

heavy boots

when you kiss me on the cheek
again when you

said you wouldn't
remember this:

the room as it seemed
to move around you
the lightburst before
the bulb blew out

and us
alone, lonely together

in the dark

and all your heat
surrounding me.

.skink.

I bought a new light today for my bike: a front one. My old one was being rather dim and dim-witted - or should I say watted? And out of frustration, I commented, perhaps a little too loudly a day or two ago that I planned on replacing it with a bigger, brighter light.
I suspect it heard me and began to behave itself.
Alas, I bought a new light today.

Maybe in time I'll be able to buy a bigger, brighter back light to match it (no doubt my current back light is having tinges of ominous fortunes), but for now, at least oncoming traffic will see me, flying towards them, screaming into their eyes, Hey, I belong here too.

every man

what was the point
anyway?

to prove
you could break

me down like every
other man

unlucky
enough to love you?

.head.full.of.cursive.

I was still young when my grandmother got cancer. Too young, even, to really grasp the concept of cancer to a certain degree. Everyone talked sedately about a body turning on itself, but I as a pre-teen going on to teenage girl, my body was already betraying me in every way imaginable. Bodies are slippery things.

When I first discovered the clumps of hair all over the shower, I thought it was my own. I asked over dinner that night if it were possible for someone my age, hypothetically, to get grey hairs. My mother looked at my grandmother briefly and dismissed it awkwardly.
My grandmother sighed and admitted it was her hair, and that she had been losing it due to the chemotherapy. I told her she should be more careful about not leaving her hair everywhere in the shower, since it was pretty gross, and I certainly didn't want to have to be the person to clean it up. She laughed and said she'd try harder.

It wasn't much use, I guess, because the hair didn't really go away so much as accumulate in greater quantities on the walls, in the drain, on the curtain, behind the conditioner bottles. I had given up on the bar of soap for liquid soap.
It finally got to be too much for me and I confronted her again about it, and after a moment, she confessed to me that she was actually remembering things with each hair that fell out, plastering it to the curtains and walls like unwound cursive narratives.
Bullshit, grandma.
You don't believe me. The far wall is dedicated to faces I've remembered.
That's still gross.

But I looked the next time I took a shower, and strangely enough, I thought I did see something or a second on the wall, scrawled in hair. I couldn't make anything of it, but there looked like a certain order to it.
Unnerved, I splashed it off the wall with some water.
Over the next few days, weeks, months, I started to see letters, then words and finally, faces. I started to think that I had gone crazy myself, and that my eyes had started to betray me like my thighs.
I kept it to myself.
And then one day, I swore I saw my own face on the far wall, and couldn't help but ask my grandmother about it.
It's the day you were born, honey.
But I didn't look like that when I was born!
People aren't always born on their birthdays. I remember when you swam into the deep end of the rec center pool for the first time. You were born as a new person the second you pulled yourself out of the water that day.
Whatever grandma.

When she died a few months afterwards, it hit me harder than I had thought it would. I skipped school for a week and a half.
I finally shaved my head in solidarity and went back to class to take a math quiz I had missed. It was last period, and I went home again right afterwards.

You would think that the whole experience would have made me better about my own self-diagnosis, but I never adhered to much my entire life: diets, going to the gym, learning the guitar. The body is a slippery thing.
Cancer set up camp in my left breast last month sometime, and I'm not really sure what's going to happen from here on out. Maybe they'll have to carve out a piece of my body, like a sacrifice to itself. I'm supposed to start chemo next week, though.
I started thinking about my grandmother again, and her hair all over the shower. Who knows if she really wrote stories on the walls, or if she was just leaning her head against it in exhaustion and resignation. She certainly made no show of it, and convinced me until the end that she was going to make it, that she was going to finally write down all those stories she had been pasting onto the shower walls.
I thought about my own $140 haircut, and the tales it would unwind into, as I started losing my own hair. I hoped they'd be as strong as whatever stories my grandmother was writing in her head at the time.

Instead, I bought a razor and shaved my head that night, shearing the Gorgonic snakes from my scalp, and any petrifying power they still had over me.

.gateway.sex.

I realized I'm dating you because you're bisexual, and that's as close to dating a lesbian I will ever get.

momento

one night
i'll come home and see

how empty
the house can be

when you're around,
your bad juju in the air

like burnt coffee.
you will shave your hair

in the kitchen, each chunk
for the time you've wasted here,

you'll say, with me.

.the.year.after.

My first real weekend starts tomorrow. That is to say, it's hard to have a weekend without a week to end, and it's hard to have a week at all when I'm coasting through the days on my bum.
But now that I've been granted the structure of employment, that has yet to become droll, I suppose my days are starting to snap back into their subdivisions.
And as I wait to hear back from U of Toronto, I'm trying to do likewise with my mind: pick up the garbage, separate the recycling, sweep the dust out the door, and get tidy up for the year after.
It's nice to think we have plans.

home again

and nothing to do until the fall.

.remember.me.

One of these days, clicking "Remember me" on these websites will mean something. Like a pet, perhaps, running to the door, wagging its tail, swishing its whiskers. Excitment is an intangible odor in the air, settling on your hairs like dew.
Maybe it's just hungry. Feed me a password! it says.
And so you do.
But maybe one day beyond that day, it will remember you, and the torrent of memories washing up in your wake. It will be filled with excitement and relief, anticipation and nostalgia.

Remember me. Just as I remember you, something more than an automaton. Something less than love.

.sleeper.law.

Have you heard of the new law to be implemented? Call it censorship if you will, but the legislatives maintain that it is merely a formality for dealing with criticism. Pardon if I forget the wording, but it goes something along the lines of

"
So and so mandates that should this or that person should criticize this law, aforementioned this or that person shall be in some manner repulsive to humanity be put to death.
"

As far as odd laws go, this one will most likely take the cake. It acts brutally only upon those that criticize its very barbaric nature, but leaves all else alone.
Perhaps we are being taught a lesson to sit down and shut up, accepting laws as they come by.
After all, if you don't acknowledge the brutality of the new law, it can't possibly harm you. Rather, we must tiptoe around the one gruesome law in this civil society, like a sleeping bear in the living room.
It's nothing more than a coffee table, but you musn't wake it.

on giving up

grandpa died yesterday at five o'clock. mom thinks he wanted to die, has wanted to die for years now. he held grandma's hand until the end of it.

we learned words like multi-system organ failure, co-morbidities, terminal wean, agonal breathing. strange, how precise the language of death. how one can single out the nanosecond when the body transforms from living to dead.

but they didn't have to turn off the vent. he waited until his family surrounded him like a makeshift womb, and only then did he let his heart stop.

.shower.and.be.showered.

I remember when rain first fell in the deserts. I was there. We were nothing more than wanderers at that point, shuffling across the sands, not entirely certain what we were looking for. The desert is so vast that we couldn't really imagine an end to the arid expanse. We were trapped between the ennui of sitting stoicly in place, or the fruitlessness of travelling aimlessly through the uniform land.
So we walked.

And as you can imagine, water was always difficult to come upon. We ripped up cactuses, carried what we could from any oases we found, and even resorted to licking the sweat off our brow. As much as our travelling lacked any goal, we were always on the search for more water. We sucked on stones to keep the spit in our mouths, and would compare with each other to see whose stone whittled away faster.

And when the rain first fell, there was certainly a moment of confusion. Here all at once was a blessing of water from the sky of all places (for, really, how did it all get up there in the first place?), and yet it was splattering down all about, rather than any cohesive trickle that we could capture. It was miracle and mockery.
And nonetheless, we all looked upwards as it fell down on us. Those of us caught by ourselves peeled off the sticky fabric that clung to our skin and learned what it was to shower and be showered.
We closed our eyes and caught what we could in our mouths.

Tennessee

rain fell, staccato-drops against the deck.
what you made me feel at that moment, i'm not sure--
i wanted to be alone
but wanted you around--does it matter
anyway? i needed
the rain for another hour, falling
from the bright southern sky, out of place
and unsure of itself, what purpose
and right it had to be here.

.notch.by.notch.

Button one way, button another. Mens and women's clothing seem to mirror each other.
As I've heard it, the chiral nature of clothing was supposed to make it easier for servants to dress their masters, and women being dressed more often than men, everything was flipped on women's clothing to make it easier.
But that seems to make little difference in belt directions, which are apparently flipped as well, though who's to say, since you could very well go whichever direction you fancy with belts:
clockwise
counterclockwise.

And what does that say about men, women, people around us? Are they trying to turn back the clock of their waistlines, tightening themselves into the posture of their primes? Are they trying to zip ahead, squeezing themselves into aged obscurity?

Because it seems either way, we are all slowly tautening the nooses around our bodies
notch by notch,
carving away at our silhouettes until we are finally content.
Until we've whittled away at that round block enough to wedge it through the square hole in our self-appreciation.

All in good time.
Notch by notch.

.leitmotif.

I wish I had a theme song, a leitmotif. It would be quite the entrance, everywhere I go.
Although, I always wondered, that if someone were to have a constant theme song, wouldn't it just be a soundtrack? When is someone exiting one place and entering another?
Where are the doorways?
the borders?

On the other hand, the pyrotechnic accompaniment might make it all worth the while.
Maybe even bar me from returning to the United States.

absinthe

and no green faeries. turns out the dose of wormwood you need for hallucinations
is a lethal one$.

.gainful.employment.

It would seem that I am once again gainfully employed!
Building bikes, cashing checks, turning tricks.

Maybe I can afford a new deck soon.
or rent.

on the way home

i tried to keep my eyes open while
overpass signs blurred by.

tell me where to go and
i won't ask how.

trees with broken
backs hunch and lurch

for the road--
miserable.

like anything
could save us now

.happy.chickens.

Tomorrow, I will see what a happy chicken farm looks like, not that I doubt that my vegan ethos will waver, but I imagine that it will instill me with some hope.
Veggie burger/hot dog grill-out as well, and we'll find out if that corn on the cob that's been in their freezer since at least New Year's is any good.

Just don't rat me out to the customs officials that I've been near livestock and foreign soil.
On the other hand, it can't be as sketchy as the fellow on the bus coming up here that replied to "Are you bringing in any weapons?"
with "Uhhhhhh...."

hiatus

starts....now!

all creatures

i was alone and dreaming
of you and now my life
without you

how will i know you
after all

if i can't keep
myself together

all creatures
look up at heaven, their mouths
dry, no words, nothing to name it

and so i looked to you--

fill me with what
i cannot say

.low.tide.

Every time I skip a day, whether by accident or not, I feel like I have unknowingly observed a secret leap year that only I am privy to. And as the rest of the world charges on I'm constantly behind, clamoring quietly in the cracks between days.
The footsteps overhead are visible as they dislodge the dust from the wooden planks, drawn like venetian blinds on my window to world.
As I lie beneath like a benevolent troll, I allow them to cross, collecting my toll: little snippets from their everyday tête-à-tête.

daffodils

growing wild in the field
behind your house, like a small
fire. a hundred yellow mouths
turn skyward, waiting
for rain.
the wind moves through them,
cold as a passerby, rattling
stem to root.

.smear.the.queers.

On Tuesday, I overheard a lady in the bus station reading the Holy Bible to herself, when a man sitting across from her interrupted her politely and started conversation. He asked what book she was reading and she replied.

"The thing I never understood about the Bible, is in that Chapter you're reading, Genesis [it was Numbers], it says that Cain and Able moved around and married other people. But if Adam and Eve were the only two people that God made, and they were their only kids, then who did they marry?"

She didn't have an answer, but appreciated the question.

On Wednesday, I was co-hosting a radio show at the University of Western Ontario, and as my friend and I were walking out of the studio, and out of the building, we were stopped by a girl with a Japanese name who asked if she could take a picture of us for her fashion blog. We shrugged and said why not, even though Lulu hadn't showered in days, and I happened to look like a monochrome menace. We did a Crystal Castles pose, and she asked us before we left if we were related. Cousins? Brother and sister?

On Thursday, I wondered who was really related to who, and as familial social order collapsed around me, I saw only sacks of flesh walking down the street, pulpy fruits of family trees smashed into the pavement like a grotesque painting.
We are artists.

.electric.shuffle.

If Chris buys the Alex P. Keaton, I might as well move into the lounge upstairs, settle into the Forest City.
Then I could co-host the Electric Shuffle more often than just tomorrow from 13.30 - 15.30.

march

it all begins outside: the way you
shimmied up my porch steps to greet me
the sound of church bells rolling through
the night, parting the air with each new note--
i felt the turbulence in my chest.

here's another way: i can hear the train
howling like a wounded dog, slinking
through dark.
i sleep with the windows open
just to listen. all of it meaningful
if i can put it together right.

and then you, your mouth's full
of words when you sleep, always talking
like i can pull you from

wherever you've gone.

.onwards.on.to.ontario.

Last time I was on a bus ride with my partner, we were fooling around in the back, and I ended up walking around the NYC Greyhound station with blue balls for an eternity. I even had to meet her father, who showed up drunk on wine at midday and insisted he knew the way to her gate. She was going back to Tennessee. We broke up not too long after that, and the next time I saw her was when I went down to Chattanooga with high hopes involving her roommate. That didn't pan out either.

Tomorrow, at the least, I'll be in Canada, so there's no way I can lose.
And anyway, we have sandwiches and steamed buns for the ride.

best

in the August heat, you pulled
the covers to your chin, the hot air
lulling you like a lover's hand.
i loved you best then

huddled in my bed
sleeping
like morning would never come

again.

.unlocal.growths.

But what do the trees think of it all? or plants of any sort, for that matter. It stands to reason that most people don't enjoy being moved around that often (enter the Trail of Tears, Warsaw Ghetto, Palestinian diaspora, and so on), so what is a plant supposed to think of the matter?

Oh, it's just like being in a military family, being slung around the globe in your childhood years, like a stone into political Goliaths. Just think of all the countries that those children get to see and be exposed to from such a young age.

Well, no kid I have ever known enjoys sitting in place for half a day, whether its at sea level, or cruising altitude. But maybe the whole military family thing can be retained: your local gardener razing the dirt of any weeds, because heaven knows they spread faster than AIDS in a vampire community. It's backyard imperialism! Exterminate and repopulate!

Maybe that's a little much. Let's take a more individualistic point of view. Wouldn't you like to go into outer space? among the stars? Or even better! How about back in time! or forwards? One must imagine the existential moment in which one realizes that one is being dragged through the world along the dimensional tracks of someone else's universe.

Which, really, sounds a little traumatizing. And when was the last time anyone enjoyed an existentialist moment?

Well, in any case, it seems like a once in a lifetime opportunity for most plants, something they can partake in as a sprout or sapling. Good luck moving that oak tree down the street.

No doubt if the idea weren't so appalling to begin with, a committee of trees would snuff out the entire practice of whisking rooted individuals all over the place. We have our own methods of dispersion thank you very much. If God had wanted men to fly, he would have given them metal detectors.
Sure, maybe a few of those sprouts enjoy the whole experience, but in the end, I suspect that they're happy to be back in their element.
"Excuse me while I kiss the sky, and curl my toes in the dirt.
If I can just live long enough to bear some fruit, maybe they'll leave me alone."

giving up was something to consider, to roll over my thoughts like a mint on my tongue. maybe it was the eerie quiet when i got home that got me thinking that way. no dogs barking, chairs strewn around the table like invisible people could still be sitting there. what was there to say? only silence pervaded. what was left to do?

i told you my unhappiness was not something you had to bear. i could let it consume you or let you go.

.divisible.by.one.or.the.other.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

.MAPHematics.

How does one get rejected and accepted all at once?
For 45 grand, I could be one of those Asian model citizens that populate graduate program brochures, keeping up the good work, but staying well below their department's radar.
I might as well buy a money clip to hold my diploma.

manifesto

it's not that I dislike people, just that
I prefer the company of my solitude.

.cheers.

He bought all my poems
read all the stories
clapped at every reading
choked down leftover coffee an
hour before bedtime
He would sing them all
back to me while
he took a whiz after sex

I was glad it wasn't
going anywhere wasn't
working out
The bed would be returned
to me like the vast
western expanse
tired of catching tears
and sweat. The
continental divide
sewn back together along
the seams of rivers

Who feeds a tree its
own apples anyway?

honey bee

your love is perfunctory, a chore:
suck from the core, another
petaled mouth for your kiss.
and when you're done, go
home, empty nectar-pockets
for your queen. honey cell.
but don't think of me in a field
of moonlight, my ear to the earth,
listening for you
should you come back.

.circles.and.crescents.

It started with a cross-country trip in high school, the first time I had ever left my hometown. My teammates and I were slightly jittery, them with the anxiety of competition, me with the restlessness of escape. I was the only day student on the cross-country team, and it made me feel like less of a guide, and more of an outcast; I couldn't be a condescending outsider. I couldn't scoff at the small shops of the town, the crazy old man who spewed forth TS Eliot on the street corner from memory, and had lent me a dollar and five cents for bus fare once when I was nine. I showed them my favourite pancake house one time, but the fried eggs couldn't compare to the street corner fare of whatever cities they hailed from. But I knew all the paths through the woods, so they followed me during practices, and I led them through some of my favourite places in the woods sometimes, looking for the small tree trunk that I had cut my ankle on once. The others kicked up a storm of autumn leaves and talked about whether or not Lindsey Cohen had gotten a boob job, despite being a freshman.
As the bus rolled out of the town, I strained my neck to take it all in, forcing myself to remember as much as possible, convincing myself that I was in a new world, that I had exploded out from behind the curtains, and was faced with centre stage, full of faces and talent scouts. A few birds flapped overhead, and a tree in the distance looked as if it might be waving back at me.

"Hey Cooper, when you gonna get a car?"
"Uh. I dunno. My parents might get me one for college."
"Whaaaa... what the heck ya supposta do til then?"

The team had realized, after the last race, that the local college frats were having parties just down the street from our school, but that they had no way of getting to them. And being that they weren't allowed to own cars, had been trying to devise all manners of ways to sneak off from under the housemasters' noses and make their entrances unfashionably early into college house parties.

"Doesn't your brother have a car?"
"Yeah, doesn't he go there too?"
"What the hell, Cooper, you never told us you knew someone on the inside."

My brother lived at home and was too busy, from what I gathered, trying to keep up with his molecular biology class to really go to any parties. Dad had told him that if he didn't get into the med school program, Mom and him couldn't afford to keep paying for him. When my brother wasn't at home, he worked at the grocery store down the street sweeping leaves out the door, trying to compromise his hatred for customers with the Hippocratic Oath. Part of him wondered, he had mused to me once, what he would do if some old lady had a heart attack in the aisles. I told him it would probably depend which aisle she was in, and we laughed until Mom told us to shut up so she could watch TV, or fall asleep, maybe both.

For good luck, since the race today was at our rival school's track, we had all decided to shave our legs, except for Tommy Lin, who hadn't even begin sprouting above his upper lip yet, much less anywhere else on his body. We also decided in an act of fraternal solidarity to write our names onto each other's shoes, squeezing them in between leather swooshes and suede stripes, testing out signatures with little consistency. We told Tommy Lin he should colour himself a moustache.
The bus rumbled into the campus of our rival school, Kensington Prep, and I thought about how much it looked like our campus, and how all the guys looked like the guys that went to my school. All the girls were decidedly better looking. There was a momentary lapse in the conversation as the others came to the same conclusion. I tried to focus on the buildings, as I was already prone to getting involuntary erections in moving vehicles anyway, and I certainly didn't need any more motivation while wearing running shorts.
The bus came to a jolt and coach ordered us off, with our senior captain Hayden Hamilson strutting his stuff, trying to get us motivated, and fluffing his black scruffy hair in the way he only did when we ran past the girls field hockey team during practices. Word was that he expected to get into Harvard next year, on account of his family legacy there. He got a lot of crap from the other guys on the team, but I figured it was mostly because he had gotten caught with his hands up Ali Diller's shirt last month, and had almost gotten kicked out for breaking parietals if his parents hadn't donated a new wing to the library. Point is, everyone wanted their hands up Ali Diller's shirt, and Hayden was not in the least disconcerted about having been caught. Rather, it seemed as if he had only gotten more notoriety because of it, and Ali Diller herself had simultaneously achieved a certain social standing with the other girls in her dorm, while earning the derision and title of slut from the girls of Grinmore House, but that was just because nobody ever asked Grinmore girls out anyway. They were all damned good at field hockey and chemistry, but were generally agreed to be busted. Either way, Ali Diller had earned a reputation for being easy, and now that the boys knew she put out, there was a line to her bedroom door and window.
As races go, the one at Kensington Prep that day was rather lackluster, marked only by a moment when Roberto Downing had screamed at the top of his lungs as we ran by some couple making out on the far end of the campus pond. As they had scrambled to cover themselves and discern the direction of the yell, the girl had tripped over the flares of her jeans and fallen right into the pond, which I later found out was manmade anyway. We all laughed about how that guy was ever going to make it up to that girl, and what if it were their first date, and was she wearing a white shirt? Did anyone see?
We won the race easily. There really wasn't much competition with Kensington Prep in that regard, and we figured they kept up the rivalry mostly for posterity's sake, so they could coax more money out of the alumni that came back to visit in the spring, who wanted to relive their high school glory, which in reality, probably comprised less of track team victories and more of having their hands up Ali Diller's shirt. But whatever keeps the school rolling in it, man. Nobody could argue with Hayden Hamilson still being around even after he had been caught last year selling pot to some freshmen from Taiwan.
Nevertheless, it was my first victory away from home, and I felt a bit like I imagined Alexander the Great must have felt, riding a horse through ancient Mesopotamia.
I slept most of the bus trip back, waking up only briefly whenever my head bounced off the glass pane when the bus hit a pothole. The others were mostly quiet too, most likely exhausted. A few guys in the back made small talk about some class they were taking, and what teacher they thought used to be a spy for the government.
As I got back to campus, I remembered I had promised my brother to go over to my aunt's house that evening. She was lonely these days, after she had separated from her husband, or ex-husband, I guess, and whenever he had the kids, she mostly moped around the house, trying not to think about what to do with the temporarily empty room upstairs. Was it a guest room? Was it still the twins' room? Were they now guests in the house? She couldn't figure it out, and to help her get her mind off things, Mom sent Tony, my older brother, and me over once a week with some kind of dessert and movie to keep her busy. I think what she was really sending over was us. Sometimes it was just my brother, when I didn't feel like going, or when I was genuinely busy with a paper, but most of the time he practically begged me to go with him, since he never knew what to say to my aunt. We usually joked about the implausability of scenes from whatever movie Mom had picked out for Aunt Sharon and always managed to get through the evening more easily than we figured it would go. Aunt Sharon always stared speechlessly, but we doubt she ever watched anything.
When I came home that night after Aunt Sharon's, though, I was confronted with a thumping noise coming from the laundry room, and I thought at first that someone was washing towels and blankets again, and that the load was spinning lopsided inside the machine, throwing its weight around like coal miners in a bar brawl. But this time the thumping was less damp and thudding, and I realized it was coming from the dryer and not the washing machine. It never occurred to me what was inside.
I opened the door and saw my running shoes tumbling around inside, bright as the day they had been bought, but with a sad worn look about them that one sees in hospital patients trying their best to perk up for their family members stopping in (my only memory of my grandfather, actually). When it finally hit me what had happened, I started yelling uncontrollably at my mother upstairs, knowing full well she was on her way to television-induced slumber.

"What are you yelling about at this hour!"
"You washed my shoes? Who does that! What were you thinking, Mom!"
"What did you say? I'm trying to sleep up here!"

I stormed upstairs and demanded an answer out of her. When she realized what all the commotion was about she snapped at me to leave it be and go to sleep for godssake and when I bought my own shoes to run through the mud with, I could track my grimy soles around anywhere I damned well please, and would I now just shut up and for chrissakes just go to sleep. She threw a slipper at me, aiming more for the door than my head, and I realized I had no more say in the matter.
I went back downstairs and stared at my shoes, deciding that I was going to do my own damned laundry from now on and who the hell did she think she was anyway, doing everyone favours. She could rot in front of that television set for all I cared, because that cathode tube radiation couldn't turn her into any more of a bitch.
Sure enough, all the names had rubbed off, except for the "ksh" in Christian Yorkshire's name.
I definitely was going to do my own laundry from now on, I decided.

And I'm in college now, having little choice but to do my own laundry. These days I don't really have time to give a rat's ass about separating my whites from my colors, or my underwear my overwear like Jenny Lang used to do in high school. All the girls used to bitch about her taking up the washing machines in the dorm basement all afternoon as she managed to separate one basket of clothes into 4 or 5 separate loads. That's what I heard anyway.
No, Mom and Dad have threatened me now that they'd cut my funding if I didn't get into a good graduate law program, so I've been working my ass off studying for the LSAT in a few months. I stopped by one of those frat parties once, and I swore I saw Lindsey Cohen there, with her rack looking better than ever, being the life of the party.
These days, all I really want from my laundry is that I can take care of it all at once. There's not much more that bothers me than running out of clean socks and having enough shirts to last me til the end of the week. I try keep a rough inventory in my head to know what to ask Mom for when I go to the store with her on school breaks. I'm pretty close at this point, having a few extra boxer briefs throwing off the equation, but that's actually a rather good thing, because it gives me something to wear when I'm actually doing laundry. God knows there's no better feeling than slipping into some hot clothes straight from the dryer, trying not to burn yourself on any metallic zippers or buttons.
I threw those old shoes away a few months after they were washed.

Hail the Fire in the Lotus

and let it
burn you through,
right in your chest.
let it
open you
like a wound, each bloom
of red cell and red swell.
unfold
your flanks, peel you
back from yourself & you'd just be
meat,
meat and some
loose bones.

edge

the sky was on the edge of storming: wind
pushed through the trees and clouds stood over me
like my father in a rage.

the first time i met you
i cut my hand on an exposed nail
under my desk. a thin red stream rushed
to the cuticle. i pulled my sleeve down,
afraid of your concern.

maybe
it's all the wine i drank that makes me feel
like the world could break me.
one push in any direction
and i'd be another leaf
cowering across your path.

.you.are.what.you.land.

Usually when I collide with the gravel, my first concern is not my general well-being, but rather whether or not my clothes are intact. This isn't really from a fashion perspective, I suppose, as much as an economical one, since I would really prefer not to have to buy new clothes all the time when they become smeared with blood and grated.
Nowadays, I tend to be more concerned that my tattoo artist will kill me if I get too many chunks of broken glass lodged into my arm, her handiwork.

But despite it all, the fs feeble stall and the fs fastplant on the bank was worth the holes in my shirts, shoes and palms. And the pothole in my pride is patched up, after having been impaled on the merciless barbs of the 8 year olds at the skatepark.

god shaped hole

would it be something clouds could form?
swirls of fog and grief, weightless and fleeting
as soon as i put my hand through it.

my sister saw the Lord in cotton domes
overhead. no one believed her but still
with the sun in our eyes
we wanted to see.

You'd more likely be
a diamond-spot with a bullet punched through.
every pulse would mean a little less
of You.

i wanted You close, but how
could i bear it? Your love that feels
like two hands turned up, asking for more.

.teen.spirits.

It's somewhat depressing, sure, but in retrospect, living wasn't unlike high school. All of the awkwardness, the drama, the immature yelling, coming to a close at the end of the day with my eyes closed, laying my head down next to the few songs that bring me any consolation.

And we all talk about it as if it were the greatest years to ever squeak by on gymnasium sneakers, and maybe it was to some extent; you haven't done much since then other than sit in a revolving chair, swivelling from one day to the next.
But in all likelihood, it was as terrible for you as it was for me. The constant jeering, the pointlessness of standardized tests and the endless race to finally just be done with it all, to be able to climb out of your molting, pimply skin like a snake, so that you could continue slithering onwards towards a hole in the ground.

And every so often, just to give those paranormal kooks something to talk about, we show back up for a 5, 10, 100 year reunion, trying to discern which one of us has made something of herself as we waft through walls towards the punch bowl.

January

From the passenger seat, I watched
an unlit cigarette dangle from your lips.
You said, January makes me feel new.
But it only made me feel cold.

You struck a match and let your cigarette kiss
its flame, and I remembered thinking
I was too young to be parked outside
that hotel steaming with city rot, the rat-a-tat
of a grumbling furnace. My father thought
I was at school.

.you.don't.say.

One of my fondest memories, but not one without its own nostaligic laments, occurred not too long ago, nor too recently. I happened to be on a trans-oceanic flight, and to keep myself occupied as we raced the Sun to the horizon I had brought some research material for a book I was working on at the time. Foremost among them was a vintage book by a noteworthy deconstructionist, who does not need mentioning.
My reading was droll and I looked out the window to break up the dense prose. As I turned back around, I was surprised to see that my neighbour had picked up my book from the seat pocket, and was flipping through it rather flippantly. And not only that, but it was none other than the intellectual that had penned the work in the first place!

What a lot of malarkey this is, wouldn't you say?-
Excuse me, sir?-
I'm not entirely sure I wrote this in the first place.-
Ah. Well, it is a seminal piece nevertheless, I suppose.-
He sighed.
My thesis was hardly airtight, and the whole text fails to really stand up to careful, or careless even, scrutiny.-
True of most vehicles of thought, though, isn't it?-

I hoped my joke would be successful, not too obscure, not too pretentious. But as if on cue, the plane lurched, and the pilot announced amidst the flickering lights that we had lost an engine. A second.

As I regained consciousness, being deprived of any memory of adventure in my own story, I realized that I was lying on the shore of what appeared to be a small island, as much a desert as it was deserted. It seemed that my mentor (well, at least as far as my research goes, and if only unrequited) had also washed up as I had. He was tearing pages out of his/my book to start a fire.
As he told me later, I had passed out as the plane plummeted, whether from fear or nausea or lack of oxygen was anyone's guess, and in retrospect, it was probably my having been completely limp that had spared my life upon impact with the water. He told me that he had managed to slip a life vest onto me and dragged me out of the sinking plane, watching as panicky survivors hastily inflated their life jackets prematurely, before realizing that they were now trapped in the chest-high water of the fuselage.
The two of us managed to leave the wreckage, me mostly having been dragged out of the body before my lifejacket was inflated. As it happened, my mentor (it still sounds lofty to refer to him as such; I shall proceed with the tentative word "friend" from here on out) happened to have a carabiner keychain that he clipped us together with, before swimming towards the island on the distant horizon. At some point, he had passed out with exhaustion as well, and when he woke, we were ashore where we were.

You saved the book?-
He admitted to having been in the military as a youth, and thought that the pages might come in handy for starting a fire. He had tried his best to seal it up in one of the barfbags, but it seemed that the pages were still rather waterlogged.

I thanked him several times for having saved my life, and as we watched the sun beat us to the horizon, we had the type of unadulterated confessional conversation that occurs between mutual survivors. We gave our respective biographies, recalled our favourite foods, and discussed with sweeping generalizations about our current research.
We had a good laugh at the irony of being washed up on an island with no name, a signified with no signifier.

We scavenged the island for food, and found ourselves able to locate some fruits here and there, resembling the supermarket produce we were familiar with only superficially. We eventually managed to get the fire started. I thought about the certain degree of romanticism that sprouts from catastrophe, like a clover from cow droppings.

As we dug around for rocks to surround our bonfire, my friend happened to strike upon something that was more metallic than stone, and we discovered, to our surprise, a lamp of indiscernible origins. By the looks of it, it was from some type of whaling vessel, the faint smell of burnt whale blubber still lingering as we removed a seal that kept the inside airtight. And just for the record, the smell was indeed familiar to me based upon my childhood residence in Norway, where I encountered whale meat more than a few times.

With the seal removed, we tried to buff up the glass a little bit, to see if it was indeed still useable, and to our great surprise, a smoky-eyed genie emerged from the lamp, confounding both of our logical intuitions. The genie yawned and appeased us more quickly than I would have thought was possible for such a supernatural phenomenon. In retrospect, I suspect that his nebulous trails, which smelled strongly of incense, might have been some kind of narcotic.

I thought your type only lived in Arabian lamps.-
And rather than the Robin Williams, Disney variety of genie, we had a bored and apologetic genie, not cracking a joke, only stating simply that one lived where one could these days.
I suppose maybe if that's your type of humour.

So as you can imagine, we had the expected set-up, or rather, we were granted wishes, but due to the collapsing economy of the wish market, we were only getting one each. No wishing for more wishes; no wishing for the power to grant wishes. All the usual fine print, that I couldn't help but wonder if genies came with End User License Agreements these days.
In any case, age before beauty, I joked, and offered my friend his turn first. He gave me a slightly dejected look, and I asked him how he could be so crestfallen when we were being presented with such a boon. He reminded me of all the "beware of what you wish for" stories, and how his entire life's work has been founded upon that very idea of language betraying us, of language as being self-defeating. And now we were standing at the one-way gate where we our undecidable language was being granted a certain degree of omnipotence.
Furthermore, we realized, with only one wish apiece, and the restrictions of the lengthy Genie EULA that was read off to us, there was no way for one of us to test the loyalty of our language to our wishes and report back to the other, and still get both of us off the island (trust me: the Genie EULA was complex and convoluted and we could not work out a way to resolve the problem).
As my friend thought it over, I could only think of an undergraduate paper I had written on the works of Søren Kierkegaard - most specifically on Fear and Trembling - and however patchy and amatuerish it may have been, I remembered the basic thesis I had tried to argue.
I shook hands with my friend and mentor, if only for a formality. I told the genie my wish, and like a terrible Disney movie (I have taken my daughter to several over the years), I woke up in my university library, my partner shaking me awake and joking that I hadn't pulled an all-nighter since my undergrad years.

Over the next few weeks, I tried to look up my friend's phone number or email, but only found a university address where he used to teach. I wrote a few successive letters, first joking, then musing, and finally murmuring.
I never heard back from him.