On Gratitude

The whirlwind escalates. Life flashes before you in a mad rush, you work, you laugh, you have no time for rest and your body screams to no avail, you haven't the time to stop and listen. Fall asleep every night before your head hits the pillow, see your main character wither at the edge of your vision and you want so much to hold her, to carry her forward but you don't know how to put her first, it's the same story over and over and rent is due on the first you count your pennies. Suddenly an unexpected opening; the Universe steps in to open a window. You see a streak of light and hold on to it like a child.

The point of life is not to never fall off the track. The point is to get back on it. I rested on my laurels and how sweet a sleep it is but how stagnant. The world vibrates around me in opportunity, loved ones take hesitant steps on shaky legs and marvel at their own strength. I sat for a quiet moment in a bar on the lower Lower East Side with a deep breath in my lungs and silent tears in my eyes and marveled at presence. These days will run past us if we do not see them. These people will leave us if we do not hear them. Life gets sticky and perhaps you can't skirt by it anymore. I take the little girl's hand in mine. Gently. Like I love her.

The only way out is through. 

2017

(There is much to say but perhaps infinite time to say them. The point is, this year I am grateful
for you.)

Chandelier

At last the excuses have run themselves out, at last every distraction has been dealt with and the wine bottle lies empty in the recycling bin it is late but you do not sleep. At last you sit down by the blank page and caress it until letters fall out, until black ink smears the margins and your head dances again in pictures.

At last you remember - truly remember not just in platitudes but in your heart - that you have seen the other side and did not belong in it, that you are not fearful of work but of the lack thereof, that you may get distracted by the well lit path but it is not for you to walk. Year after year you remember, you are reminded. The story unfolds at your fingertips it is late but you are not tired.

You are what rises from your ashes.

to Show Me

(We sat in the late autumn sunlight and watched yellow leaves dance to the ground and I thought I have never seen pain. In a messy room in an East Village tenement building, a word processor lies untouched, a pile of pages lie blank.

It's only because I think these streets are mine, that I hesitate. It's only because I fear if I share them, I can also lose them. You sit like a life raft steady at the surface and reach out your hand, but I see if I am to grab on, all the sludge around my ankles will follow, and once it's seen sunlight there's no going back.

I cannot pretend this tabula rasa forever. Set fire to the streets. Wait and see what survives the flames.)

November

(the sun is still shining
it's not the same as it shines in June
but it is there,
it is making the best of its circumstances
it's fighting for you when you need it
the least you can do
is see it
acknowledge it
and fight like hell in return.)

Quest

When you wake, the apartment is warm and the morning mild, winter sunshine trickling up the quiet street. The past day moves slowly like a hangover across your brow, but it's leaving, you know it, you can feel your chest lift in deep, clear breaths: you've made it through the storm. A broom rests at the corner of the bed, waiting for you to sweep away the debris and start anew.

The fire destroys, it burns and razes your fledgling shoots, but when you survey the damage, it turns out your core remained intact and what was lost in the blaze was the flurry of distraction, of fluff that never was going to get you where you were going, it was only low level brush. You didn't want to trudge around the forest floor.

You always meant to aim for the sky.

After math

(After the fire,
What remains crackles
And floats through the air
Its edges still bright orange
Burning
winding  slowly to the ground
And you
Singed
Numb next to them
Gray like ash
Looking for the seeds
To start anew)

Tally

At the end of the day, exhausted, you are washed ashore panting. Pull out a sheet of paper and run through the day's bookkeeping. Count the words in your story, nod. Count the miles under your feet, nod. Take a deep breath, dare to look at the other corner, dare to put your pen to the column on the other side of the line. See self doubt spread like a black cancer across your pages, see it eat your flesh and arch its brow at your tattered life. Hear it rifle through your paperwork and laugh at your juvenile delinquency. The disease smells your fear, feasts on it, envelopes you in dark smoke and begins to pull you under. Who do you think you are? You grapple at the few beams of light you can recall, mantras or songs you may repeat but you tumble quickly into the void and it would be so easy to simply let go (lord knows you've done it before, lord knows you've swam in the sunken place and let the cold water fill your lungs, it doesn't ever have the grace to kill you it only drowns you alive).

But you are determined now to look this monster in the eyes, to read its every ticker tape and watch its mouth create the words that aim to tear you apart; you are determined now to shine a flashlight at its gruesome face and see it was just a collection of sheets in the wind. You will collect them, fold them up, make your bed with them and sleep soundly. You will keep score and one day when you nod you will smile.

Reaper

A day stretches out ahead of you: sunny, solitary, free. A word processor lies at your fingertips, quiet, waiting. How you have longed for this moment. You sit in it for a minute, let the panic of inactivity and parched bank accounts twirl around you, it is November so the panic almost wins.

But a small tree grows inside your chest. It twists and turns and sprouts little shoots of hope and stories worth telling, it beats persistently in  your veins and rustles along your nerve endings. It looks frail still. You vow to water it until it grows stronger than your every fear.

Glycerine

It begins early, as soon as you wake up there's a rain cloud trying to beat its way into your chest and you're too tired to stop it though you know you ought to. It sets itself down on your left lung, breathes a heavy, sticky glue onto your organs and invites its friends. By lunch, there's a small party, by sundown it's a veritable rager and everything that could go wrong with your day, does. Your eyes blacken, your head swims, there's a mouse in the oven and all you do is lean over carefully and turn on the broiler. It's an analogy, and you know it.

Sit in the fiery silence of a Requiem, consider what other steps you could take, try to be the bigger person in a day that wants you belittled but come up short on how. Some days we must simply throw to the dustbin, feed to the wolves, better the day than you, better lose these precious hours than let your flesh decompose and disintegrate, tomorrow you will breathe easier again and there must be some potion can scrub the glue off your lungs, you will find it. Today is not the day to speak big words, today is the day to whisper soothing encouragement to your insides, swallow the last of the vodka, and move the fuck on.

A Requiem ends. It was not written for you.

In the Arms

The callouses on my fingertips harden, they've taken up the fight against the steel strings and I'm starting to think they may come out on top. The bar chords still win their escape. Last night I sat in the cold cellar of an old church and heard voices of the South beat the Lord into my lungs; it's hard not to believe music is salvation when it vibrates in your spine. Eventually the room fell away, eventually the audience disappeared, my body turned to lead and all that existed was a heart on fire, was knowing that everything is everything and everything is nothing, you thought of sage Jack in his delirium and he knew, he knew, and maybe there's a point to that as well.

We stepped out onto a 16th street that acted as if nothing was different, the Arctic winds raging up 3rd avenue and you thought everything is here, with gratitude swimming behind your eyes; you know there was a time before this when you were lost and you're sure there's a time after this when you won't remember what a smile feels like, but they're so distant now, they're so faint they can't touch you, when I woke this morning the room was an ice box but I smiled because everything is everything and as such so are you.

Signed

A ferocious cold front sweeps across the island and rattles leaves still green on their boughs. We spent a day retracing steps from years ago, when he was half as tall but just as thoughtful; it feels like a lifetime ago and you're not quite sure who you were then. You were happy, but what else? You tried then, too, but your throat was not lined up with the guillotine yet, and perhaps that's the trick.

I came home late, tired and restless, and began tearing at open drawers (I'm not sure if I mean literally), until it was 2 a.m. and music had beaten a smile into my step, my closet rearranged into its winter shroud. The window keeps shimmying down and letting floods of ice age air wash out my bed,  but the radiator hisses now and again, and this vodka keeps me warm, and I think I think I think I see light around the edges and I'll piece them together, I think I think I think I'll figure it out I'm not ready to lose just yet, I'm not ready to lose at all, I think this time I want the prize for myself and maybe I'll just fight till it's mine.

and Whistles

Late night in midtown, before the Tree arrives, after the tourists have returned to their berths and the avenue is unusually still, turn a corner and enter doors you've only seen from without. There's a familiarity in wires, in giant spotlights strung from soundproof ceilings, in buzzes of creative technology; there's a matted air around deadlined frenzy, and it comforts you. He turns a page and you read it a hundred times as fast as you can, trying to commit it to memory. Here are my sleeves, everything is on them. You zip up your jacket but make a note to try other routes. Soon, soon.

On the train home, that reliable F train carting me up and down this city at all hours and never asking any questions, a sudden sadness gripped me and I couldn't shake it while I lay shivering in bed. The heat came on, at last, the first violent sputtering of the season; it hissed in my eardrums as I fell asleep but could not drown out the cold fear in my chest. Anything but sunshine is darkness. Anything but perfection can just as well go to curbside collection.

You read your note, consider the map. Wonder if soon is now.

Re:Sent

(It's cold now, so cold and the days get dark so quickly, in an instant it turns. You feel the fear grip your chest. Every year, the same fear:

will I make it out alive?) 

Re:Set

But what has happened to your manic ramblings? What has happened to the lyrical dances that rushed through your head unasked and painted the inside of your eyelids in scintillating stories, coloring the world in words? How are the days passing you by in silence? 

A year comes to an end. 12 months ago, you shed the cloak of the straight and wide (again, again, you shed it a hundred times over but keep buying it again on layaway, paying for it with your freedom and praying this time it'll keep out the cold when it never did before), how new and possible it all felt then and now you can barely remember any other life than this.

Fall lands slowly on the steaming streets, leaves rustle into yellow and darkness moves in when you look away, it's so easy to sit blissful in a Brooklyn Heights bay window and I'm not sure why I wouldn't. You tell people you're a writer and gauge their reactions. You'd rather keep this secret to yourself: it is your treasure, not their object to inspect, turning it over in their hands and considering its worth. A year ago you walked out of a Manhattan office building in your business casual attire, nestled into a messy, dusty, fantastical tenement nook and did not look back.

Some days you may doubt, you may let the fear creep into your heart and silence your trembling voice, but no matter.

Wherever you go,
You always come home again.