.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.