De-cember

One holiday rolls out, another rolls in. The season was not meant for work and strife, but for candlelight and winding hours ignorant of clocks. I return to the bar, the bartender parked across the table telling me stories of her trip to England and rolling her eyes when other patrons come in. The two young girls next to me talk about a boy, and it's all I can do not to lean over and say he's just not that into you, but really the answer isn't that, it's that he's a child, still. He doesn't know how to step up, and she doesn't know, yet, to require it of him. 

You bring out a manuscript, long abandoned, edges scuffed. The voice sounds familiar, but like a distant cousin you know you liked growing up. I had missed you. You're unsure how to approach the wildling, trying to make yourself seem less threatening, even though you know you're not threatening at all. You only want the best for these pages, only want them to come to light in a sparkle. That's not a threat, surely, only a promise. Only a hope. 

She writes from the research institute to say you're next in line for the experimental treatment study. You tell her you're happy now and does that make you ineligible? She says yes. You say, I'm glad, and are a little overwhelmed to realize you mean it. 

She writes from 5th street to say the room is available, and would you like to come see it. You tell her you spend your Mondays down the block, writing. The bartender brings you cheese, this is your neighborhood even though it's been years since you last lived around the corner. Maybe it's time to return. 

Even strays are allowed to come home, 
now and then.  

Re:Pent

How creaky the floorboards of a house long abandoned. You step gingerly into it, but why? It is like stepping into a chamber of your own heart, this is yours, this is familiar and comforting and if I built it why could I not return? 

I never meant to be away so long. Never meant to let these muscles wane into oblivion, into a body I no longer recognize. You, I recognize. You, make sense. Everything else I could let go. 

Fall turns into poetry if you let it, if you remember to watch the leaves twirl to the ground and the wind beat its way into your spine. Brooklyn sits reliable outside your window, even as you remain unreliable within it. You think it's been a year of silence but it's been two, you're losing gallons of the blood you worked so hard to put in your veins, is this how you repay me? 

America, I'm puting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

The best thing about losing your self 
is the premise of finding it 
again. 

Som en Hemlös Själ

You remember it, it remains at the edge of your awareness, a memory of youthful optimism, there was a time when a song could change your heart, you refused the cynicism of people who knew better. How the fire gets washed out by reality. I think you need to shed it. Everything burns around you, why wouldn't you burn, too. 

It's not too late to start over, to go back to the beginning. Remember who you were, remeber how you knew better. 

You sit in a rocking chair on the back porch at sunset, listen to fireworks pretend everything is the best it's been. The dog is anxious, stares at the sky and wonders if you’ll protect her against the unseen enemy. There’s a metaphor in there and you don’t want to see it. 

Go to sleep, try again tomorrow. It’s not too late 

to start over. 

Gloria

New Hampshire sinks into your frazzled edges, fills voids you didn't know you had. You try impatiently to force a peace, a purpose, but that's not how it works, and you should know it by now. A third season on the road, summering across America, escaping into the outskirts. They offer you an apartment in Brooklyn, everything about it should have you saying yes, but when you drive out of New York along the FDR early one Saturday morning, all the shoulds wash away and you're left with the same inexplicable yearning for Manhattan that pulled you across oceans time and again and you were never sorry. 

I gave you my tired, my poor, I promised to want for nothing if only you'd love me, and I mean it still, how can I mean it still? There's something kind in a love that refuses to abate. 

I have lost so much, New York, but I have yet to lose you. 

So though the road leads north, 
I'll be back when the nights get longer again.  

Summer

You pack up

You leave

You mourn for a second but then the country spreads out before you. So you forget. 

You leave behind. 

I told you once I will always run, 

And I didn’t know how fast I’d hold to that truth. 

It feels less like fleeing,

Now. 

It feels so much more

Like flying.

108 degrees

My envy of the waterfowl in the Buttermilk Channel knows no bounds. 

I am a thousand degrees of humidity. I am a pile of loosely frazzled curls atop my head. I am summer, am joy.  

I am joy. 

How many dark months did I not remember this feeling, did I think it a figment of my imagination, a youthful state to which I would never return. And now, how easy it is, how self-evident. Of course you are a million morsels of happiness, what else could you be? 

I am yearbook signings and last day of school giggles. I am temporary goodbyes. I am adventure on the horizon. The heat wave breaks and breaks against the glass monoliths of Manhattan but does not break me, this is the difference. 

For so long you thought you had nothing, were nothing, the illness takes and takes when you have nothing left to sacrifice, sometimes I think I live a half life, offering so much upon its demanding altar. 

But would the light, when it comes, look as bright if I had not the black of night with which to compare it? Would I know the preciousness of this joy if I had not endured months in its absence? Do you not think, when I go to die, I will add up both sides of the coin and find 

That the life came out 

To full? 

Raise

You sprint to the end of an era; your landlord throws you a lifeline and tells you to hold on to it for later. Your parents ask if you couldn’t cross the ocean and babysit their plants instead, you are a perpetual potential to those around you who see your flailing tethers and long to hook them to their agendas. 

It’s too sunny, too warm, the breeze to mild for you to be angry about this. 

We sat in Battery Park and watched our heritage dance around us until dark, sat at the edge of Red Hook and watched the sun set behind the Statue of Liberty, I sat under a tree in a spot of shade and watched clovers hide their fourth leaves, life is a mystery. I packed the contents of a year into the open nooks between contents of a life in my storage unit, 

life is predictable. 

June has arrived now, my darling, summer has arrived to take us all somewhere new. All you have to do is hang on. 

All you have to do is live it.