reasons

last night there was a ghost in my room it was tapping on the walls in time with all my heart beats, i am thinking of it’s body, of your body, what do ghost bodies feel like? i am thinking where are your hands? at night the world contracts and shrinks to fit inside my head and then it grows back up to fill me, the atlantic and pacific oceans lapping and swaying around my skull, the ear feeling of loud silence, of woods. i can’t sleep, my eyes are sinking, there are places we should never go . we are just looking for the quiet, why they call it “peace of mind”, looking for dreamers, for something golden and capable of glowing. i am separated up in pieces and i refuse to listen to a word i say, like the teachers in high school; broken eyes and frown wrinkles, forever angry with me for the things i’d never believe in. this feels like the house from that scene in “eternal sunshine,” you know, the one that crumbles.

winter

it’ll come to you, i tell myself, it’ll just saunter right over, take your hands in its hands and ask you for a slow dance, and then what? no one is here. there is nothing like rain on forests. there’s nothing like the sound or the smell. what i want is to be really little , i want to fit in hands. i want to be swallowed. we have far to go, i thought, you see, i am a foreigner, the apple when it turns brown, an unraveling sentence, you’ll lose your use for me. perpetually sitting on the edge of the diving board, wrinkly fingers and dangling legs, that clean, deep smell of chlorine, that waiting and waiting, a sticky guilt. that wonder.
but here and now i keep my knees close to my chest, kiss them when i can, think about the lines and curves in wood , i’m thinking how much better night was in the city, all the noises and stories outside, the honking, the footsteps — just distractions for my brain, for this thing in my head.
still, though, i remind myself, that liquid tap dancing on leaves, wet evergreen smells, a clear light fog sneaking out of the dirt, the soil exhaling. the emotional presence, the trees whispering about it, there’s water in the sky and it’s falling.
to begin this i turned this novel upside down and backwards, the last pages of it, now some kind of excuse for a diary, an excuse for a reason to move the god damn pen across the paper, let the words plop out of the tip of it like goldfish bubbles single file out of the tiny orange mouth, a glub glub chime.
to say: winter is coming, it is nice to be reminded, to stop and stand still long enough you disappear, you’ll see the way we write our winter songs, the air doing most of the work, reminding your skin it can feel, hey you – look alive, it says, you tugging closer to your jacket, running because your feet on the pavement bring a necessary sound, telling the cement ground your name and where you grew up, oh the growing up – you were there, you dark grey ground, i remember. and this too, this sky – the winter we keep finding ourselves in, that same feeling. so many tiny winters all chiming, the way the word christmas feels, the sharp c-h-r like a piece of candy in your mouth, the crescendo i-s-t like a secret, the lazy m-a-s on the end stringing lights in your eyes, and in the trees.

6am

my bones are cold, it’s morning, i get so afraid of what you see in me, what my eyes are when you look at them, you powder blue, you slow fire. i’m afraid that emotions got confused with sounds somewhere mid-creation, if we’ve got it all mixed up, running away except we’re going backwards. but i step out, myself – suspended, outside me. sometimes, sometimes way inside, in the belly of that monster, just keeping the pieces of my body together is hard work, when i close my eyes the limbs fall off and i drip, i shatter.

god damn, he said, and right there, i knew what the devil looked like naked, why sweat was cold at night and warm the rest of the time. i looked down, all there was to do, i saw my two hands, saw a bird, and in my head i could hear how tiny it’s bones were, how soft the wings would be, but i stop myself : i’ll let the air have the birds, my body too heavy for flight, so i go with the flow, as they say, as if, we were out to sea, as if that was all this was.

nov 6th

i want to know when we were ever given any evidence to the fact that beauty might not feel like pain. the answer is never, we were never given anything. the air has it’s fingers around my heart, it’s nails are painted white, i have faith in nothing, the moon is crying out loud and i don’t know what to say. i have changed often, i still am, slipping skin like a snake, coiled inside itself, the heart eats what the heart wants & the villains are always beautiful in the movies, all of us. things keep happening and overlapping, i need them to slow down, everything is clapping, left marked up and fuzzy like after nap dreams, learning if everyone misses you you will always be loved. winter is coming, the leaves are almost gone, the trick-or-treater’s aren’t like the ones in the city, the new world missing two sky scrapers, missing teeth. there’s skin on the scissors i say no, no i am just stirring my coffee with them. the blood.

october 26th 2am

i stay underneath the blankets, protected from the tiny ghosts the air carries, they keep singing their lullaby songs but i pretend it’s just some bluebirds singing, some honey loving hummingbirds, i want to call you but i won’t; it’s late, you’re sleeping and it’s that simple, it’s that easy. i want to call you because there are things i need to ask, things i need to tell you, to hear the way a person sounds when they first wake up, the crunchy voice and breathy sighs. the first thing i would say if i called you is this, i know the answer is yes, you don’t have to say the words, a deer told me in my dream last night, it’s a secret i can keep. the second was what do you think it would be like to be buried face down? the body peering into the sharp bottom of a coffin? my mind is cataloging the unfortunate corpses, there could be so many, all looking down forever into the infinite brown inner shell of the earth. maybe there were reasons for it, old superstitions, forgotten religions that believed this was the way to do it. is there a way to do it? it is funny the way things tug at your head, little kids that can finally cross the monkey bars in the playground “look how far i can go” the mind eats away at the world until it becomes it’s own one, until it’s stuffed up and gluttonous, always passing through red lights and smoking cigarettes next to no smoking signs. it’s late, i want sleep. it occurs to me it is possible i can never sleep on sundays, the “holy day,” they say, but maybe i make these things up, perhaps i turn everything into balloons, plump things up with air and watch them take slow, lazy flight. on the contrary my mind is underneath, nowhere close to flight and yes, i am on the earth but I’m crawling towards the sun. a deck of playing cards flip dramatically in my mind, some faceless dealer – quick and precise, i wonder who the first people to play cards were, the first game invented, who drew them up, designed them? i resign to look into this sometime soon, jot it down somewhere with a juicy inked pen, it sits there looking back at me like some bad dream. i imagine the way the cards sound against each other, the smooth faces of the queens and kings, the simple eloquence of the ace of spades, which card am i? and you?
you faceless wonder, an ever glow distant but still inside me, something unnamed and pretty that people on slopey hills take out to hang with their white sheets along a laundry line.

ampersands in my eyes

when this piano was born i was calling out for it, somewhere on the other side of the world & i ran for miles and miles to find it and when i did i collapsed, i remember things turning a dull shade of yellow, like some magazine ad from the 60’s. i told the gravel to push me back up & it did and i smiled & wrote stories on it with sidewalk chalk, i climbed trees and swung from branches and kept the pine cones i found to give to you we could put tiny bulbs inside all of them and string them up like lights. you said “saeglopur” i said we’ll find it everywhere we go, i said we’ll follow the birds, my heart shook and so did your body and i thought we’d crack open the universe if we weren’t too careful, that we could teach planets how to kiss their moons, my eyes were doing it right now, had their arms around one, watch me, i think, write this down. they say, all you talk about is birds, all you write about is shadows of hearts and season smells and the insides of people who want to be outside themselves but, it’s all true and i just want to let you out. nothing left to do but aimless walking, lost sentences and fevers and clammy hands, i fall asleep thinking about how i always cheated in elementary school when we played 7 up and the bob dylan song that’s stuck in my head keeps playing.

tiger lily

was always me

water bottles & blankets

the words are bumpy and big so we crawl through, like the little globes they placed in the sand that you could stick your head into at the park slope zoo, so you would see the meerkats in their habitat, so you could feel like one of them. This is the thing about life.
this is the thing about where it is you and i find ourselves. i find myself, here and carved wood, feeling like all of you and letting all those kids’ feet crawl around, banging on the roof over my head, their chests caving in like collapsing houses. one by one the little hearts are learning and i close my eyes and look up like dancing in a snowstorm, tasting the flakes but knowing it doesn’t feel like much.
But i am tired of writing about love.
i used to be real in here, flesh and blood. i used to be a lot more of the tactile, of the reactions & satisfactions. things have been folded and unfolded relentlessly but not the pretty way i thought they’d be, in high school, like the counting crows song. a different kind, like putting wrinkled clothes away in a drawer, or making paper airplanes that can never fly.
but god it’s good when you feel real little, but not in time in space, no, more like in someone’s arms. it’s so nice when the wings get light and every little sigh can be heard like echoes & getting inside them.
when words are water rushes and ting tingles and music switches places with god for awhile and you find that yes you’re praying.

mystery trees

we’ll go where they keep the bodies. where they ring those big bells, we’ll say, shout out, hey! you’re doing it wrong! we’ll kiss for hours we won’t hear the bells; no, we’ll be them. climbing up you like ivy; my ivory faced landscape, the smell of acrylic paint, the smell of those slices in time. i’ll take the greens please, i’ll swallow your blues. now only your bed sheets know your secrets, your cotton-soft tear touches, they hold you like arms and i want to be those. the walls watch you and then they close their eyes, i write your name on my ankles, with me every step.

cannibalism

what i don’t understand is how i used to stand on top of your shoes and you’d dance and laugh and i’d laugh a little too and in between those giggles the world rushed over and pulled up a chair and sat down to watch us. but these days it’s quite different, because everyone looks like a bad copy of themselves, or a little kid version dressed up in their parents clothes trying not to cry. and for the second night in a row in my dreams i’ve seen a dog rip apart another dog and eat it. my coffee is cold but i drink it anyway, you standing there like some well-lit mansion and where do my hands go? just, well
let me tell you what i want
i want some vowel sounds out of your mouth
some love hands.
the languages we would speak here, what languages.
no one sounds the same
i watch your mouths for understanding
instead the secrets fall out of your eyes like sand
eyelashes slipping through my fingers