.things.i.have.been.putting.in.my.body.

Everything I eat looks the same.

Love Poem No. 1

I was here when I loved you
and so
I am here just the same.

.knocking.bones.

you never liked
me knocking my bones
the dull impact as
something in my skin
came into contact
with the outside world

millions of microfractures
it is said, over time
will regrow into stronger bones.
but one major fracture will floor you

i bounce my elbows together
i flick a pen back and forth against my shin
i tap my fingers on my ribs, my skull
as if i were punching into a typewriter, out of paper
or fingering frets on a stringless guitar
there is no soft hand coming between myself
staying my knees and wrists
no voice saying,
"Stop it, that really creeps me out."

.a.legacy.apart.

It didn't occur to me until rather recently that some of my friends from childhood, while I lived in Saudi Arabia, were around for the Apartheid. I could wrap my head around some of my peers being around for the Berlin Wall coming down, albeit I don't actually feel that I know too many Germans. I did think about the head German baker at my former job having grown up with that institution in place, but maybe I never gave it too much thought.
But that's just it, really: political trauma seemed to be symptomatic of older generations. And it's not even as if I really believe the world has become a better place to inhabit. With each problem solved, new ones seem to spring forth, like heads of the Hydra.
But anyway, even thinking of talking to Lithuanian and Latvian friends about their experiences of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc collapsing was bizarre, but it just didn't really hit me the same way as realizing that I had white South African friends that grew up with Apartheid as standard practice. What are we teaching ourselves?

This isn't meant to be a rant, or a PSA. Rather, it's an attempt for me to discern shapes through the translucent glass panes of their country's history, distilled through nothing more than some books and texts I've read. And there is no fiction that I can create in the face of what should never have been squeezed off of the paper into non-fiction in the first place. As much as we want that photo of black and white children holding hands, sharing toys through a chain link fence, I think they exchange nothing but skeptical gazes and taut silence.

.southern.wedding.

Have you ever noticed (I am sure you have) how freshly cut hair never falls in quite the way you wanted it to when you started. Perhaps it's more noticeable if you cut your own hair like I do, and you have no one to blame but yourself and your twitchy fingers on the reins of the hungry blades. I suspect this is why it's so easy to keep snipsnapping away until you have nothing left to obscure your prominent widow's peak.

It was just a little trim for this wedding I'm going to this weekend in the dirty heart of Texas, which isn't so dirty, and is actually rather young and hip and Bohemian, not unlike you. It is if Texas is an oyster on the seabed of the country, and in all the obesity and terrible air quality (oh yeah, and rampant racism and backwoods conservative cowboy ethos), some pearl was solidified, fortified and called Austin. The safest place for our kind is dead centre, surrounded by vast expanses of hostile white neo-natives. In fact, it's not unlike Columbus in that regard, I suppose.

My friend getting married, Sahar, constantly had a problem when we were younger: everyone seemed to want to spell her Persian name "Sarah", and you'd think that in the international community and school that we were in, a place where there were more Omers and Osmans than James or Johns, there would be some sensitivity to that sort of false typo. It even reminds me of taking a class with one of my favourite English professors at OSU, Pranav Jani: it wasn't his name that was mispelled, but the course was on Salman Rushdie, which the university printers had graciously corrected on the syllabus to read "Salmon Rushdie". We were headlong into postcolonial discourse (the Western biases of technology and its spell checks) before we had even cracked open Midnight's Children.

My friend Gianna will be there too, and is probably the main reason I agreed to go to this wedding at all. It's not as if neither of us are friends with Sahar; I think we just needed each other's presence to motivate ourselves to go.
And so, for the first time in probably a decade, our three families will all be in the same place at the same time. It feels as if it is some elaborate astrological event, but if it is scattering any tea leaves in my direction, I have done nothing more than ingest them to settle my recently poisoned stomach.

I imagine it like some ghost image of the past, blurred into the present picture. There we all are, standing in line: the Phams - 3 boys, the Bishehs - 4 girls, the Leggios - 3 girls. We hardly fit into the pictures of ourselves, and what is this business now of Sahar getting married? Is this for real?
The ghost image decays a bit, eroding slightly around the edges, not in quality necessarily, but in a more ontological sense, if that is the word. Objects begin to disappear from the field of vision, until all that's left is each of our faces, and how we have even outgrown those.

Am I ready for this confrontation? On one hand, yes. I have my clothes picked out, an outfit that was remarked upon as being "very GQ". Gianna told me that her mom is putting money on me as being best dressed at the wedding.
And on the other hand?...
Who's to say. My family stresses me out. Being in Texas stresses me out. Confronting layers of my past seems to have interesting effects on my head, a palimpsest of escapism and striving to just be enough.

Families reunited. Families expanded. Children gone. Fathers gone. It's not the same picture at all. One wonders how one was ever deceived in the first place.

July II

A flower pressed between the pages
of a book I haven't read: your way
of saying I was something else.
I call for you all night and get the same
machine. As if our bodies in infinite collision
were not enough. As if
your shoulder in the bare moonlight
could make any of it easier.
I find my way down
the block where our neighbor's
crab apple tree spits fruit
all over the sidewalk.
Then the rain in summer, how
warm, uncomfortably warm
like you in bed beside me, sweating
out your dreams.

Diner

The woman in the Chinese diner sits
two tables diagonally from me.
She is aware of herself the way
lonely people are.
I could be her in thirty years,
eating lunch by myself in
an over-sized sunflower shirt
and red pants. I want never to be
old. Each bite of lo mein
closer to my last.

.just.to.show.you.can.

I remember when I was probably about seven years old, I was thrust into all the activities a son could let down his father in. Try your best. Swimming, soccer, little league. There were probably more things, more sports. A healthy body, a healthy mind. Right? Explain jocks. Rotten minds in ripe bodies, moldy flesh in firm fruit. But not me; school comes first. Absolutely. Keep your grades up. Why only a B+? I'm talking to the teacher for you. Oh, that's so embarrassing, a mother shmoozing up some better grades for you. It's 'cause the school's so small. You can't help but know everyone. You can't help but be in everyone else's business, if only because they speak the same language. And you'd poke fun at their accents as well. You'd run around taunting the lunch lady until she cried. We sure as hell did. Maybe that's why they kept us busy with these sports. And maybe it was some semblance of familiar motions, comfortable movements, choreographed as if we were all at home across the water, where none of us would have known each other. So we'll just pretend, for the sake of it, for the sake of the charade. Were we playing sports? playing parts? And although swim team was the worst, I couldn't quit it for the life of me. I certainly tried, but it was like trying to reverse a dive back onto the starting block, a bootstrapping feat wherein it proved rather impossible to fully extricate myself from the agony. I wanted none of it. Do I totally regret it? Perhaps not. I have broad shoulders, and I suspect I have years of swim team to thank for that. I have recently found I have the shoulders of a medium sized woman, but not the hips. If you squeeze the forms a bit, we'd all resemble each other in a bit. Mold your body into the furnishings for the mind. But I also remember the guitar lessons. I couldn't have been more than, what did I say earlier? seven years old. Signed up for guitar lessons after school. Same building even. Same teachers too, I suspect. Did I know what a guitar was? Only in theory. And I had a realization a day into it: I could quit. So I quit. To what end I have no clue anymore. In fact, I think of all the good it could have done me. And yet I quit, for no other reason, I suspect, than to simply show myself that I could, that I could simply walk out that door and never have to look back. And there is certainly a story in that somewhere, should you look hard enough. A moral? None. Only lessons, once learned, forever clawing at that door to be released. Let me out! I quit! And never look back. Not until you're far enough to safely reminisce nostalgically about your regrets, insulated like a down jacket by the deadened silent feathers of all the years you put between yourself and whatever it is you thought you had quit.

July

July, like the hot breath of the dog
lazing on the porch.
I'd hole up in my room for days.
I could smell you all over
your side of the bed, right against
the wall. Even when you're gone,
you're there.

.house.and.homeless.

In this poem, he compares the heart to a house. It is a nexus of coming and going, eaten-away foundations, and wooden supports ready to ignite.

Whatever. You have to think that any grizzled old man writing poetry in his cabin knows rather little about love. And on that note, why is everyone so persistent on the topic? Universal themes are boring, aren't they? Or maybe it's just that they're safe.

The house is a haven. I do not need to reiterate the adage that a man's home is his castle.

And yet, she just did. Do women poets compare their organs to architectural structures as well? Why do all these men feel the need to construct their emotions outside of themselves? Erect themselves in nature somewhere and disappear again back into the woods and, eventually, the dirt. Why make symbols? At what point does representational analogy re-establish itself as paradigm, reasserting itself forever like a defiant statue in the desert?

And besides the direct metaphor, we must think about what is being implied given social context. Men have traditionally built houses; women have made homes. If the heart is a house, then the speaker is perhaps relating to us that he has an unfulfilled space. He requires his mistress to perform the transformational act of house to home.

House and homes have always been dicey for me. I lived overseas for most of my life, with the implicit knowledge that my house was temporary, as if it were written into the walls, "You are here, and you will leave". And the stark reminders every summer when my family returned to my country of birth, of citizenship, chiselled away at my American identity. I didn't really live here. Who was I fooling? My parents came uprooted from across an ocean and stretched their branchy arms into the air and grew money on their fingertips, shaking it down every fall to pay my tuition. And do I live here either? In this dorm? This is no more a home than a hostel, with possessions bolted down, and memories sewn up in mattresses.

What does the reader have to make, however, of the secret chambers of the heart that occur in the third stanza? What do locked rooms in a house denote? On which side of the door must we assume the speaker's love interest is locked? Is she his mistress? or does he have mistresses? If we extend his referral to her as his lifeblood in the first stanza, then we have to contend with two things: the first is that blood occupies the whole heart, and if there are sealed off chambers of the heart, we must assume that they contain blood all the same. And the second, is that the movement of blood through the heart, as the speaker admits, can only flow in one direction. From what rooms is the speaker's love moving, and where to? Is she destined to be expelled altogether?

Living in Saudi Arabia, the law accommodated for up to four wives, a fact that is often recited in Western demonizations of the Muslim and Arab world. In reality, it was rarely fulfilled. Four wives are four wives, and not just four more mouths to feed, but four more voices to hear. And given a few generations, that number grows exponentially. Did these women and their children have their own rooms, as the multiple wives their huts in Achebe's Things Fall Apart? or did they mingle together? Half-brothers, and half-sisters struggling to remember names and social standings. In the Bible, it was the custom for the first son to inherit everything, but it never once happened, at least in the Old Testament. Look for yourself. A rabbi told me.

The heart is the nexus of emotion and passion, as you clearly know, class. But, given the popular modular perspective of human character, where then does the mind reside, if not the house and home? And does the soul encompass the two? or does it too have its own dwelling place? Are these three components defensibly separatable? Can they act independently? And if the answer is yes, do we have to contend with the Self as an amalgamation of discrete identities? And if the answer is yes again, then is the poem setting up a parallel with the Christian model of the Holy Trinity? If we have that parallel to consider, then we, the readers, are in a place where we must decide which parts of the Trinity align with which parts of the Self as presented in the poem. If we accept the Father as the mind, the Holy Ghost as the soul, and the Son as the heart, then we are now left with a situation in which the Son, or the speaker, is the house, which the Father does not reside in, but has created. The question this leaves us with, and the topic of your coming essay, is whether or not the speaker has knowingly created an impossible love scenario for himself, wherein he must abandon reason and rationale - his Mind - in order to inhabit the fragile and empty structure of his house with his mistress. We will discuss the ensuing parallels with Father-Son/family connotations and how the Holy Ghost/soul plays into the dichotomy next class. Don't forget to pick up last week's paper before you leave.

Impossible scenarios indeed, this long distance relationship. And I know that it is only temporary while you are studying in Central America. Or was it working with Habitat for Humanity? Houses, homes, habitats. We live in all of them, but so rarely do I ever feel as if the walls will hold me in. What are we sheltering ourselves from? What elemental forces are so violent that we must shield ourselves inside of ourselves? You were like a tropical monsoon, ripping through all the little buildings inside of me, growing like palm trees. And now we have reached the dry season. Can we make it another year? Are we ever going to feel that cyclonic ferocity again, shaking the beating walls? It tires me, replanting, rebuilding, repairing every season. There is no such thing as progress, only cycles; no linearity, only meandering garden paths. And at the end of the day, when the sun sinks in my head, the heart is still the house to which we return, and I am homeless.

.refridgerator.

like my mother, you
have come and
gone
in your wake an
overstocked fridge
an open front door
inviting the night
air cooled by rain
it refuses to enter

Other Homes

My father moved to Indiana
under the pretense mother
would follow and when
she didn't, he shook her
off like old skin
and made for us another
home where nothing smelled
like her but she was there
all the same.

.jersey.barriers.

"
people always say "it's really easy, there's a simple formula. you just turn it clockwise half way and then turn it the other way until it won't turn anymore and then look in your mirror twice and turn the wheel a quarter turn and and and"
"

My roommate has made it to almost 30 without learning to drive. Or perhaps he has learned and forgotten. Maybe he has a secret license he has been hiding from us.
I think I can beat him. But I'm only 22 now, 23 tomorrow, actually, so that's only 6 or 7 more years without being behind the wheel that I have to get by. That's somewhere between a quarter and a third of the life I have lived so far. It will somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the life I will have lived at that point.

There was one time my father decided it was time for me to learn. I was already older than the average American teenager engineering his escape pod, courtesy of having attended a boarding school. In fact, my dad decided it was time because I had just graduated from high school.
My family was helping me move from New Jersey to Ohio for college, but we had to make a stop in Tennessee to pick up the old Toyota (or was it a Honda?) that they had bought for my grandparents to use almost a decade before. My mother was the type of person to stock up the top shelf of one our closets with various gifts, just in case. So when that kid in my class that I didn't really know or like invited me to his birthday party out of nowhere, my mom was ready with some wrapping paper. Or maybe we got invited to some kind of housewarming party. The shelf got a little emptier before the light turned off and we closed the door.
So it was really no surprise that she had masterminded a scheme in which my parents bought my grandparents a car to drive around in, with the hopes that I would drive it 10 years later when I was old enough, and my grandparents were too old (and in all actuality, it was only my grandfather anyway, since my grandmother, stricken with glaucoma and osteoporosis, preferred to putter around the house, stocking up Apple Jacks and Mello Yello for my impending summer visits). With me having graduated, the plan was simple: drive down with my family to Tennessee from New Jersey, pick up the Tonda (or was it Hoyota?) and drive up to Ohio from there with two cars, one which they could leave with me.
Maybe they hadn't counted on me not having a license yet. Nothing that couldn't be fixed though. Driving's easy. Tennessee is pretty sparse. My father drove me to an abandoned strip mall.
I have never been comfortable around particularly noisy mechanical things. Vacuuming was a chore. And airplane toilets were absolutely terrifying; I would be halfway out of the folding doors before I flushed the toilet. It wasn't even as if I feared being sucked through it or something, and in fact, that might have made the idea a bit more appealing. Blenders? Also terrifying, but my love for smoothies generally wins out.
The car was not particularly noisy, but feeling the herds of horsepower on the other side of my foot had the same unsettling effect. After all, it is not a far cry from stepping on hot coals, and maybe I even felt a bit like that one scene in Dr. Strangelove, riding that hot and bothered machine into certain doom.

I didn't take the car beyond 20 miles an hour.
And in retrospect, that's almost rather hilarious, as I am rather comfortable, these days, riding my bicycle around at that speed and beyond.

Perhaps my father was a little disappointed in my slow, misshapen laps around the parking lot, and thought that perhaps it was time to work on parking. I know: that pun wasn't intended. He pulled me out of the car and ran over a few basics of parking. I closed the door and my dad stood in front of the car, pretending to be a cone pretending to be another car. I began to ease the car into the parking space and crept forward until my dad jumped out of the way, pushing on the hood.
In retrospect, "crept" might have a bit of an under-exaggeration.
He drove home.

Maybe one day I'll have to get a license. My roommate is getting one next year, his financial situation is strong-arming him into the suburbs and into the front seat. He'll uncomfortably readjust his seat position and angles, never quite finding that sweet spot. He'll ignore the oil economy fueling him, and his role in fueling them. He'll check his mirrors. He'll take a sip of his coffee, sigh, and back his car out of the driveway like a retracted promise to himself.
I think I can beat him. Six or seven more years. They're just numbers.
Or maybe I will have to get a license as well, and take the plunge. Learn to walk those hot coals. And when I am issued my license, complete with haggerd photo, I will hide it in shame. Maybe under some towels in the hallway closet, on the top shelf underneath the hanging lightbulb. And when I forget your birthday, our anniversary, my best friend's wedding, a graduation party in a nearby city, I will open the closet door and wrap my license up in my wallet, and hope it's enough of a gift. I will hope you can unwrap those retracted promises, beaming false rainbows, failed covenants.

.a.million.fingertips.

normally, i
like to sleep to
music, playlists built
on strings and horns
arpeggio stairways and
sloping crescendos for
the handicapped

tonight, the
rain drowns it
out, with the
percussive
repercussions
percolating
like your fingertips
softly repeating
their customary
rapping, requesting
permission to
return
to your own bedroom

Notes to Self

Lose ten pounds. For real this time.
Sift through the shit you don't need to take with you.
Stop spending fliff. On shiny things.
Resist the urge to burn all your bridges before you move.

.burnt.toast.

so tan
these days
like toast, browning
on both sides
never evenly.
a little darker,
with every step under
the sun
pushing me down
smeared into a
shadow, melting
into yours

11 pm

Don't come
around here
like a hound
on the scent.
I've seen your
kind before,
don't I know
a thing or
two about
the hunger
of men.

.cherry.picker.

What do they call those guys that wear those reflective vests and hard hats on the side of the road, but don't actually do construction? Are they just workers? Telephone line repairmen? Surely they have names.
I saw a few on the way to work today, and since I was going in early, decided to stop for a bit, already having almost thrown myself off of my bike due to my own carelessness. I just about ran into the back of their truck, parked on the side of the road, as I thought about the sad sag of the telephone wires, victims of gravity. But you know all about that affliction.

I forget their names already, but they gave me an extra bottle of water they had lying around, and I pretended that it wasn't warm as sweat and just about as smelly. Water is water, and water is relief. And one of them asked if he could try my bike, not having ridden one since he was a teenager. Sure, why not.
When he came back from the other side of the parking lot, I told him he had to take me up in his cherry picker now. Sure, why not.
Wait.
Really? Oh, so he was serious after all. Maybe they were having a slow day as well, trying their best to prevent the sun from beating away their motivation and livelihood like colour evaporating from tattoos.

Up I went, a little choppily at first, but slightly smoother as I evened out to the height of the telephone wires. Some birds squawked disapproval and fluttered away, leaving me wondering how it was that they didn't get electrocuted.
I hung out for a little while. I marvelled at how much windier it was up that high, and when I finally looked down, I saw people walking dazed on the sidewalk. Here's an angle one doesn't see too often! How many people, do you think, make sure they look presentable from an aerial view? And as I sat up in the cherry picker looking down, there was some relief in realizing that people have lost interest or ability in ever looking up.

.book.burning.

"
This was terribly hard to do, because written-on paper burns reluctantly.
"
-Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

I made a bonfire last night, feeding it all your novels and notebooks, your diaries and magazines. There may have even been some of mine in there, but devil knows I haven't read a book in months, if not a year already, so what do I care. I can't help but see a wall of words stacked in front of my face, filling me with the desire to punch a hole through the paper and binding, and as I remove my hand, peer through the tiny prison cell window into the world.

The glossy periodicals went up first, the yellow flames looking a bit sick as they digested the various inks and chemicals. The models on the pages didn't blink as their faces were blackened and eventually erased altogether.
It occurred to me that I had forgotten the recent novel that you had finished and left on the bed. I walked back into the bedroom and found it undisturbed from where it had landed like a pine cone last week, fluffed and ruffled and spent of its contents. I looked around for any other forgotten texts: a piano score you had printed out, a newspaper with employment ads circled in blue ink, an inhaler prescription, a love letter written on a dollar bill.
I wrote a check out for the rest of the money I owed you, and hung a sheet over the mirror.

All that was left on the bonfire when I returned were some drawings from your sketchbook and the letters we had written each other while I was studying abroad, while you were visiting your relatives in the mountains, while you were in the kitchen. Bulgakov was right: the written-on pages stubbornly refused the flames, but even they eventually succumbed. Without ever changing colour or the shape of your looping cursive, the words clung obdurately to the crisping and crackling paper until, finally, your heartfelt confessions rose like smoky whispers into the ears of the night sky, leaving me with the cooling white-edged embers of all that remained.

God According to my Father

It doesn't matter what you believe, only
that you do.

And Jesus is good enough, but
that's not the whole story either.

After your mom left and took you girls
I thought I'd never fall asleep

and it was that way for days.
Nights became mornings became another night,

impenetrable dark and every
unwelcome nightsound magnified

by night's camouflage. The small apartment
rattled with the traffic of footsteps

and laughter from the neighbors. I was lonely
for them, for anyone, any sound

other than the heater as it shook at 4am,
grumbling to a slow wake in the dead of

that winter. But listen--
all that was dead inside me

made me live.

.when.the.moment.comes.

אני עוצם בעצם

.wild.things.

(Just so you know, the real version of this has that empty bottom square cut out completely so that the page is see through. Didn't quite translate when I scanned it)

Whoa! New mix cd!
Hit me up if you want me to figure out how to get you a copy.

For those of you that still can't read the tracklisting after blowing up the image:

Ear Pwr - Epic Suitcase .1
The Mae Shi - Run to Your Grave .2
The Magnetic Fields - I Think I Need a New Heart .3
Dillinger Four - Suckers International Has Gone Public .4
Rilo Kiley - Smoke Detector .5
Page France - Here's a Telephone .6
Erik Satie - Le Piccadilly .7
The Unicorns - I Was Born (a Unicorn) .8
Andrew Bird - Candy Shop .9
The Thermals - A Pillar of Salt .10
Malajube - Le Métronome .11
Thao Nguyen - What About .12
Mika Miko - Attitude .13
Stereo Total - In-Out .14
Cansei de Ser Sexy - Hollywood (Madonna) .15
Japanther - River Phoenix .16
Yea Big + Kid Static - The Nameless .17
She & Him - This is Not a Test .18
Kurt Weill - Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (Moritatensänger Macheath) .19
Do Make Say Think - In Mind .20
Julie Doiron - Nice to Come Home .21

Linear

Because there are many ways
to fuck up a straight line. Because
when I walk toward you, I want
to walk away. Because
every path is forward moving
and devolving all at once.
Because in the hot breath
of a June evening, you were too
beautiful to bear--even another
moment of you would undo
all that was done.

.bose.einstein.condensates.

"
"Condensates" are extremely low-temperature fluids which contain properties and exhibit behaviors that are currently not completely understood, such as spontaneously flowing out of their containers. The effect is the consequence of quantum mechanics, which states that since continuous spectral regions can typically be neglected, systems can almost always acquire energy only in discrete steps. If a system is at such a low temperature that it is in the lowest energy state, it is no longer possible for it to reduce its energy, not even by friction. Without friction, the fluid will easily overcome gravity because of adhesion between the fluid and the container wall, and it will take up the most favorable position (all around the container).
"

When we are at our lowest and coolest points, it's hard not to think of all the potential.
It's hard not to climb all over you, screaming all the time that you will never contain me.

.overdue.

You asked me to clear off the bed today, to put my guitar somewhere sensible, which in this case turned out to be sitting on the basket of winter coats in the corner of the room. A childhood friend once told me that when he didn't have anything to plug his electric bass into, he would lean it against the wall and listen for the resonation of his plucked strings in the walls. I couldn't tell you whether or not it worked, and my guitar in the corner is an acoustic one, which is not to say, I suppose, that one couldn't play it with one's head bowed, one ear to the sound hole and the other pressed against the vibrations of a house reverbrating with comfortable chords.

When I finally got home, I found your book resting on my side of the bed. A discarded dropping. Books building up in the room like autumn leaves hiding the sidewalk, and whatever chalky proclamations we wrote each other on warmer afternoons. Books building up in the rooms like the autumn leaves on my skin, tucked under my arm. And when the night breeze rushes through the room as I enter, the leaves disperse into their corners, accumulating dust and library fines. And your book lies on the bed, consumed and dispensed of, its spine neatly broken.

My mother, a teacher, often had this habit. Most of the books that I read growing up were at the 4th grade level, providing a progressively decreasing challenge with each passing year. Eventually, she told me to move onto more worthwhile books, but like a secret nook in a distant relative's house, there was something familiar in staying at that 4th grade level, never moving past my mother's occupational preoccupation. Like a dung beetle, I was rolling up the discarded scraps of her lessons.

I'm glad that you bought that book, though. You certainly don't need any more library fines, and I probably don't have time to run up there tomorrow anyhow. I would like to think that if it sits there long enough, I might eventually get to read it. But the truth is, I'm going to move it two feet to the left tonight when I lie down to sleep, an arm's length away from the never to be read chapters lying next to me.

.lactic.acid.blues.

Ever since the break up, it's been an easy relief to lose myself in working out. And don't get me wrong, I was active anyway: I ride my bike everywhere. I don't drive. To hell with that. To hell with everything.

But it wasn't enough. I mean, at first I just started going on longer rides on my own, when I wasn't heading to work, or to class. A fine distraction, and on the longer rides, I did find that my legs burned with exertion. I borrowed a friend's fixed gear bike to do some more training, and found the lack of coasting hard to settle in on at first, but welcomed the aches and cramps that welled up in my butt.

I joined the gym. It was the one that my friends go to, which is how I found out about it in the first place. Frankly, I could have just gone to the university rec center, but any more time spent on campus and I would have most likely gone crazy. I did go once, and ran into a former professor of mine. We nodded at each other without a word, and I watched him shoot basketballs wildly for five minutes before leaving. I ran into my ex on the way out.

I don't go to the gym when my friends do. It's fine seeing them here and there, and probably even nice to grab a cup of coffee with them when we do cross paths for that brief morning half hour before we head off to our jobs and classes.
I started with the elliptical, after hearing so much about it. And it was great, I won't lie, but I don't think there is much more to say about it. At least, not any more than has already been said. I also took a spinning class, figuring that it was close to home for me. It was something comfortable. I wasn't a runner, but I used the treadmills. I started swimming with a coworker once a week, barely keeping up with her.

Eventually, I even started lifting weights. I had never imagined myself doing so, or even wanting to do so. And yet, here I am in my bedroom with dumbbells at my feet, begging to stub my toe on some dark night after I stumble home from the lab bleary-eyed and smelling slightly of the beer I had on my way home.

There's a comfort in taking it out on my body. Or maybe it's a distraction. Equal parts of both, like counter-acting muscle pairs, pulling and pushing me towards blissful exhaustion. Without your body here next to me, my body has turned inwards, trying to build enough muscle mass to reconstruct a counter-acting body pair, something to fit together like South America and Africa swimming across the Atlantic Ocean into sub-equatorial embrace.
With each new muscle popping into definition, begging God to rip through my torso and remove a rib, I figure that I will finally be strong enough to lift up myself out of this ocean of lactic acid.

.tachyon.theif.

I didn't even feel his hand when he slipped the bills into my pocket. Did my father ever pick any pockets in his childhood? It's a certain sleight of hand that can't be taught, only learned.

They didn't order any food, but were content to sit down and watch me eat half of a free burrito. Oh, we already got food. It's in the car. We have to get to the airport soon.
Munch munch munch.

Maybe my father is some sort of anti-pickpocket, like an antielectron, a positron. He is robbing me of something, but moving backwards in time as he does it. He is a tachyon thief. By the time I'm born, I'll have nothing left.

I have to go back to work soon, but there's still a little time for some parting words, some advice and consultation. Make sure you see a dentist. Don't forget to look into apartments in Chicago for the fall. Please write.
Munch. I wipe my mouth.

My mom pulls me aside on the sidewalk and slips some bills into my hands, drawing her head in close in that way she always does, as if she's telling me a secret. It is in Vietnamese anyway, so we are being doubly secretive. If my father is the tachyon thief, my mother is temporally backpedaling con artist. She'll look me in the eye and deftly snatch up the meagre allowances I had put aside for my oncoming childhood.

I am already ten minutes late getting back to work, and the door is a handful of strides away. My mother is reminding me again to see a dentist and to take care of myself, not yet releasing her grip on the folded bills, her hand still resting in mine. This is from your dad's parents. They said they think you're too thin. They asked if you were on drugs.
I do nothing. I take a step into the doorway of my workplace.

Sam is smiling at me and holding her bike. She has not yet gotten her new haircut, and is wearing her helmet. My family is walking across the street to their rental car with West Coast license plates. Sam is amused to have seen me interact with my family. She loves my mother. For once, it is my family sealing themselves off in a metal carriage to be machined away. I finger through the bills in my pocket and discover the ones that my father slipped in. He is gone before the crime has even been committed.

Sam rides her bike to the bookstore downtown and I return to the backroom, where I face a bicycle with a tire robbed of air. Once, I patched a hole in my tire with a dollar bill, forgetting about it until I sold my bike to a friend. I realize that I too am a tachyon theif.
Money flows like eye glances, disappearing behind irises. I remember that my mother told me to put my money away into my wallet so I wouldn't lose it.

I get off work and ride my bike to the bus station. I want to return their money. I want my father to be a real theif, moving forwards in time like a normal person. I want my mother to sell me dreams and hopes as I drop bills into her hand.

I try to buy a ticket, but I would have nothing left to return when I arrived.

Apartment hunt

I'm going to Carbondale to find an apartment! Wish me luck.

What Love Is

Loving you is inconvenient. You think
it's callous to talk about love that way.
Your love is
heroic rhetoric. Big as
a canyon, full of air.
My love is a coal mine, all
tunneled out, no light.

Walhalla

I took the road hidden in the dead
of the city, where a heart of forest
canopied the cut-out path
past homes I could never
afford. Where everything fell away
for the five minute drive to its
conclusion. I shift
the car to neutral. My friend once said
a kid hanged himself from the bridge overhead
where my car slows to a creep
under its arch, cowered in shadow.
Trees shake in the warm wind,
branches waving like a warning.
I could keep going. I could
drive all day and still be here.

Overcast

Today, my father's face is full
of shadows, his age showing
like cracks in the sidewalk
we walk along now, talking
about next year and the move
south. I don't want to leave
Ohio, its constant gray, the way
it makes me feel a little sad
most days. How overhead, like
my father's worry in each line of his brow,
the clouds gather around the edges
of the dull sky.

"You've trained me to be crazy."

---Jon Chopan

Mayday

Today I saw a woman walking a three-legged Pomeranian. I don't think
it gets sadder than that. Or maybe I was just sad and saw what I wanted
out of the thing. The way it hopped along on its one front leg like
a pogo stick. Mouth open and tongue unfurled and breathing hard
in the heat of May. Reminding me what's broken can't be fixed.

Joseph

A black man on the corner says,
You are the dreamer, you

are Joseph. Someone howls, Get A Job
and he pulls his technicolor scraps
tighter around his waist.

Overhead, a single pidgeon
sits on the wire and one feather
drops to the street.

Traffic, heavy at midday, stalled.
Hot city air, metallic city noise.
Who has time for dreams

when all we can do is unravel
our threads.

Beatitudes

I woke early to hear the remnants of rain
after an all-night storm. Gray morning, diluted

light coming through the shades. A bird from
the willow chirped, each note

another beatitude. I took my time getting
up, an unfinished dream still warm

in my head: it was two autumns ago
and you were there with a half-smirk,

scarved neck, framed in sunlight.
All the leaves scuttled to your feet

and far off somewhere, a woman’s voice
wisped like a westward wind against my ear.

But this morning I find no love where
once it glared like a thief who overturned

all I own and still wanted more.
My bed was empty and it was spring,

another season without you, had you
been here at all.

.hold.your.breath.

I'm thinking, now that Ruth is back, I might take a brief hiatus to recompose myself and not squeeze out little turds for updates.

I will be back!

French Kiss

The story is that I was just a kid when Mom left us, me and my father and my two sisters. My father gave me her old bathrobe she left behind, ratty blue and white striped cotton. Smelled like her perfume and Aquanet hairspray. She had a life to get on with, a life that didn't include us or who she used to be.

The next time I saw my mother she was living in Murfreesboro, Tennessee and remarried to a man she'd known for a month or two. His name was Lee and he was a burly Southern prototype who believed that heavy discipline was all it took to rear good children. Naturally, he had none of his own. I was eight at the time and I remember how my mother used to kiss him full on the lips, open mouth. I'd never seen her kiss my father that way. Me and the sisters sat in the kitchen of her two bedroom apartment and tried not to stare. Lee poked his tongue against his cheek to make sure we knew Mom had her tongue down his throat. "And that, girls, is a french kiss!" he'd bellow. Mom lowered her eyes and shook her head, her cheeks flushed. I couldn't decide if she was embarrassed or amused by the way her claret-painted lips twisted into a half-grin.

The story is that was the first time I knew I'd lost her for good. Until that visit, I thought she'd be back, thought she'd drive up to Bluffton, Indiana to that crappy rental house next to the gas station off the highway, thought she'd knock on the door in the middle of the night and we'd take her back like she hadn't stomped our hearts into dumb red confetti. I wanted the mother who hot rolled her hair into big, puffed out curls. I wanted the mother who handmade my Christmas dresses and knitted new sweaters for our birthdays. Not this mother with her fishnet stockings and dyed black hair. Her deep V-neck dresses and heels and cigarettes and french kisses.

MIA: a defense

Sorry for the complete lack of posts lately. I don't really have a good reason for it other than being sick & lazy. I'm gonna get my ass back in gear after I'm done wallowing in mucus-soaked misery.

.pneumonia.

Do I have pneumonia? I should probably get that checked out tomorrow. I know I have good health insurance through my parents, and yet, I feel totally incapable at using it.
Where do I go? What do I say?
None of this makes the least bit of sense to me. I've never believed I was sick until my body staggered and fell, a nation of cells caving under internal strife. And even then, it'll pass. I have a certain degree of denial when it comes to my body, I suppose, although perhaps in a slightly different way than, say, a teenage girl. If I were 20 years older, we could chalk it up to believing I'm young and healthy, in my prime.

The last time I remember being really sick, I was so zonked out I couldn't even get out of bed to do much of anything. At most I staggered to the washroom to drain myself of bile. Was I on meds? Probably. I don't really remember what I took. People threw pills at me. They landed in my mouth and slid down my throat.
I still don't know what I had. And it makes me think of ancient times: everyone exhibiting unmistakable signs of sickness, and only in our modern day can we give our afflictions names, a pale grasp to control them.
But you can't fight that cough. And despite rubbing your nose raw, the snot still drips onto your shirt at inopportune times. So don't go on dates when you're sick. Stay home. Enjoy the company of your favourite pillow. Drink something hot. Read something. Take a nap.

And really, who am I kidding. I just got home myself.
You can't control your afflictions by giving them names, so why serve them when they have titles?

.clean.nostrils.

So many birthdays in such a short span. It makes me think that no matter how much we're muddling up our lives right now, we can all think of at least two people that were having a good time x number of years ago.

Yeah, that's pretty gross, but I just went there. It's ok for me, because I've never witnessed my parents doing it. But I've never witnessed them really fighting either. The question, then, is whether or not they were being considerate, or if they are just the Asian robots that society wants to believe they are.

So ask yourselves: with the recent spottiness of our updates, what are Ruth and I doing? Are we being lazy? Are we casting doubts at our literary ring fingers?

It's tough to tell! But don't be surprised if a hiatus happens, and maybe you'll shuffle back and forth every other weekend. You'll probably be better off with her for most of the time.
But don't be surprised either, if we come back at this blog project with the full force of a spring-borne sneeze, expelling all the seeds and pollens of ideas inseminating into the air.
Eyes closed,
lungs emptied,
there's not much left to do but inhale

.untidy.mitosis.

Sometimes - actually, most of the time - I enter a certain illusion that my return home will be ushered in by receptive cleanliness. And below that tidy surface, enough undercurrent of discombobulation to prove that someone has lived here in my absence. I did not leave a tomb. I am not returning to one.

It's rarely the case, though, as you doubtlessly already know. Everyone leaves in a hurry, clothes strewn about: last minute exclusions waiting for the next suitcase out of town. And if not a comparable degree of disarray, entropy does as entropy will, and piles multiply and subdivide, never quite garbage, but never quite clean. We return to the messes we left.
Or how does the saying go?
You made your bed and now you must lie in it.
The inverse is also true. With every surface littered with forget-me-not-but-I-wish-I-coulds, there's hardly a place to be knocked down onto.

.dc.

If your car should get broken into, let it be a shoestring around a brick, holding a note: "drive safely. i miss you already. godspeed."

May

The fan, switched off on the window's ledge, still turned
when the wind ran through it.
I didn't feel so alone. Traffic
slicked by on wet streets. Everything
was motion, everything was stopped.
I sat around watching the spring rain like one does
when their lives become a slow unravel.
Except for those few moments of stupid joy
I took from you, I didn't have much.
But it was enough.

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.