(just)

Late night conversation, your head spins and you walk around in a daze, not just for lack of sleep. How does one do the right thing when all options on the table will hurt? Everybody bleeds at the end.

I fall asleep early, with a strange autumn wind piercing through the window. There's a storm brewing in your gut. It's too soon to guess now the fallout.

Say It Can Be

Late night playgrounds with the lights out, the swings move different under adult conversation. I had to stop for a minute to hear the words: they were not surprising, they were true. We walked past a street corner where a former literary character of mine had potentially lived, in an instant the entire book came flooding back over me. I missed her violently, first sweetly in recollection, then in mourning. She was packed away and abandoned, never to live in the imagination of another. The bitter taste in my mouth trickled out all morning in sticky aired Tompkins Square park during those magic hours when the bums own it again, the ragged, when I can relax. Anaïs Nin speaks to me in voices in the back of my head; she colors the fire escapes and sunsets, the burning sliver of new moon, I remember how it felt to always walk through her melodies and now I have since forgotten. Too much fire packed away, and for what?

I am angry with myself today. Maybe tomorrow I bring out the shears.

Cove

A quiet Sunday arrives when you are not looking. Your windows are closed so you sleep like dead, wake full of possibility and sunshine, it seems too simple but perhaps this is the respite you've earned, like the first day well after illness how everything seems lighter than you knew it before. She writes from the mountains, all northern light turmoil and emotion addiction, you haven't any advice worth its weight but your ears will remain on the line however long it takes. The streets swelter even as the leaves turn; you think it might be a metaphor and wonder if so, what for. You've been taught you can't have it all: were they wrong? I sat by the river one night and watched the lights go out on the Empire State, soon every street in this city will be washed with your name, I haven't the sense yet to stop it.

By sense I mean desire.

It is still summer and in summer there is no fear.

Baby Blue

Grand Central Station late on a Thursday packs up and winds down. The floor of the great hall quiet, a moment's rest before the commuting hoards return. We stood whispering in corners, stealing moments in transit while the city looked on, benevolent. Summer returns and you are caught unawares; they say if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. But you have known this city long enough to know that it doesn't follow rules, doesn't subscribe to convention. If the city wants to give you gifts, it will.

You've known the city long enough to know, that if it gives you gifts, you'll do best to take them.

The Hours

They speak
Your soul forgets to burn because your skin is already
on fire
We discuss periods at the ends of sentences like
weapons
but it's too soon for anything but
softness
sweetness
flower beds of caresses so your skin
smolders
in the tight seat
deaf to the poetry
deaf to the baptist church choir
deaf to anything but your own
beating
heart it says
yes
yes
yes
never mind the score
for once you think you'll let
it

The Choice is Yours

My fingertips burn with burgeoning calluses, steel strings still smarting from months of neglect. I forget how to make bar chords. I woke shortly before lunch with a start but reveled in familiarity; nights were made for writing, not mornings, your life was made for madness, not order. All afternoon, the blood in my body on fire, beating through my skin and falling out in words, spilling into sentences, I recognize the face in the paper mirror and hadn't remembered to long for her, thinking she was but a figment of my imagination.

For a dream, she feels terribly real.

Mused

Two a. m. trains on Sunday night run in a different plane, are inhabited by a different people. On the seven train into Manhattan they sleep on their way to work, on the four running local they sit quiet, disheveled, but comforting. How many nights have I walked these streets so late at night and always the city looks out for me, always the city keeps me safe, I write illegible scribbles in a notebook and lose stray pens in my hair. I do not want to sleep now, I want to keep speaking with the city until dawn because at last no one interrupts our conversation. The air is velvet, the cars quiet, at two a. m. the Empire State Building goes dark, I spent a summer in a Greenpoint window watching it sleep and here we are still wrapped in the same love story. It builds its momentum perpetually. 

Perhaps it never ends. 

Sunday

The story returns to you late at night, after you've exhausted every option for escape, after the quiet has dragged your fears from their hiding places deep in your chest and run them along your line of vision for hours, it seems cruel to punish before the reward but you'll take it, you'll take any sadistic tricks from the Universe for those pages to be written. You go to sleep with a smile on your face and wake ten pounds lighter at the memory, but every day starts the cycle anew. You sit in front of the blank page again and wonder what drives you to such madness.

The answer, of course, is that it was never up to you to begin with.

It is, in fact, the madness that drives you.

Glycerine

(You write poetry
because you cannot tell
stories
only bleed.)

Naive

The Great Novel evades me, slips through my fingers and taunts me at a distance. I tear out my hair to appease the gods, employ every tactic of procrastination in the book, hell I write that book sooner than this one, but to what avail. The street outside buzzes with life, summer returns for a sweet revival and the sidewalks are littered with tables. We drove to the ocean to look at it but the air was sticky and your wet feet unsatisfying (your body aches for complete immersion anytime it nears the sea), the seasons are changing, you know it is time to accept it. Virginia Woolf killed herself, all your heroes die but you think perhaps you want to live; it's a newfound idea, and you move it between your hands like putty. The vodka in your glass melts the ice, slowly, methodically, like the Arctic glaciers meet their demise now you watch eternity in its transparency. It's all sentences, one after another, but you are not sure yet your crime.

I rest my hands on the typewriter. It burns crumbles under my hopes, a pile of ashes at my fingertips.  Unto dust shalt thou return. But not now.

Not yet.

14&6

(Late nights
in Greenwich Village
still retain the same magic
now
as ever

It's a comfort.)

And Yet

(Your free minutes are few, and precious, and try as you might to spend them ticking off your to-do lists,  you find yourself with your head in the clouds and unwilling to come down.
A year from now what will you wish you had done today?
But you're not sure you'll have wanted to do this differently.)

Strangers Personal

I woke up late, too late, a dream lingering on my brow of bags that refused to be packed and the melancholy pull of departure. I had sat by an unfamiliar piano with Regina and ignored the changing tides, I wonder what it meant. I don't want to go anywhere. Later, by the river, my muscles were mute and refused to lift, I hallucinated stories of people jumping off roofs, it's that time of year again you know, it will pass, it will always pass it's just today I'm tired, just today. She sends pictures from a mountainous north, says maybe I live here now, you look in your medicine cabinet for a flashlight to keep the darkness at bay, every day follows the next: this is life. You've been given the option to leave, before. Your bags remain unpacked.

It's all right.

As You Are

A warm late summer sun shines, ignorant of the changing seasons and the chill of winds at night. You keep light clothes easily accessible, glancing at your sweaters in bemusement. It's a morning as sunny as many, many years ago, and that day barely makes the front page anymore: the earth revolves perpetually, it is a comforting fact. Time will pass whether you are ready for it to, or not; I bookmark foliage maps and will myself to accept the coming of the dark. Three years ago I crossed the ocean to watch my grandmother die before my eyes and the fall was beautiful then, too, it was warm, and still, and vibrant, and we sat in the sunny window reading poetry. I knew she was mostly elsewhere already, a tiny frail bird in oversized sweaters and hospital underwear, ready to return to her childhood north and she saw only my mother in my face. I stayed long past visiting hours while the nurses left food for me in the fridge that I could not will myself to eat. Late at night falling into the kitchens of my friends as they tended my wounds: I thought family is created, they did not falter.

The last day, I read our favorite poem, and the light in her eyes returned. She looked into my tear-soaked face, listened intently to every line and nodded. We both knew it was the last time we read these words together, but in every line lay the previous thousand times we had. In every last trill lay years upon years of laughter together. The last time I hugged my grandmother and told her I loved her was only one time of countless; maybe it was unique, but it was only confirmation of a love we no longer needed words for.

I still hear her laugh in mine sometimes. It is light, like the lemon curtains of her kitchen window, like the pink magnolia in her backyard, like the way she only ever wanted beauty and joy in the world, it dances to the ceiling. I still hear her laugh in mine.

And so she is not gone.

-

(you begin
to pack words
when you cross the river.
you know what it means
though you hesitate to say it
out loud.
a piece of home comes along.)

Musings

Key Foods on Avenue A is a sad place on weekday afternoons. Sad, you could say, or beautiful, or just true. The woman in front of you tells the cashier she is both a cat person and a baby person, even though people say you have to be one or the other. Another cashier yells at a man with only half his teeth to take the coupon flier from the front of the store, not from behind her register. The elderly are out in force, the decrepit, everything moves slower down the aisles than at night and you adore the scene. I have time for every delay. The sun shines like summer but the wind blows fall through your hair.

You see the waves approaching shore, feel them wash around your feet and rise to your kneecaps. You know you've only been on temporary leave, been offered a summer's reprieve to fill your lungs with air and soon the cold water will knock you down again, send you swirling into the maelstrom, turn everything you touch to rot.

But we are not there yet, you tell the woman at the checkout when she isn't paying attention. And maybe this time I'll know how to breathe underwater. 

to Palm

It rains in darkness; your closet is confused by the changing season and you wonder why you haven't mourned summer yet. (Everything races ahead regardless of if you remember to be sad or not.) Navigate the puddles with a laugh and make mental notes to invest in more appropriate attire, knowing full well it'll be years still before you commit. It always ends, eventually. I stare at his sculpture and marvel that magic flows out of human beings, out of nothing. How we can create worlds and leave someone else different than when they came. Later, in that soft red light, the music buzzing in your fingertips, how when he speaks of play you are exactly 15 years old again at a piano you knew like breathing, 7 and telling stories that never settled on paper but lived between your temples, 11 and painting micro cosmos as the hours while away underneath your thumb. It was a thousand miles away but returned at the turn of a phrase.

I woke with a weight on my forehead but that same feeling in my chest; sunshine returned to the island, summer lingers. There is nothing to mourn.

Through the Ceiling

Wake like a rock against gravity, dreams of pleading with dental experts that I've done everything right and still this destruction. But the alarm clock whispers words of freedom, of hours swirling ahead with nothing but creative dances in their path and you know the blooms are all yours for the picking. His voice rings in your ears not like a corral: like a wave. You read poetry and imagine every line is a gift.

It is.

Rattle

Heat roars across the avenues in a last desperate attempt at exerting power but it is futile: everyone has seen the forecast. We sit in union square park and giggle at the last round of sunscreen sand masks along our arms and ears, revel in that particular kind of tired you feel on a humid summer day, secure in the knowledge that the sun will not leave even when the seasons move on. It is the last day before laundry but I am unfazed; everything south of 14th street I own and you can't touch this, it is invincible. A poetry publication landed in my mailbox this morning and I long for the word like a lover; it sings in me as it approaches.

Count down hours, minutes until my eyes will rest only on you.

Diet Coke

The days do not wait for you to have time for them. They fill up and spill out all over the whirlwind in your head, the ache in your muscles. The train leaves on time and the rain begins on schedule, after the I do's have washed the bride's eyes all on their own. You reveled in the effortlessness of celebrations, of returning to familiar rivers with a new scent against your restlessness, it smelled of safety and adventure all at once, I slept for hours. We walked outside long after sunset to find that everything looked the same, but somehow you knew it wasn't. A cold wind blows across the avenues and takes summer as it goes.

You decide it doesn't mean anything at all.

Eleven

An anniversary comes and goes, eleven years of this skyline etched on the inside of your eyelids, I stood and looked on it from another shore but felt closer to it than ever. There wasn't time to celebrate, properly, like you like to do in your solitude, but at the end of the night, on the 4 train passing your first stop ever on 28th street it occurred to you that perhaps this was perfect. I landed in this city, again, early this morning and sprinted right into another day, Madison square park glorious and picturesque like a postcard, the back end of Chelsea dirty and real, Long Island city like a testament that there is much left to discover. It's September before I reach my bed, my dear morsel of space on a noisy street corner in Manhattan, the wind blows cold now but everything, everything in you beats warm, beats frantic.

Beats alive.