Tales

In an entire day, do not leave the room. Do not put on clothes, do not paint your face. Do not make food or answer your phone. The world beyond beckons, do not listen. Stay in the three by three feet square where your street stolen desk chair can roll, wrap yourself in soundtracks on repeat, sit at the white page and watch it bleed into a whole new world, an adventure you can only guess as it unfolds before your fingertips. Write stories because they want to be told. Imbue innocence with resistance. You bought yourself time to buy yourself this magic. Turn on the light, turn off the clocks.

Revel in your riches.

Monday

The nights grow so long in sleeplessness, but come daylight there is warm sun streaming in through the 4th street windows. I prop one open with a book, feel the cool winter air on my skin and remember again what it is like to breathe. The newsfeed carries on relentless but you try not fall under. Glance at your bank account when rent is due but focus on watering the plant. The walls of your writing nook look more like a paranoid serial killer's by the day, but a world builds in the back of your head and you believe if you could only dive into it proper, all this despair could be worth it. Turn the clocks, wear the clothes and empty the pantry, embrace a solitary silence and live in the peculiar twists and turns of your imagination.

The sun sets. Everything is only beginning.

Revolution

The warning bells of your childhood
of generations born out of oppression
ring hoarse into the void of what came after Camelot
The nights grow long
trying to wash out the devastations of the day

Everything that has come before
seems suddenly wiped from your insides
The earth trembles beneath in solidarity

You burned everything

We burned
Everything

Do not drown
in the ashes.

One More Try

The days are warmer than they should be, you know to let the sunlight warm your skin when it deigns to, but the gray swatch brushed across the land devastates you regardless. You sit on a slow F train from queens, a stalled R train from Brooklyn, you wait in the tunnels and platforms of the underworld and feel your last resistance quietly trickle out of you.

I sat at an unknown bar, alone but for a surly owner, and stared at quickly emptying glasses of beer, trying to will answers out of them. No one gives. The mornings grow longer, when rising out of one's bed becomes a mountain to climb.

You know this, too, shall pass.
You've yet to see if you will pass with it.

3:25 PM

Gray Monday morning feels
out of clean underwear so you wear
none
out of space on the floor
for the piles of clothes
and discarded good
intentions
Looks like rain
Sounds like
oppression

Angry words
still ring in
your ears
scrambling for a foothold
Either don't listen at all
or go all in and
unravel

But somewhere in your muscle memory
in the molten lava that cooled in your gut
and took your soul with it
the slightest amber
ember
lights
and smolders
and warms the void

In the mess that is life around you
spring little words
and leaves of white paper turned to stories
In the mess that is life around you
your life returns
to the page.

45

The world no longer looks how you knew it
Curtains pulled aside
Cue soundtrack
Cue rainfall
In an instant everything unrecognizable

Today you may cry
(great ugly gobs into your tequila)
But tomorrow
Tomorrow you fight.

Scribbles

The days are long but the nights are longer. They sneak up on me and suddenly are all around. Roommates go to bed one by one. The street goes quiet. A radiator hisses but it doesn't make anything warm. I spend the days making blanket forts on a couch in Chelsea, while it rains. She is sad that the man named Obama won't be president anymore. But where will he go? Can I see him tomorrow before he isn't president anymore? She asks what comes next and I don't know what to tell her. The entire week swims around in a mire of its own indiscretions.

Fight. Fight fair. No one knows what happens now.

Afters

I looked out the window
in the late morning
(too late, I know, I overslept but it's so hard
to will oneself out of dreams and into reality)
The street corner below
looked gray
and sad
but I may have been projecting
Although if I were honest (with myself)
it'd be nuclear holocaust.

I woke with a fire in my chest
I wanted to tell you all about it
You are always the first person I want to tell
any of these things
all of these things.

I know I shouldn't
want to
But it's one of such few truths I have
that I hold on to it
like a precious
gift.

I give it to myself
like a stab wound to the gut.

Elizabeth and Prince

I moved in in 1985, he says somewhere along Houston. I payed maybe $300 at the time, but it was still money. I was moving out of a 3 bed-room down the street and I've been there ever since. I considered my own residences since I was 11 and realized I'd never lived anywhere more than 4 years in that tiny West Village room with the teapots, and even that seemed fleeting and ethereal. Vagabond, he says. After 17 years I assume he is right. We look at the construction and remember a gas station that is no more. They had the most gorgeous signage. 

Things change, everything changes and when you stop to notice it, it cuts in your chest. Try not to remember. Walk up Bowery, once messy and downtrodden and alive now laced with drunk teenage girls trying to get into the hotel club. I elbow them as I go. Laugh inside when they fall. At least tomorrow I wake up in New York again.

b., amended

When I walk into a room
I do not light
it
up

Fuck. 

b.

There's a space
after the end
before whatever comes next comes
(and things will come
because life doesn't stop
waiting for you to catch up)
that is so empty
so quiet
so dark
you forget why you ran the race at all

You close your eyes
But you still wake up
with yourself.

2017

A year has passed since David Bowie died, and so much else, you are not oblivious. Sometimes it takes you longer to get places than it does others. Sometimes you feel like life is one of those dreams where you run and run but get nowhere while the darkness chases you. When you look back you've gotten somewhere, after all, but fuck if it's enough. The bar across the street has 2-for-1 drinks on Tuesdays, you see the sign from your bedroom window and try to find one good reason not to fall down the fire escape and land in drunken oblivion.

A new year lies at your feet. They keep doing that, and piling up behind you like discarded wrappers. In the distance, earlier years gleam a little more than others, like something good was in there. The year that passed already burns in a tin can. I took a shower this morning so long it felt like I washed the entire year away. Nothing that rotted in that year will stay with us, will come into this new treat of a future, everything begins now.

January is grey but inside you is a spark, and a flame, and the knowledge that if you fight this war you could set fire to the stars.