Temperatures

I called in sick, he writes in the early morning; you cross the river with chicken soup and tenderness, it spills out of you helplessly, you do not try to stop it. The late January air is cold but not cruel, you set your alarm for sunrise because at least then you can wake with a smile. Read and re-read the old words, etch into your lungs that it's only a waiting game, that you can force these breaths into your chest until you win it. Some days you believe your own ignorant determination. Some days are harder. But I sat in a Brooklyn bay window today and words appeared on the paper like they were supposed to, like it wasn't a miracle, like I hadn't cut through treacle to reach them, and I think, if the words can continue to dance in innocence,
then so can I.

Try

With the lights out
It's less dangerous

The Darkness returns. It grabs hold of you like you're an old friend, like it missed you and longed to smother you in its arms, there's something primal in its powers, you succumb at last. Every year the same weight in your chest, you count down minutes until it ends, you track sunset times and try to remember how to breathe even if nothing else sticks. You sleep heavy sleeps and wake with uneasy nightmares drifting across your brow. Stay alive on sheer faith.

One day this will all be over and you won't believe it ever buried you like it does.

Forgetting the Darkness is the only way
to live in the Light.

Falls

When you find yourself in the tangled web,
your every extremity tied into inertia
the dark of winter like a lid on your eyes
like a weight on your chest
just sit for a minute
realize you are still breathing
despite the vacuum you are still
breathing
unwrap yourself gently
the sun will return eventually
all you have to do
is
survive

Resist

You are not your words

As much as your actions.

Do the right thing

And you won't have to tell anyone 

Who you are. 

Re:Vive

There's a space, unassuming, on a street you'd never see, normally, where the Times Square crowds don't reach you, there's a rickety stair case and a sound proofed door, there's room enough only to breathe, room only for your soul to sit, to know itself, to remind you of its existence. The voice in my chest is quiet from disuse, my limbs tremble, but they are here. I am here.

And the voice is all my own.

Den of Thieves

When you wake, the sunshine has returned. You know it's a trick of the lights, but it feels just like March when you believe life is around the corner, and you'll take the brief respite. Pound early morning wake up calls into your typewriter even as the spectre of fear lurks in your pipes, pray your ignorant bliss will win this war for you and you'll come out on the other side with only character for scars.

Perhaps we spend most of our life making excuses
for why we're not living it.

Hosanna

But he is one of those suffering writers, he says, a new face on an old couch in our sunny living room, and you say that you were, too, in your youth. There's a light laugh at the end of the sentence, everything is terribly pleasant when you think you are only writing adventure stories with heart.

But at the end of the night, when the bourbon has sunk to the bottom of the glass and you have looked up every shred of evidence at the world's brilliance against your pathetic normalcy, that familiar night sweeps in over your heart, drenches it in black. It whispers the same words you've heard since you first started hearing voices; it convinces you to hold your own head under water until the lungs give out and all these smiles you wrote were only kidding themselves. Maybe Sylvia suffered but she did so beautifully and all the while wrote furiously. The mirror on your bedroom door has twisted in the cold, your reflection looks like a fun house joke, it's appropriate.

The suffering is only beautiful in retrospect, is only poetic after success. You wonder when it's time to pull out the want ads. Wonder when it's time to pull the plug.

You know January wants to see you bleed dry.
You just haven't the work ethic to prove it wrong.

Pretty House

We found a mouse in the bathtub this morning, a tiny wet thing frantically trying to jump up the sides of smooth, white porcelain and tumbling back down at every turn. We caught it somehow and, unable to bring ourselves to kill it, tossed it shrieking out a side window into the snowy alley and where it disappeared in an instant. I skipped the shower and went straight for another cup of coffee.

The days stretch out in front of me like beautiful, snowy presents; I long for the word processor, for the words, I long to escape into a world I've painted and rummage about in it like it's the first day of summer vacation and the grass is new under my bare feet. There's a smile in my chest that wasn't there before, it's been a while since I felt it, it's delicious. It rolls across my tongue.

When I starve
it feeds my soul.

Lacrimosa

I cried today
again, today,
it's been a week
But here's the thing
Today I cried in words
in affection
in the overwhelming power
of creation
I cried in seeing the secret at the base of
these tales I tell
They are not an innocent play
in frivolity
They are me
trying to love me
and in so doing,
living a life

And maybe that is what all art is

We have such short time on earth
to make sense of it however
we can.

Dawn

The moment after the storm passes is quiet, peaceful. Weather presenters lose their voices yelling about the cold, but the sun shines, and you'll take the freeze over a beating any day. I wake with air in my lungs, with a lightness in my chest, I wake in poetry even as the ocean remains swimming behind my eyes. After 35 years you thought you'd know these demons when they come to call but you stand blind in the doorway as ever. All you can do is vow to do better.

The world lies at your feet. It'll wait until you thaw, just as long as you do.

Hurt

I shouldn't have turned the valve, I knew it, six hours later I'm still telling myself I know better and a childhood of admonishment claws at the back of my head this bourbon isn't helping where are my pills. It's stupid, so stupid, in the end it's only material damage it can all be replaced with money and I'm sure you can find some of that if you stop spending it on buying yourself freedom. The monologue raves. In the shower I draw tattoos over my body, but on dry land my tears wash them away in an instant. My hopes and dreams go with them, how frail this solid ground on which I stand, and instead I spend the evening cleaning up the sludge that rested in one hundred years of New York City tenement code. You don't know why everything you touch turns to shit.

There's a message for you in here somewhere, and you're determined to read it right this time. Put on your glasses. You're out of excuses, now.

more.

The year begins as they so often do, with fits of cleaning, sorting through a dilapidated closet and building bags for the Salvation Army shop, scrubbing refrigerators and writing lists for improvement. But when dinner comes around, cliched early January burning muscles gasping for oxygen in my legs, I decide to burn all my fireworks at once, serving up long-saved lamb and homemade wine: a meal awaiting an occasion so special it would never come. I think of my grandmother, how she served every coffee, every water, in a vessel from the fancy cupboard: her grandparents crystal, her wedding china. Because how you spent your days is how you lived your lives and would you not want it to be magic. She had a laugh that sparkled in those glasses.

After dinner, I read a dead woman's final love letter and think that more may be the most beautiful word we can taste on our tongues, not drunk with immortality, but as beings ever desirous, ever longing, ever curious. I cried over her sweet sentiments, over the welcome reminder that while life is often not fleeting, it does end, and we'll never have had enough when it does. The year is new, the page unwritten, but we must savor each moment regardless. The wine is delicious. My grandmother lives no longer.

I consider tattoos across my rib cage.

Vow to make 2018 not a year without fear
But the year I am fearless.

One Day Like This

The temperature continues to plummet, you run down an empty Brooklyn street in the middle of the night praying for a car but also laughing so that's what you'll remember. You were the best thing to happen to me in 2017 lingers in your eardrums, wraps itself around your drunken sleep, there's confetti stars on your eyelids and you part reluctantly with a year that's torn at your insides but strengthened your heartbeat and 2018 is cold and scary now but you are ready to make it grow you are ready to turn it
into
a
fucking
jungle

This pot is equal parts water
and gasoline.

2018

Use these pennies to travel, to experience the world and your place in it. 
Buy your freedom. 
I hope you read and write and sing and play. 
I hope you use this year to understand yourself better, learn to say no to that which doesn't make you happy, and yes to that which does. 
I hope you continue to love New York with reckless abandon, because it is your truth. 
Don't be afraid to feel. 
Don't be afraid at all. 

I haven't forgotten why I came, nor why I stayed. I'm putting it all into motion. 

Happy New Year.