Lean

I'm not a revolving door, she rants on the country radio in winding mountain passes, before static eats up the rest of her monologue. I'm a one way street. How exceptionally simplistic, you think as you hug the curves you know by heart. Life is so much more than platitudes. My mother cuts my hair, inches much too short and for just a moment my breath gets stuck in my throat. But it's only hair: it grows back.

The year races to its end, the decade saunters. You don't want to jump back, you don't need to run ahead. Somehow, for one short instant in your life, you are happy right where you stand. A year races to its end and you will not be sorry to see it go. A shiny new day rests on the horizon; is this not always the way? Ten years later, how much can you add to the conversation? The answer is that you have to grow every year to not bore yourself. You have to grow to make it worthwhile.

New Year,
Same You.

Just a little bit better
again.

Circle

(There must be a way
to be home 
and not feel like a 
wrung
out
sponge

but you haven't 
found it
yet)

Go West

You wish you had more words.

The way the sun breaks through snowy clouds over the mountains, the way the child who looks like your bloods ties himself to you in an instant, the way you suddenly sleep ten hours and you don’t know how, but everything is quiet.

I wrote her today, stretching on the warm back porch after and long run that went nowhere and said I am really, really happy.

Maybe those are all the words I need.

Ends

A day comes and goes too quickly. Promising to sit still, you end up rushing despite yourself and there’s never a moment to catch up with your own idea. Is it like this every year? you wonder, but memory is fickle. Walking through moments, it’s hard to know which one felt the most like a miracle, and still all you see ahead is Dark.

Set the alarm clock for well before dawn. Wonder if you’ll ever feel like it isn’t all simply slipping through your fingers.

What More Can I Do

Quiet apartment, you sit in the window watching commuter trains leave the city and counting down minutes until Christmas can land in your bones. The day was warm, sunny, like a beautiful spring day but you saw it only as a gift. I stood along the river and stared straight into the light like it would save me, and it’s not unlikely that it did. There was a great hole in the earth yesterday, did you feel it? Sometimes I think the universe dialed us in to the same connection without realizing; I don’t know yet what it means. The commuter trains returning to the city are empty.

Sometimes I think my heart would beat out of my chest if I let it go.

Squall

The snow, when it comes, is a monster, appearing out of nowhere and burying you in a second. You see videos later and it looks like an avalanche burying the city. The snow leaves arctic air in its wake, every step carefully calculated against risk and reward. We make our way into an old townhouse off 5th avenue, the ballroom coming alive with story and you marvel at New York City magic, how it appears and reappears at every turn. I whisper my gratitude into the night, and again, and again. Sometimes love overwhelms us when we forget to look for it, it rolls like waves through our insides and grows us whether we want to or not. Love is not proud. It always perseveres.

The day is mild again, the sun setting in fire at the other end of the bay, every step I take is in gratitude now, do you know that? At some point all the shattered pieces within me healed, at some point I could look in the mirror and recognize my face again, love is patient, love is kind. The darkest day of the year is behind us now.

Every step beyond this is a gift
is a
triumph.

Advent

December is a blur, more work, more deadlines, more scheduled cheer and you try to drink it in as best you can: mania is a temporary gift, and the January hangover already looms in the distance. I bought a light therapy lamp, sit staring into it in the mornings like an addict, longing for it when it goes dark. I'm sorry I never write, I'm just so busy keeping my hands to myself, there's too much light in this body this season and I need to share it somehow, yesterday I ran along the river and it was like my body remembered again who I am, what I'm meant to be doing. It's been such a long time of having forgotten, it's no wonder if we are strangers to each other.

But do not worry. I carry light with me now, I make my own. Stick with me, kid, I carry stars in my hands and you look like you could use a few in yours: the magic of Life is how it all
evens
out.

Upstate

Winding Friday night slog out of the city, it takes two hours just to get off the island and by then it is dark, the parkway shrouded in mist, it’s a horror story. We navigate the last few blocks by memory, the little town asked again to carry our dreams and our needs for escape: everyone is friendly, everything is quiet. We roast marshmallows in the fireplace and wear matching pajamas until noon, ride horse drawn carriages with jingling bells and enter the raffle with unknown rewards. So long since I last walked these streets; I was broken, then, a bowlful of empty and now how my steps are light, my limbs only here and nowhere else.

Do you hear me?

I carried the piles of my own smoking ruins, these devastated bones, I brought them through unending winters and raging storms and now I am here: I break and break but am not broken. Do you hear me?

The heart heals 
And heals
anew. 

Wintry Mix

You wake early, the streets black and slick with last night's rain. Everything is quiet, like no one really is sure what time it is. The radiator has lost its mind and pumps out steam enough to heat a small village, you swelter and open a window. Rise and Shine. You run to the trains hoping the weather hasn't derailed the time tables but knowing better; by the time you unearth in Brooklyn the mist has turned to hail, and when the sun finally rises, it is hidden behind a blanket of big, heavy snowflakes.

I wake every morning from strange dreams, wandering through dilapidated houses and wondering at the whims of the Universe. I think I was lost for a while, you know, and I'm sorry if I dragged you with me in the muck, but I am ready to step out now. Rain turns to hail turns to snow on our eyelashes, what can we do but roll with the punches? There is work to be done, books to be written, we have destinies to fulfill. Meet me on the shore whenever you're ready.

We can look at the map together.

Gumdrops

A day slips through your fingers: you were ever the master procrastinator, perfectly poised to tiptoe around the fire in perpetuity. Hours while away into pretended necessities. A year lies behind you, a thousand pages lie behind you, how many times will you have to correct your trajectory? I went for a long run along the river, before the rain, the air so mild; I've been forgetting to trace my steps lately and yet every return to the starting line is a remedy. My body is unrecognizable lately, my mind covered in piles of confusion and my heart crumpled. But a tiny flame sits, still, in the deepest corner of my chest, carrying on unabated despite the wreckage around. It is guarded by a young girl at the edge of a cursor. She runs alongside me, says: every return to the starting line is a remedy. Correcting your trajectory is better than walking the line.

It is dancing it.

Create

(the bar is loud despite the rain, you only have a minute and you squeeze as much as you can out of it, you eke out a trickle of words like drops of blood, crawling toward the finish line and it is constantly moved further away. We are at the end of this year now, do me a favor and crumple in up, throw it in the fire at first chance. Forget who you were and what you did to yourself, you won't want to remember it in your old age. Take with you only rage, only the stubborn grit that does not let you run away anymore, it is too hard earned to leave behind, it cost you too much to let go. The bar is loud despite the rain, you are here despite the darkness, a new year arrives on the horizon and god damn if I won't step into it and leave
these ashes
behind.)

of Giving

A Monday arrives, the days pass so quickly in December, racing toward a socially constructed finish line and leaving you grasping at remaining moments to complete your to do lists and impossible dreams before it is too late, before you are too old. An alarm clock ticks at the edge of your vision, reminds you it will soon scream into the ether and it will be too late for you to change your mind, to reclaim your soul and your beating heart from the devil with whom you made deals so long ago. You spent a lifetime building armor, and now you want only to tear it down, life is a cruel joke if you look too closely, best not to. You string another garland of colorful lights around the joyful apartment, sink into reprieve, see your body soften not from love but from protection, I know I have to do something about this because nobody else will, and anyway soon a new year will appear full of promise and potential, soon you can reinvent the wheels under your armor.

I think perhaps your cuts hurt me more than I knew and this shield just kept us both from seeing the blood as it drained from my body.

Sometimes I fear we know too much of life, and that is what turns us against it. Perhaps when the new year comes, we should shed our skin how we built it, should wash our memories clean and start anew with only hope, only faith, only beating hearts no thought to how they bleed. If ignorance is bliss, perhaps this is the year we transcend into oblivion.

M-I-SS-I-SS-I-PP-I

We're on a winning streak
I got a plan that's gonna turn it all around.

 A handful of free hours arrive at your doorstep: you are dumbfounded. Your liberated muscles creak with disuse, eyes blink at thee sunlight. I took a short run along the river, let my rusty lungs stretch before landing at the piles of words and wondering, but, you know, in the other sense of the word.

Wonder.

What a gift it is to age, and still be giddy like a child, to still swell like a balloon in gratitude, to still be amazed as though you had not seen this feeling before. We can fall in love a hundred times, and each time is as magical as the one before.

A young girl greets me at the end of the cursor, repeats my words back to me. I would not let you go into this fight, if I did not believe you had it in you to make it out. I fall in love with her all over again, wonder at the magic at my fingertips. Begin with cautious steps: break in to a run when you are ready.

Take Heart, Little Monkey

The Monday bar is quiet on a Tuesday; you sink into the warm, dark, downstairs mood as the cortisol finally washes out of you, we are superhuman when we need to be but achingly human when the storm has passed. A week has passed in silence, did you notice? I forgot: I forgot how to think, how to let the moments sift through words to arrange themselves neatly in my lungs, I forgot my own name how it sounds when all the accents are right. I am here, now but I'm not sure it's real. Would you pinch me? Would you shake me up and say my name, over and over until I feel like myself again? An old man in the toystore said he moved to the East Village in 1982, but I also got to live in the West Village for a while, on Bethune, that was a dream, and now here we were, wrapping gifts and talking about rent controlled apartments like we still hadn't achieved all we came to, and realizing we never would. New York is a dream: it puts everything you ever could imagine you'd want right in your hands,
and then you wake.

This year I am grateful for another year, grateful for more days on these strets and the promise of others to come. We lose so much, so much, all the time, including time, and we have to keep an eye on all that we gain. More days under our belt, piles of days, mounds of wisdom all adding up, one day I will tell you everything I know and it will be beautiful, this life is a miracle, I may be quiet sometimes, but don't for a second think
I forgot.

Destruct

You are too tired, the voice at the back of my head says gently. You are running head first into the brick wall, didn't I tell you about it a mile ago? I wake disoriented, a fire rattling in my lungs, a to do list chasing me through every dream. Drag five versions of a manuscript to a quiet corner and watch the happy couple next to me touch each other in that way people do when the early morning is a bubble of their own making. Outside the window, autumn leaves cascade down the awning, some days New York is a film set all to itself. I walked home late last night and played peek-a-boo with the Empire State building, we had a good laugh even though I could hardly keep my eyes open.

If you think I am complaining, let me tell you I am not. Everything aches but my soul is delirious, I cannot keep my eyes open but I cannot stop smiling. Do you know I found the secret to the Universe and it makes everything else irrelevant?

I turn it over in the palm of my hand. It is weightless, and it is everything. Do you know I'm this close to the edge, and I have never been more sure of my footing?

Scratch

The bar waxes and wanes, Monday night before a holiday and we're all trying to fill up on strength and resistance before we are reduced to children who do not know how to fight for themselves. Silverware can turn fatal with the right lighting. My regular bartender is away; my spine crackles at the incongruent playlist but the post-it on my word processor says don't be precious, so I pull out piles of paper and get to work. At home, the cupboards bulge with holiday spices and pounds of butter, the corners whisper of tinsel and light. I know it's just an excuse to hide from the world, but if this world were yours, would you not take it? I worked so much for a while I forgot my own name but nothing lasts forever, not even that storm in your chest: if you just sit here long enough that racing heart will pass. If you just wait at this word processor, eventually the story will show up and let you tell it. All this loose yarn is nothing but a headache now, sure, but eventually you will tie it all together and create a tapestry.

You'll know when it's time to give up on a white whale.

It's not yet.

So keep moving.

Surge

Getting over love is like breaking an addiction, the scientist says in your headphones. See how this part of your brain lights up?

I consider a future in opioids.

The dog saunters in and shimmies herself down on the cushion behind me, fast asleep on her perch and I wonder what it would like to come home at the end of the day and just rest. The video feed from across the ocean shows six and a half pounds with a full head of hair, it's so strange but somehow it's like he always was here, a small girl stands at the end of my cursor and everything that follows is a miracle: I love her still. The days are long when you rise before dawn and return to bed in the middle of the night, but such is the nature of this addiction. We do what it takes.

I break out the bourbon for the season. Take a long, light run in the hesitant winter twilight. Pack my bag and get back to work. I'm turning this brain into a god damned Christmas tree.

Dig a Tunnel

The mornings get earlier and earlier. I become intimate with the Frenchman behind the coffee counter, he gives me free coffee and I have patience that he forgets everything else. Hours while away behind the word processor, stressed Brooklynites running in and out for their morning regulars, other writers or free lancers roll in with the tides. Come midday, I stumble out into sunshine and feel I have an entire day behind me, while another lies ahead, but evenings are heavy and my eyes grow gravelly before their time. He calls from across the earth and his accent soothes you, the way his voice sounds tanned by African skies, the way his pauses are waves against the shore. I once spent a summer watching him fall asleep in Soviet nights, but that was a different life, I was a different person. Not better, not worse, just different, you know?

You have been someone else, too, many someone elses after all, surely you know what I mean.

I go to bed early, now, my eyes closed before my head hits the pillow.

It's been a while since I watched someone fall asleep.

Dime

I wake early, again, the to do list splits at the seams and overflows even into my commutes; I sit on the subway, productive, running from one ask to the next. Something at the edge of my vision cautions, whispers warnings against the gratification of the manic, but I am too light, too fast, to hear it. Just let me have this bliss. I know it cannot last. On the Upper West Side, in a drab high rise among many, I turned around to see a small sliver of light between buildings, and there in the space, the Empire State shone and sparkled 30 blocks away. This building which sees me and finds me wherever I go, this lighthouse which reminds me no matter where I am on this island I am home. I stood there, dumbfounded, and stared at it for a minute, wrapped the moment up and carried it with me like a gift.

I guess that's the thing about life. Everything is a gift, if you let it.

Mended Fences

(The bar is quiet, winter is here and Mondays are black, rainy. My fingers get pruny with an unruly manuscript: I believe somewhere in here something burns, something smolders but it's still just out of my reach and I am at a point now where I can taste it on my tongue, the addiction is a gift. I have let you go now, I have let go of everything that dragged heavy stones through my chest and it's hard to remember who I am without them. The last time I saw my grandmother, she did not know who I was and still I carry those days like a treasure: death is not a punishment for those of us who remain, it is a roundabout gift. I wonder if I've made all the wrong choices but I know I made at least one or two right ones and maybe that's a batting average to admire, in the end. Tonight I sat at my usual corner table in a bar that feels like home, and swam in magic until I forgot the time, forgot my worries, knew only this story. If I do nothing else with my life but give myself the gift of this space, perhaps I will still have done enough. The last time I saw my grandmother was only the last time, and I had a lifetime of moments before that, if you are sad now, please know that you will not always be, please know that sometimes our boulders turn into balloons and though you will be lost when your feet leave the solid ground, the air is only a
new map
to learn.)

Arrive

We're going in shortly, he writes in a text I see when I stir at the far end of the dark night, her water broke. I fall back asleep and dream of healthy babies with our aunt's face, with a full head of hair and we're already making jokes. I dream I cry, and when I wake again, there are tears drying on my cheeks; I wake smiling.

The day carries on impatiently, with every stir of my phone I jump. He sends videos of her dancing, I make stupid jokes with lots of swearwords and wonder how quickly one could traverse an ocean, if one really really wanted to do it at the speed of light.

And then, while I step away from Friday night cocktails and icy Brooklyn winds to look at my phone again, he is here. I stop in my tracks, wonder at the wonder. How life is so hard, so long, with so many wrong turns and impossible walls to scale, how the wind is cold and the nights so lonely and how still in just one moment, everything can change and nothing is what you ever thought. A year ago, how we were broken, and suddenly how some pieces have melded themselves together, suddenly, how a whole new piece changes the puzzle entirely. Everyone is happy, is healthy.


My sweet little boy, you are too young yet to know what a miracle you are. Too young to feel in your heart the kind of love that breaks us open and drowns us and we do not turn it down. Too young to understand that just by existing, you are so much more than enough, so much more than anyone could have ever asked for. One day you will know that your parents dreamed you into existence, that you are their dream come true, and I hope that day takes your breath away the way you have already taken all of ours. 
My sweet little boy, everything you do from here on out is icing on the cake.
 
I don't know if there is
forever
but if there is
it always belonged
to you.

Overlook

There’s a certain freedom, when you’ve lost all the things you clung so tightly to, a certain weightlessness you could not buy with money, only only barter and sacrifice. Fulton street is cold in the late Sunday night wind, but you’re holding this umbrella now, it tugs at your arm:

it promises to sweep you right off your feet.

Re:Treat

A silence hangs in the air, sometimes life is too big and the space in which to fit it too small, sometimes the Red Queen runs too fast and I cannot catch up. I smile in the quiet breaths, and that is enough for now.

I smile in the quiet breaths, and that is enough
for now.

Frost

The cold moves in like a sledgehammer. Come morning, the gingkos have all lost their leaves before they turn golden; the streets are washed with green. Everything smells fresh, alive, this isn't how it's supposed to go. Dead before their time. I know the feeling.

Deep in Brooklyn, I walked around the park looking for a trail on which to get lost, for a bend in the trees where there is no telling you are in the metropolis. I kept finding my way back to paved wind tunnels, crying into the ether only to be interrupted by groups of school children learning about wilderness. It's not that I am sad, you say to the skies, it's that this body feels like lead and I don't know that I want to carry it anymore. I try to breathe hope back into my lungs, but they are closed to optimism and my breaths are shallow, escaping in little plumes of smoke as I choke on my despair.

Winter arrives in splendid sunlight and a knife to your back. It doesn't seem fair, you whisper to the Universe, but the Universe is silent in return. I find an old penny at the foot of a tree, covered in dirt but visible by a thin outline. I wipe more tears from my frozen cheeks.

Eventually I start walking, again.

Freeze

The temperature plummets, little flurries of snow surprising themselves into existence along the river and your extremities numb. The season of long, steaming showers out of which it is near impossible to step. You arrive at the bar early but your table in the corner is taken, the one with perfect lighting and rickety legs; you nestle into a back nook with orange string lights. For the first time, the Tuesday bartender knows your order, too, and you wonder if this means you have officially moved in. Don't be precious, the note reads, and what it means is don't be particular, but you have turned out to be the sort of writer who thrives on superstition, who craves the known to paint the unknown, you return to this bar because you don't know how not to.

I return to a lot of things in life, circle back and try them on for size, make sure everything still fits. Sometimes I'll leave sweaters lying in a corner of the closet for months when they don't, trying to alter myselt to make them make sense again, but I see now the error of my ways. I'm not the one meant to be changing.

If this sweater doesn't fit anymore, I am ready to leave it behind. The winter is too long, too cold, to go without what keeps you warm.

Honestly,

A bright pink post it note on my computer keyboard reads don't be precious, and I drag the processor across the village to cram words into it at every turn. The bartender hands me my drink as I walk in, I forget that I do not live here, you could have fooled me. In my youth I manically raced into change before it ran me over, but now I revel in the routines, breathe easier in familiarity. They ridicule me for the post its and printed sheets of paper but a story isn't real unless I can feel it, unless I can run my fingertips across the ink and imagine it in edits, I told a story once and it had potential but I want it to have magic so here I am. He asks to read it, you say only yes now, whoever said we cannot change was only too sad to see the beauty of another sunrise.

She tells me she is leaving her husband. After 30 years together she has at last had enough. He'll find someone new, good for him. She beams at her newfound freedom, spends her days looking at designer sofas. I brought it up before, of course, but he never wanted one. We laugh like girlfriends in a romantic comedy, sometimes life is light when you do not think it would be. I ran for miles and miles along the river today, the air was mild and kind like in springtime, and I thought, well it isn't long until it is here, and I can wait, somehow believing my words as they beat out of me with each deep breath. I don't recognize the skin at my fingertips but my face in the mirror is reassuring. The bar gets busy. My story sways but stays steady, I lose my sense of time, I forget to hear the conversations around me, all I know is there are piles of paper around me that are slowly, slowly, arranging themselves like I hoped they might, it took me years of pain to become the person these pages needed me to be but I am here now.

I'm not going anywhere until this story is told.

I'm not going anywhere until this story is spun in magic.

Cosmos

Days race past you in hours clocked in and not many clocked out. Nights are short and moments to process few, but you pay your bills and when an hour appears among friends, you drink the wine: everything is weightless. I went for a run along the river at sunset, the Bay on fire and a full moon twinkling over Brooklyn. It was not fast, or particularly long, my breath slow and steady, mind unoccupied; I lifted my head like I so rarely remember, looked at the oily blues of the water, the shifting colors of twilight, the familiar, reassuring outline of New York City in every direction. I was happy.

Sometimes we do not win in extravagance. Sometimes it is slow, and steady, and remembering to keep your head up. Sometimes it is just putting one foot in front of the other, and in every step, being
exactly
where you
are.

Treasures Untold

Poetry is useless if you're talking about yourself, he rants into the dark apartment. No one cares that you're a drunk. Piles of my self-revolving whisky rants blush in their corners, but what else can they do? They have nothing to say except what they know. Winter arrives in a rage, suddenly every street corner is an assault. I don't recognize the skin at my fingertips anymore but my face in the mirror is reassuring. You got off track for a minute.

But sheets of paper don't lie, when people tell you who they are believe them, when November hits you cannot reasonably be surprised at winter winds, my alarm is set for far too early but my bills are paid, the Universe will not take without giving something in return.

The Universe will not give, without taking something when it goes.  

Clearly Now

Morning is crisp, like ad agency copy crisp, like images of biting into apples at orchards upstate crisp, the air is cool but the sunshine warm, a large, soft scarf neither too warm nor too cold. The French man behind the register is  his usual manic self, blasting Magic Flute arias and tossing out pastries like a hurricane. Sunrise shone down the Brooklyn street like a joke, like we all know it's not supposed to look like this in real life and yet here we are. I went to bed happy last night.

There's a lightness in November that always surprises me. Like I've finally given up my grasp on summer, have consented to the changing season and can embrace the creative solitude it affords me. I sit in this space now, with a heart that bleeds ink, sit in this dark and create my own goddamn sunshine. It will pass soon enough.

The leaves will all have fallen. But let's cross that bridge when it pummels our way.

El

The bright new building sidles up to the park avenue wall. Street level it’s all masonry, but on the 15th floor you can hear the northbound commuter trains rumble by. I sit in the window and watch them race out of the tunnel and into the fresh air, look in through the window at late night passengers, wonder where they get off and what life looks like there. How quiet the train cars look. Midtown Manhattan sparkles like so many gemstones at the bottom of a dark lake: do you know this city is actually a hundred, each one a world away from the other. The 6 train winds through twenty at least before I reach those blocks of low buildings where I am home. People filter in and out, and I don’t know how to tell them what a miracle it is that they are alive, that all this magic coursing through our veins truly belongs to us, did they remember to look this gift in the eye and did they whisper thank you to the universe? We ride past the ghost stop on 18th street that you have to know about to see, spirits of old New Yorkers long gone lingering by the graffiti, waiting for their ride. I whisper thank you and it sounds just like breathing.

I breathe, and the universe nods like it knows what I mean.

DST

They say it's good for something, but you can't remember what. All you know is that you woke with an extra hour's sleep in your system, like a bribe, and that by afternoon it was dark outside and the evening stretched out too long around you. She writes from above the Arctic Circle and asks, is today the last time we see daylight?, her pleas alone enough to make you vow to never visit. There was a time when I did not know my whole self to die for several months each year, and I wonder now what that was like. To not slowly wither at the first slow dusk, to not feel fear with each cold gust of wind around the corner.

And yet, somehow,  it is only life. I've made it through too many winters to think I will not survive this one, too. Living a life does not mean evading the dark entirely. It means walking in it, and always remembering to walk yourself out.

Sera

November. A day so beautiful it assaulted the senses, all crinkly leaves drifting slowly to the ground, crisp wind and warm sunshine, the river beaming in its swell. The dead cat still lies on the rocks; I learn a lesson and let it lie. There's was a lightness in my step for the miles under my feet, there's a quiet void around me. I spent the afternoon scrubbing the apartment, I know the routine. Quiet doesn't last forever so you'd best breathe while you can. Everything is going to be okay drifts past your eyelids like a news ticker: you stow it away for future reference, would like to send it across the ether. We take the air conditioning units out of the window, just as the heat comes on in the riser. Second avenue is quieted. My room smells like dust and winter.

The first few days I have to be careful even in my sleep,
so I don't roll over and burn myself.

De Los Muertos

The train across the Manhattan bridge is a gift your give yourself, is a pill from New York to ease the pain, but it’s a testament to its shortcomings that you do not ride it back and forth on a loop, that you do not stay on it for days on end, because the bright lights only carry you so far, the rest of the way you have to walk to yourself. The October winds are a hurricane, they set the west ablaze but your flame is small enough to keep in a back pocket. The streets are a carnival, the Bowery is a gamble and sometimes the cards blow away unasked. The answers slip through your fingers.

It’s only life. Surely you can find them again when the dust has settled.

Pause

The heart is a very small muscle, I wrote once in my youth, yet within its fragile walls lie all that love and gratitude that make up our existence. I had no idea, then, how a heart can stretch and bend, break and recover, did not know how much I could will it grow, or how it would grow even against my will. It's a great testament to the human spirit that it survives at all, that we endure this life with nothing to carry us but a small soft muscle the size of a fist.

The streets are full of disguises today, of blood and of fear, of a minute to be anyone but who you are. I know it's tempting to stay there. But take a deep breath and listen to the old brag of your heart. I am, I am, I am. It is not good enough for you to be so sad, so much. Maybe now is when you sink in and let yourself be happy.

Also

It rains and rains, but everything is warm. We sit at the end of the bar racing through topics because how can we ever catch up when time is so short. Her advice is an anodyne, you see the synapses light up behind her eyes to patch your every wound, pair each tough truth with a parcel of hope. When his anger attempts to sow distrust along your heartstrings, you feel that old defense line up. How broken hearts will try to break the world. I mended mine, you know, glued it and softened it again until I dared to think it could survive the rain once more. I sit here now under this ridiculous umbrella, alongside piles of truth with this parcel of hope in my hand and do you know?

There’s room for one more
if you want it.

Starve

Poverty runs rampant through my every waking hour, the first of the month approaching like a monster in my closet and it takes all my energy to keep the door to it shut. I see the well-adjusted routines of my peers sink into carefree weekend spending and casual acceptance of a life without jagged edges. One time I went to the dentist and didn't flinch at the bill, and I still remember how sweet the moment. That was years ago. Now I search for quarters in the sofa cushions to pay for a castle in the clouds, while I wonder at self-fulfilling prophecies and how long it took to drag the last vestiges of propriety out of me until I could finally sit in the ragged beatness I so long revered.

Because when you peel away all the layers of security, of civilized living, only art remains. I only have the Word, now. I cling to it, drag it through my anxious filters, force feed myself another rewrite to try to eke out the magic that can sustain me. I said I'd sacrifice everything for the Word and I had no idea then what Everything actually is but I am here now, reduced to only sentences, reduced to only piles of stories, I saw a dead cat washed up on the shore of the East River yesterday in the rain and all I know is somewhere in the back of my head, somewhere in the deeps of my chest, I still think
this
is
worth
it.

Exhale

A day unravels in mental illness, in useless circles around well-trodden paths, I am so many more questions than there could possibly be answers for, and it's hard to know if this is the right path when they all look knotted in the beginning. Meander over to the bar with more gritted teeth than faith but whatever gets you there is a good start. The bartender's boyfriend shows up later than usual, but her voice rises in octaves and they steal sweet moments at the edge of your vision. You turn your phone off, try to forget there's a real world where the rent needs paying. Illness has kept you sober for too long, the beer tastes different, it wraps you in a cotton cloud of your own anxietey. The real world agrees to sit back for a minute.

And that is when it happens. When the typewriter keys melt under your fingertips, when stories line up behind your eyelids, do you know I saw a character break and it made me cry despite myself, despite this chatty bar and dissuading beer, I saw her break and I did not. I stayed, right here, and carried her through and suddenly the hours had swept from under me, suddenly the world had floated away and there was only this story, only this dark wood of creative bliss and I never wanted to leave.

When I came up for air, at last, wiping the tears and trying to smooth the hair from my mad science, I had forgotten the questions that bore into me before. I forget the fear, the years that escape me, the rent that requires paying. This path is the right one. I know because it is the one that knows me in return. I know, because as much as I think I'm the one choosing the path, the path chooses you.

All you have to do is walk it. 

Prophecy

The day rains, rains like it cannot get itself to stop, like we'd be fools to go outside. We try, but end up back in a moment of soft folds and heavy dreams. In sleep I saw sweet futures without all these clouds but I suppose I'd take the one if I could have the other and anyway rain makes the flowers grow. I keep hoping there's a treasure trove of answers somewhere, where everything could become clear, but I'm starting to think the answer is just keep walking, one step in front of the other, do the best you can. We cannot make a lot of promises, other than that we will try. Just one more moment, and you've built a whole life.

Here, have this moment.

All I'm saying is, it's a start.

Favorites

It rains.

After days of warm kind October sun and when you need benevolence, it rains, cold dark confining rain of November. You scowl. Saturday night on the Bowery is a farce, it has always been a street for the young to ruin, what else is new. I sat in a window on the upper west side and watched the traffic on the west side highway, slow meandering diamond necklace of cars along the dark stillness of the Hudson River. This city is a faceted blessing.

We sat on the sixth floor of a Chinatown walk up painting our whims into the universe. More windows, more views to infinity and sometimes I think the magic of this place is it makes you think you fly. I swam in poetry, piles of it amassed around me in the silence. All good things come, but you must go out to greet it. If you never say your name out loud to anyone, they can never ever call you by it. It may rain now.

But it will not always.

Panhandle

In the early afternoon, we pack up our home office and tread down the avenue. Only a few steps away from everything familiar and still how different home looks from this vantage point. A turn of the century apartment building towers, yet you have never seen it like this before, truly seen it and you wonder what lesson it's trying to teach you. The bar window is open in late October, fall is mild in the city and you adore the Hollywood way the yellow locust leaves choose to twirl down to the ground: it is a gift.

I wrote my younger self a letter today, to see what I may say. Mostly, I suppose, they are cliches, encouragements of how it gets better and how you just have to make it through. But it is easier to also be kind to yourself a few years removed, easier to treat your former self like you would anyone you love. I wish you would have overcome your fears sooner. The point of all of this is just to love and be loved. The point is to experience as much as you possibly can, because what is life if not just one great adventure, and you'll never regret stumbling as long as you also flew.

If you leap, you are bound to fly, eventually.

Let them love you. 
Let you love you. 

Everyone is doing the best they can. 
Yourself, included.  

Phoenix

A character speaks to you from across the page. She wanders the strange and confusing maze of her own life, tries to make the best of the twists and turns which you have thrown in her path. We are all trying to live our lives with some meaning, with some spark, but oh how hard it is sometimes. You ache for the destiny you have given her but do not erase it: without this fire, she will not have ashes out of which to rise. Maybe it has to hurt now, I whispered once into dark silent nights but I secretly pleaded with the Universe not to let it.

And that was when, the Universe tightened the vise.

The point I'm trying to make, my dear sweet creation, is this: I will not make you walk through fire, if I do not believe you will come out stronger on the other side. I will not give you burdens that I do not think you can carry. And, above all this, I do not send you on a path without walking it beside you.

The woods seem dark now, the struggle great. I have no comfort except to tell you that conquering it is greater still. I have no comfort except this hand to hold you through it.

Maybe I Didn't

By morning, the illness still lingers like dead weight across my chest: every time I move, it rattles through my rib cage and convulses past my eyelids, every breath is carefully considered. I wipe my calendar but not thoroughly enough, and the phone shakes me from my half-sleep. What fog can inhabit a mind, how fragile we are and microscopic events render us useless. But a life is not just grand gestures and milestones passed, a life is every little brick you lay, every short day you wade through.

Did you try to make yourself a better person today? Well alright then. This is your brick. Tomorrow you start anew.

and Alone

Evening is all dark rain and a thick cloud across your brow; it sounds like sighs but really I just can’t breathe properly, don’t worry about it. How quickly gifts are taken from you once given, how effortlessly the rug is pulled from under these feet, I lost my metrocard somewhere in Brooklyn and I would have walked home
if I didn’t think I should know
better
by now.

Tussin

The illness drags itself up and down the length of my body like nails on a chalkboard: incessant, grating, relentless in its demands for attention. I don't breathe right, I don't sleep right, my limbs are heavy and do not respond to my calls for action. He writes from across the river to say the same thing, and we spend hours on a couch just breathing in raspy tandem, while the dog happily settles in the quiet space between us: this space with expands and contracts with every question we answer, or fail to. I am so many unanswered questions lately, they waxe and wane through my chest like this October congestion, one minute consumed with impatient conviction, the other resting in accepted ignorance. When there is much to win, there is always much to lose, and the heart in your chest steels itself for another season of assaults on its soft underbelly.

But here's the point I'm trying to make, New York, however ineloquently, and it is that I love you. It is that no matter the day, or year, or weather, I am happier with you than I ever have been without. That no matter the money in my pocket or the success on my papers, ever day I live here I have won. That I can look back fondly on the violent sorrow of every time I've left, a sadness that tore the organs from within my body and drained the light from my eyes, because they seem now a maudlin recollection of a time when we did not know better, of a threat that will not reappear. And however lonely, or mismatched, or confused I may find myself, simply walking your streets will make sense of the world again and make the pieces fall into place. I sleep sounder in your crazy cacophony than ever I did in the quiet darkness that is everywhere else. You make me a better person, you make my life unequivocally worth living, and I will spend the rest of my days attempting to deserve you. 

The point I'm trying to make,
is that I am not afraid.

Dis:ease

The October sun is bright, we run drunk into the streets in the middle of the day because what is New York if not respite; what is New York if not the dream that your life could be different and maybe, for once, you could impress yourself.

We should all be trying to impress ourselves. It is tremendously difficult, and that is all the more reason for it.

Morning arrives with slow, churning questions, with an itch at the back of your spine and rain on the horizon. She writes from the gate and you sit paralyzed on the couch where she left you. You see the illness rev up, see it gather strength and set its gps to that soft spot in the center of your chest that so easily collapses under its thumb, but do you know what? I don’t care for your empty threats that rely so heavily on my consent to bury me. I don’t care for the ease with which I fold, so I think maybe I won’t anymore.

We made it this far. Why the fuck wouldn't we make it to the stars?

A Home

Morning arrives with a sledgehammer, I remember declaring that Bourbon season is here! but did it have to be so drastic about it? Daylight seeps in through the window like a needle: sharp, and not what you want boring into your eyes. I attempt standing, but fail. I attempt eating, but seem to have forgotten how it's done in the first place. Valuable minutes fall from my open hands, my heavy body falls into piles, I try to meditate but forget my own name, forget how to breathe it into my spine. The words we used in the bourbon bath were big, were unavoidable, I always had a terrible poker face but at least sometimes I could manage to lie to myself. We ordered another round long after I knew we shouldn't, and still how being seen, if only for a moment, is worth the pummeling that comes after.

When the fog lifted, at last, how brand new the city seemed. The skies cleared, the ideas arranged themselves. He called to say it is fall now and it is beautiful, and I wanted to tell him all the answers that had lined themselves up inside my skull when the sunlight turned to hope on my eyelids, but it wasn't time, yet.

And maybe it isn't even about the answers at all, but about the path you take to reach them. Maybe the journey is the destination, maybe you've already made the choices, they're just less scary if you can't quite gauge their size when you take them home and bring them through the front door. How you spend your days is how you live your life. Just one more dive and it won't be cold, anymore.

Been Trying to Sing

I wake early, fall is here now, the mornings are dark. Something from my youth itches at the small of my back, an uncomfortable wet, cold woolen sweater sort of memory, how autumn is knit socks and too many layers of clothes to peel at the school entrance, a day full of indoor work and harsh flourescent lighting our only weapon against the dark forests outside the window. There is no way to explain to someone raised in sunshine what it means to grow in its absence. To create an entire life out of absence.

I created an entire life out of your absence, too.


It doesn't mean I don't still fear the dark.

Skyline

The sun beams across the island, making it sparkle and shine like you've seen in movies, and in your dreams. You remind yourself that reality is beautiful, too. The cat stretches out along your keyboard, insisting now is not the time for work, but your body breathes again and doesn't have time for diversions. There's something in your smile that sets my cells straight again, there's something in long runs along the river that clear out the fog from my eyes and do you know, I think everything's going to be okay.

The Monday bar is a Tuesday bar decked in Halloween lights and pumpkin ghouls, you don't even mind the changing of the seasons as long as it keeps telling you stories to write. It has yet to fail you. Last night in the Village I looked up MacDougal to see the Empire State Building and all its lights were turned off, like an ominous reminder without saying of what, and by the time I reached Hudson street it was beaming in all its colors again as though nothing ever went askew, and do you know, New York?

We all fail, sometimes. We all go dark when we're meant to be beaming. You have failed me and hurt me and piled garbage on everyone that came to you with soft shelled dreams in their hands, New York but do you know? You've made up for it hundred-fold. We all fail, sometimes.

The only way we redeem ourselves, is by getting back up again. The way we redeem ourselves, is by sparkling until they know we're worth it, and no one can tell them they're wrong to leave their dreams in our hands.

On Leaves

We can turn over new ones, they say, everything may begin again in spring and we are blank slates again, the future what we want it to be. I turned over in my bed and it was new, perhaps, but it felt well known. Or was it vice versa? That it was familiar, but felt brand new. I slept a heavy sleep and sometimes it’s hard to remember dream from reality, fact from fiction, the truth is my dreams know better than me anyway because I spend a fair amount of time squirreling away secrets from myself just in case everything inside me might break. Please don’t break, I ask my insides, but I forget they know me better than I do, they measure their weights and balances and the strength this life made me prove I had, do not think I fear the leaves changing. Do not think I fear their fiery colors washed across the hillsides, the sharp crunch of their sidewalk crumbles.

I have walked across the desert plains without a drop of water, I have raged through storms without a breath. When the leaves fall, I am still here. If you fear there is so much old there cannot be new, remember this: from fallen leaves grow little spires. We would not know spring, without all that came before.

Re:coup

As soon as the shift clocks out, illness sets in. Your body folds in on itself, waking you at all hours and falling asleep on a whim, everything aches in strange angles. The afternoon sun is mild and feels like spring, I walk slowly down under the bridge to the river while my muscles complain at the effort. I cannot demand purpose, or productivity, only to take steady breaths and watch the water, listen to the blue skies and let the jumble in my mind fall into place. Live a little. I remember inside myself the person who loves adventure, who loves a new view, who leaps for the sheer thrill of leaping and never longs to say I told you so. We all make moves and take chances that may not be right in the end, it doesn't mean we shouldn't have taken them.

I go home early, fall asleep again against my beetter judgment. A Saturday night plays out on Second Avenue below, but no matter. I spent this time wisely: a sick day can make even the most wretched illness subside, make the light at the other end of rock bottom look invitingly within reach.

Thursdays

(The only answer is work. You rush from checked box to checked box on your to do list and still find time to run along the river in surprising sunshine until your legs burn and your lungs laugh and we still spend the evening in a juggling act the only answer is work.
Sometimes all you need is a break
to know the answer that's been staring you in the face this whole time.)

Moments

I wake late but catch the train right on time. When it turns out I've forgotten my wallet, the cafe owner gives me my coffee for free. Returning to the subway without a ticket to my name, I find another card in a jacket pocket that swipes through with ease. I wrote a story so sad this morning that all the hurt drained from out of me, and didn't it look like I had created something new after? The Universe forces gifts and rainbows into my veins, refuses my stubborn despair, showers me with sunshine, who am I to question the Universe? Who am I to tell it it's wasting its time?

It rains today, endless cascades of cold October rains and strangers in the street like drenched cats, but do you know? Every day you are not drowing is a day you do the damn thing.

Lest You Forget

(The time may come when you'll think you've hit rock bottom.
At this point it is imperative to keep swimming,
because you have not.
Remind yourself what sunlight looks like,
and you'll find you're still seeing it.

The ocean is deep.
You may be treading water,
but the surface is still within reach.)

Gig Economy

For $5 I will write you a poem
For $5 you will pretend it is yours
For $5 I will sell you the blood in my veins
What is $5 anyway for a fun experiment?

We take our poor and make them poorer,
call it opportunity,
call it freedom,
present this one bright shining example of digging deep and
striking gold
You just have to want it,
man,
You just have to work real hard for it don't you know
this is the American
Dream.

Money bleeds from me
not in five-dollar increments but
hundreds
thousands
the only difference between me and the
homeless man downstairs is one
month's rent
stuffed under my mattress.
His name is Derek, but
it's a name that doesn't fit right.
He wears a black leather jacket,
combs his hair,
sleeps in his wheelchair,
only asks you for money if you
look him in the eye. 
He spends most of his days by this stoop,
some nights,
sometimes he's gone for weeks I don't know where
he goes. Do five dollars look
different
in his hand than mine?

Did someone promise him the
world
if only he
made a small investment 
too?

I've sold my life for beads,
as slippery as a rug
pulled from under you.

Hard Headed Woman

Monday afternoons at the bar, these days you eke gratitude out of arriving early when all is quiet and your dim corner is unfettered by the stakes of others. The bartender pours my drink as I walk in the door, she stumbles over her Spanish to a softspoken older lady at the bar, I think of travel and making one's way through conversation blindly, how each corner turned is a revelation. I've been stuck on this street corner too long. (I've stuck myself there.)

Someone died on the block this weekend; his friends gather every day, drinking Hennessy and lighting candles, holding vigils. A few pitbulls linger, lazily. I pass them at all hours and feel only love; what a strange thing it is to die. Do you know, we have such little time, why would we drag it out, why wouldn't we do all the things as soon as possible, why would we take time to think about it. A manuscript lies under my elbow, waiting its turn. Why would I let it wait any longer?

October is a blessing,
but it sure disguises itself well.

and No Surprises

Down under the Manhattan bridge, on cobblestone streets late at night when no one is there, you can have a moment that does not self publish on social media sprawls, that does not crop itself into perfect angles for anyone’s enjoyment, that is only there for you to remember. 

When they ask me, fifty years from now, what I remember, please know this: I will say it was you. 

Phooey

It's not how long it takes you to get there,
it's that you get there at all.

I lied when I said I was okay,
I'm sorry.
I'm still a work in progress and
these puzzle pieces fall
so haphazardly even
when I try to direct them

I'm working on
it. 

Story

Well I mean, L.A. is so easy, the greying men at the table next to me repeat, in the midst of recounting how work is going and how their children are doing. He's dating a lovely girl now, but since I last saw you he's had three jobs, I don't know what he's doing. Monday bar on a Thursday, I am wrapped in the season's first tights, I'm swathed in a sweater and somehow impossibly October appeared out of the July that was yesterday, everything is topsy turvy. My phone autocorrects it to tipsy turbo,  and I am loath to change it.

The cherry blossom tracker on said phone morphs into a fall foliage map, washing the screeen in fiery shades and cozy exclamations. At last the waves line up and I see a life make sense: this is what it is to be human, this is what it is to be you. You fight so hard against the demons instead of seeing how much they look like you, how much they could help you tell someone else their story. You spread out in your usual corner of the bar, piles of paper and empty glasses, you think of what home is and how the only thing that matters is that when you are homeless there is only survival and when everything lines up you can think straight, and maybe I do think more about the weather than most but don't you know? A maple on fire can change your life just like a wave at Rockaway beach, the point is we are insignificant specks in the Universe and so you owe it to yourself to
live this life as
goddamn much
as you possibly can. 

Let the River

I woke with the stirrings of a dark cloud in my belly again; it lingers always now, ready to move at any sign of weakened defenses. The dog by my feet did not stir, she is too old now to worry about any of this, what does she owe life. I struggled through morning tasks and paperwork at my feet, while the temperature rose and rose outside, the streets growing muggy in confusion: tomorrow it will be cold, they say, tomorrow this will all be over. There was summer still, right outside these strangers’ window there was sunshine and warmth and I decided if I could do only one thing of worth this might be the best. I ran to the train, I ran to a dozen trains, everything is so far when you long for it but suddenly I spilled out onto a bright sunny boardwalk in queens and when I saw the ocean, would you believe I cried. How can I write what I know when I am all questions, I wrote in a poem once, but do you know, I’m starting to think I am a lot of answers, I just haven’t been paying attention. How long I have spent homeless, how long I have spent searching for that which will hold me, how long I have tried to hold myself, spinning into infinity with nothing in my hands but grains of sand and castles of my own delusions?

I know what home is, now. I know the trick to sleeping soundly at night.

You can’t tell me that the breath of summer isn’t worth something in the depths of fall.

Tiny Love

The movie stuffs itself with clichéed sweeps of Manhattan in the 80s, yuppied conversations and obscene haristyles, but your eyes are trained now, they see only familiar streets and dear skylines. You absorb every scene, smile in every margin. I write I think you'd like this movie and he says I already do.The dog is blind, and deaf, but she hobbles her way up on the couch and we spend a quiet moment contemplating nothing.

You can do all the thinking you want, you can write lists and ask the advice of strangers in the street. But eventually you'll sit in a moment that catches you by surprise and puts the answer right in your chest. I'm not saying New York has all the answers.

It's just that every time it does, you've done so right to listen.

in the Sky

The day after is always cruel in its indifference. The last of the alcohol seeps out and leaves only gutter leaves, only muck and confusion. I ran along the river and tried to sweat it out, but one last heavy weight lingered on my brow. I went to Brooklyn, ostensibly to get work done but wanting really only to sit in a window and look at the city, let it heal me. A small dog curled up in the curve of my arm. I thought alright then, and it was. A small girl waits patiently at the end of the cursor, asks nothing of me that I do not give willingly.

The truth is I want to give her the world.

I don't know why I don't.

Belleville

People come for the cherry blossoms, she tells us. We’re booked through 2021. At the mention of cherry blossoms suddenly I see only fall foliage, only shades of fire and the possibility that maybe autumn isn’t death, that maybe things live because we want them to. That maybe I can look at this ink blot from another angle and paint another image inside my eyelids. Here’s my happy little accident. I wore a scent of 2017 on my skin, of tour buses and freedom, it drifted across my awareness at the strangest moments but it felt safe, comforting, steadfast.

We stood on the street corner for hours, until the air grew cold and my shoulders shivered. The Empire State went to sleep behind us, and I thought how this building has kept watch over me for so many years, unwavering, reliable, reassuring. How this building reminded me what home is. I know you don’t know all the answers.

Just rest a while. When you have found home, dare to believe it will know them for you.

Moonstruck

We drove across the Manhattan Bridge, late afternoon sun streaming across the island onto Brooklyn, the sky blue and the air expansive around us, and at last I remembered again how to breathe. I rested my hand on the steering wheel and took deep, clear breaths in a smile.

When you've been drowning in soil six feet deep, a moment in the clouds is a treasure.

Bum

The day after the bludgeoning is quiet. He asks how I'm doing and all I can think of are bruises, everything is dull, aching. I remember how to get up at the end of the fight, please do not send ambulances, but I know I should not have so many TKOs under my belt without someone looking around for concussions. I read Kerouac in Mexico and it soothes me, like his sad eyes hold my hands clear to redemption and maybe I'll make it out alive after all.


"Where'd you learn to do all these funny things?" he laughed. "And you know I say funny but there's sumpthin so durned sensible about 'em. Here I am killin myself drivin this rig back and forth from Ohio to LA and I make more money than you ever had in your whole life as a hobo, but you're the one who enjoys life and not only that but you do it without workin or a whole lot of money. Now who's smart, you or me?"

 Just because you made a deal with the devil doesn't mean you didn't win.

(post)

The only answer is work,
on a post-it.
The only answer is work,
in a notebook.
The only answer is work,
etched into my skin
again
again
again, they say
be mindful of tattoos
because they last forever but they
never warn you against scars you
carved into your own canvas, they
never stop you from all these stories you
paint
onto your sad eyes and
I know I fight
tooth and nail
to keep you from trying but
please,
try,
please,
remind me there are stories to tell
in which I
do
not
bleed.

Tread

She writes from across the ocean, and I do not listen. She yells from across the time zones and I try to look away, but the tears catch me off guard and I sit crying in a quiet Brooklyn coffeeshop, while people rush to work outside the window. The Mountain West calls to me, reminds me of quiet air and space for lungs to breathe, my to do lists falter in the margins, I wonder how early is too early to be drinking. Perhaps the truth is I was always stumbling, it's just sometimes I could make it look like I was running, sometimes I could make it look like I was dancing but I was only ever two steps away from falling down, do you hear what I'm saying? I'm saying leave this sinking ship, I'm saying save yourselves while you still can because everything is drowning and I'm trying to shut the hatch to minimize the damage, concentrate it to just this body, hear what I'm saying.

I'm saying you got out just in time. Keep swimming. I'm saying I don't think I can do it anymore.

addendum

She told me it's not that I don't know what my dreams are. That that's just something I'm telling myself. She told me the problem is I'm not doing what my dreams tell me to do. 

We craft our lives out of stories.

How would you like yours to go?

And Then

When he smiles, it is like a baby not yet in control of involuntary muscle spasms and still everyone around it coos and claps in delight. They do not coo over smiling six-year-olds who do not mean it. When I tell him truths he does not like to hear he hits me, soft at first across the chest, as if to test my reaction, hard later but noncommittally now, knowing I will not change the Universe to suit him. On the long train ride home he takes my hand and runs it across his face, as if trying to make our bodies one and my movements his, he buries himself in my lap and wants only to sleep. How life is cruel in its whims. Across the ocean, a woman whose blood runs in my veins, whose small body my own mother once held as hers, watches her belly grow, wonders at life. She says I haven't dreamed yet, and you know what she's telling you. She says One day at a time and you remember suddenly how many years are tied between you, how many stories. Does it not ache to be keept so far apart? One night I sat in a dark bar just like this one and whispered I love you, but only under my breath, only so you could not hear it and anyway that is years ago now, you are miles away and everything looks different from here. Some days I'd give anything to have you in that bar again, how simple our desires become in relativity. Anyway the point is today was the first day of fall and it was a hundred degrees so what do we really know of life? All we can do is put one foot in front of the other.

All we can do is live it.

Sundays

I tried on a new shade of lipstick today. I tried on a new dress, I tried on old words, dripping across piles of papers and reminding me how the depths of despair are a well for poetry. There is no tit that doesn't return a tat, there is no summer that doesn't have one winter behind it and one ahead. Your appearance may change in the mirror, some days I think I am more ghost than woman, but do you know today I tried on a new shade of lipstick and smiled in the mirror while my arms were full of midwinter tears and I think the secret to life is to carry all those sides and all those seasons all at once, and do you know today for a short minute I think I did.

Today for a short minute
I think I was
entire.

But I Can Go On

(and the words, 
that keep ringing in my ear:
Curiosity is the antidote
to fear.)

Dual (sic)

September appeases you with sunshine, like an apology, like it knows you know what it's there for, but it would like to soften the blow. We walk through the park and I think it's a lovely day for the beach but in my apartment we have already stowed away the picnic blankets. How life is cruel, when you are always one step behind it. My body aches, yells at me about children unmade, another month wasted and here's how we are made to suffer for the choices we did not make.

But I sit at this desk, again, cool air streaming in from an open window, piles of magic strewn around me on bits of paper, the space around me expanding with possibility and story. It's not that I didn't make choices, it's that I made strange, curious, fantastical choices that do not fit easily into properly labeled boxes and sometimes that's bound to chafe at your sides, but believe me: when you let yourself settle in and get comfortable in the box you chose, how much it looks like an entire Universe.

How much it looks like you gave yourself the stars.

Apex

The thing about storms is, they always pass. They always move on to some other green grass and leave you to wring out your socks and wonder what happened. The morning after it leaves, my body feels like the first day after a great illness is over, like I can taste the flavor of food again, like I can take deep breaths without an ache in my side and my skin no longer crawls when I touch it. The face in the mirror looks familiar.

The aftermath of a hurricane is always absence. The silence is a relief.

I walked down the west side, late season hues of oranges and pinks, the Hudson River glittering under clear skies and all the world like old friends. Turned in to remnants of rush hour traffic around the Lincoln Center and thought, I love every corner of this ridiculous city, as I stepped down Broadway and caught a train. 57 blocks south I unearthed on the same street and saw the Woolworth building anotheer 25 down, disappearing slowly under deep blue velvet twilight. I nodded in agreement with myself.

The relief of silence is a gift. The absence of illness, of the hurricane, is a brief moment to see your Self as open to filling only with that which you like. It's always there, even when you believe it's been drowned. If I can go to New York, live madly, and write, 

I will want for nothing. 

Re:volt

The entire day comes and goes in waves of uselessness, in fogs you thought had long since lifted and burdens the size of boulders on your chest. You swear you know how to breathe but the mechanics evade you. Morning in Brooklyn was cold, but the afternoon sun beats down on your southfacing windows and you cannot reconcile your autumn tears with the stubborn summer outside. this was always who you were, a quiet voice whispers as you attempt to bury yourself in apathy and a few invisible blades against your clammy skin. everything else was respite.

I open my eyes again, fill them with words and poetry and magic, drag myself far enough out of the sludge and into the sunlight that at least I can fill my lungs with air, the only answer is work and the only answer is the word and the only word I had was "wow", do you see how you had the pot at the end of the rainbow in your hands all along, do you see how we have nothing to fear?

I sit back down at the word processor, counting my minutes like pennies. I am unafraid now:

this blank page breathes for me.

Arrival

Journal entries and scraps of paper on my desk swim in delusion. Scribbles of a mad Universe clutter the pages, how they feel like home. I ask myself how to recover the magic I've lost to reality, it's a cruel trick of the light, you see the mortgages and required hustle playbooks stack themselves in your line of sight, and it gets too hard to see the world you had painted for yourself before. Do you remember there was a time when everything was oil paints and fireworks, when life was not a straight line but a dance, an endless wave you were riding and you believed you had found the Answer?

Just because they don't dream in color doesn't mean you weren't right to.

Re:minders

Sunday night full moon
in the east village
And the reminder that
Family
is not what you were born into
It is the love you choose.

Play Tag

Quiet afternoons in an empty office, you relish the refuge and wonder at your life. Scribble handwritten notes on a pad, saying it's just now that I know different, it's hard to go back to baseline. Realize that your whole life you've had the sad eyes, the heavy heart, and when you feared those breaks were temporary, you were right.

Maybe this is it, my love, maybe you and I are destined to walk together through this life and I shouldn't try so hard to leave you behind. Here, why don't you step up. Here, why don't you hold my hand, I am not afraid of you anymore, don't you see? If I cannot leave you behind, I have nothing left to lose. I give in to this, now, I give in to you. Come, let's move on.

Come, we have the remainder of a life to live. 

Approach

(you know your outer shell
is a praline
is a thin veneer that breaks
at slightest pressure,
but here's the thing
fuck you I get back up
again
and you can't keep me
down.)

Eves

You look over your calendars, and all these years later the date still stands out. You've forgotten so much of what the world was like then, what the city was like and you barely even knew it. When you first landed, how it was still a smoldering open wound; lately, how it is smooth and clean and the whole city tries to erase that it's ever been hurt, ever been poor, ever been unloved. You preferred its rough edges, its unconventional beauty, its relentless grit, and you wonder why any of us aim for  seamless perfection, that is not what life is.

It occurred to me at the laundromat today that we are, in fact, allowed to live the lives we choose, and not just for now. That love is a choice you make every single day, but if you keep making it, you don't have to let it go. And I love you, New York, as in ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other love, and sometimes in a busy Lower East Side laundromat I am reminded that I may not have to, and it is the sweetest gift I ever give myself.

I am not perfect, New York, but I keep choosing you. I think maybe you are the best thing about me now, you with your hidden hurt, your scar tissue and endless ambition, and me with my endless optimism and thinly veiled dreams of magic. If you will only let me, New York, I think I might just choose you until my days run out.

Ash

An entire weekend comes and goes, clawing at your gut, a sense of unease slithering along your the inside of your skin, you do not pay it any mind. There is work to be done, there are drinks to be drunk. You wade through the masses of unknown eyes and walk home in the late night with newfound empty to add to your bowls. A Monday arrives, all promise and quiet hours for weaving your tales, you dive in head first.

It's not until your running shoes reach the bottom of the Brooklyn Bridge, when you've attempted to pound the last of the itch out of you, that it catches up to you in the flesh. The dark cloud over your head turns to pain within your body, you stumble a few feet and wonder if you'll make it home: is that a fever on your brow? Your body decides to yell and scream at you when you will not listen to pleas, you return to your room and collapse for the evening, unsure anymore what it is you are trying to outrun.

Sometimes it is not enough to sit still for a minute. Sometimes we have to fall to the bottom, expel our insides, clean out the messes from our tangled minds, rest in the power of having nothing left to lose. The sun will set, the sun will rise. Tomorrow you can step out of the mud, dust yourself off, and start again. Such is the blessing of another day.

Cling to that. Wake up, again.

Mille-feuille

A ball of fire sits in your gut. He looks at the dark cloud around your head and attempts to wave it away with only truths, what a blessing it is to be seen when you do not want to be. You try to shake the obstacles in your path, but sometimes the best lesson is this: the first step might be,
let it go.

Wreck

Sometimes I get so sad, and I don't know why. Melancholy drapes across me like a blanket weighted with day old rainwater from crosswalk puddles. If this description seems precise, it is because I have had a lot of time to think about it. The bartender scribbles notes at the end of the bar, a cup of tea by her side, perhaps we are all trying to be somebody. Did you know you cannot erase your problems with the naked bodies of people you do not love? They only scuff their edges against your grating skin, you sit on subway trains with bowfuls of empty in the middle of the night and try to sift them for morsels of purpose. You cannot fill the bowls with the touches of people who do not love you. But you're on the express train now, you're no longer sure how to stop.

I went to the bar after work, perhaps I should be more mindful of my health but there's this novel tapping on my shoulder at all hours, there's this sense of impending death leaning over my brow when I wake, perhaps it's only fall with the wet blanket again, I should be used to this routine by now. The bar gets busy. You want a moment's rest. The novel stirs at your side again.


The only answer is work. You couldn't be more grateful for the gift.

Hit

These things always seem to happen in slow motion, don’t they? How the man across the street did not register in your conscious until the car hit him right in the side, lifted him down first street, an array of confused or shocked faces lining the sidewalk. How a day of balloons and birthdays drop from out the soles of your feet and later on the subway you only know how tired you are. He says I saw you get on the subway in my neighborhood this morning, and you don’t know what the Universe is playing at. Perhaps the game is not for you, perhaps you are but a pawn, a disposable plaything to fill a moment of boredom. You give the police officer your phone number, go on your way, leave the borough.

Wait for the city to wash words back into your chest again.

Itch

The bar looks different on a holiday Monday, the crowd filteres out, the bartender turns the lights down, but once you settle into the wooden seat, does it not feel exactly the same? The story, which you have tried so hard to avoid - for hours, for days, for years - dances under your fingertips and everything feels fine. You remember again this is the gift you give yourself: time, dreams, joy, and you think maybe you've cracked some sort of code even though you forget so often. Your roommate sends pictures from Hawaii, but you stood at the airport this weekend and thought there is nowhere else I'd rather be, so she can have it. Summer ends, September sweeps in and tries to break your heart but you're not sure there's much there left to break and maybe September can have it. I love you in ways I cannot explain and for this short moment I don't need to, let me have it. Last week I stood at the top of the Empire State Building and let my heart beat again in the magic just of being here, just of owning a few mad streets of this jumble. How easily we forget (and yet how easily it all comes back to us). I owe this little town everything, and what a gift that debt is, alone.

Because debt means we are still tied together New York. I hope I will owe you my every happiness, forever. It doesn't seem hard, to do.

Edit

Another writing day, you pace around it like a stranger, like a high school crush. The last day of summer and it rains, it rains, fear lingers in the periphery just waiting for a moment of weakness and a chance to pounce. Newfound muscles ache like soft reminders and soon you have to decide if you're willing to give what they're asking of you. It is September, who will you be in it? Who have you been, thus far? There are too many opportunities for dress-up, for charades, and perhaps it's a welcome vacation from your regular life but prance in vacation long enough and eventually your face will stay like that. I know how my heart softens when I'm not paying attention, so I have to be careful while I still can.

The rain stops eventually, I run out of excuses. A little girl waits patiently on the page. Okay, I say, all the answers in my hand. I'm coming.

and You

Brooklyn, Brooklyn 
take me in 
Are you aware the shape I’m 
in

The F train makes you wait just long enough to remember how tired you are, how far from home when it’s late at night on a holiday weekend and all the city has escaped. I wrote a story once about New York after the apocalypse and I think perhaps this is what it feels like. Disorienting. The bridges are always their best late at night, I hear myself say I have to go home there’s a manuscript waiting for me. Maybe it would be different if it was different but I’m setting my sights to other tunes now, what are you going to do about it. Arrive late and trembling on my own stoop, I forget who I thought I was and maybe it doesn’t matter. Morning arrives, a manuscript waits for me.

September has a lot to prove.
Whatever it chooses, I am ready.

August 31, 2006

We tripped out of the subway onto a sunny afternoon tarmac, last of the summer travels underway and that special scent that rests in your shoulders and speaks of transit. We melted into the clean lines of a bygone era, drinking martinis and looking for the cheapest ticket to anywhere, as long as it left right away, everything was a riot.

Thirteen years ago I landed in this city and knew my life had changed for good. Thirteen years I've walked up and down its avenues, I've shuttled back and forth to this airport, I've breathed that sigh of relief as the A train makes its way back, takes me home to the island where my soul rests. In thirteen years I have never loved anything so much, and I've stopped believing that I might. We looked at the departure board, but the truth is there's nowhere I'd rather be than here.

New York, my darling, how many times have you not held me when I've stumbled? How many times have you not smiled at my joy and carried me through my fear? I know I was a person before you coursed through my veins but I cannot now remember who she was, and it really doesn't matter. At the edge of the river lies an island that knows my name when I forget it myself.

For a moment,
for a minute,
I am whole.

(ends)

(I woke this morning with a sense of clarity
with a sense of these to do lists aren't spelling it 
out 
right with
a sense that at last I could remember
what I have been missing lately.
When all the projects are peeled away,
when all the superficial markers of what
your life is supposed to be like
are rendered mute,
there is a small voice in you that has carried on speaking
unperturbed.
It's been whispering to you for as long as you can remember
and now you can hear it again.
The voice says only
follow the magic
and she sounds like you. 
You look at the road map.
It looks brand new.) 

There is Quiet

Roommates cycle in and out, suddenly the apartment lies quiet again, the long weekend spreading out in solitude and silence. Even the dog has left. I eye a calendar, full of sprawling notes, errands, potential, and wonder what would happen if I just crossed them all out. Erase their demands on my time, shut the door, pretend there is nothing but the silence and the page. (Maybe I'm the one who can decide there isn't.)

I woke up this morning and for the first time in I don't know how long, consciousness wasn't immediately followed by a crushing weight of the world on my chest. I woke only to find piles of paper in my bed, remembered words in my blood stream, how I had stepped into the river and how fine the water always is in there.

There's a magic still floating around this town, this life, we forget so often and busy ourselves with tickertape and mortgages. Charles Bukowski sits on my shoulder, a manic pixie dream girl behind his eyes and a drink in his hand. I toss the calendar aside, lock the door.

Summer ends. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Watch the ashes around your feet
simply blow away.

Right. Rite. Write.

An entire day washes itself through your sandy deltas, filters its sunshine and hours and distractions, the dog sleeps on your bed while you writhe in the agony of reaching that still place at the center of your being. It is not quiet there, it is not empty like the vortex of a meditation, I do not close my eyes. In the eye of the storm there is merely a moment where nothing else can reach you, where nothing exists but the words at your fingertips. All day, I see my little boat torn in and out of the hurricane, pulling to reach that stillness but failing, trying to sit in words but tumbling about in raging whitewaters. Anytime I reach the page, I can exhale, I can see the narrow path towards enlightenment, I can see why I scratch these marks into my skin so I bleed.

This is the process. This is the maelstrom you always must navigate. You write your lists and attempt to optimize, but these tricks are just your attempts to pretend you don't know how the magic works. You have to wade through the waters, you have to pace around the process. Eventually everything settles, and the words stream from your quiet place.

Stay on the boat. Be here when they do.

37

("you asked for a challenge, a voice inside you repeats")

Life is so fucking short, and heavy and sad so much and you've been dealt such a melancholy disposition, but fuck, that makes your highs so beautiful, so out of this world. This year I hope you capitalize on that. I hope when you read this letter you feel hopeful, grateful for the year that passed and even more excited about writing the letter for the year to come.

When my knees buckled, New York held me. I didn't have to leave it, and I think now more than ever that I maybe never will... I realized that the greatest strength is that we have to love: friends, lovers, enemies, ourselves... My heart is still too worn to envision new love, and too scared to ask for another challenge, and still I do. I hope you keep writing. Keep reworking. I hope you stay soft, vulnerable, loving, in whatever way that means.
 
You get better every year, remember that.  
Happy Birthday. 

and the Living is Easy

A morning arrives, heavy clouds on your brow and light springs in your step, is this what the new age brings? I feel like a bag of bricks,  I feel entirely reborn. A birthday passes in mad dashes: diving into the ocean in Queens, collapsing in a hungry giggle in Brooklyn, drinking our way up the Bowery in Manhattan. I said why don't we go up to the top of the Empire State Building, and he said yes. I asked, but is it ridiculous, and he said yes, what better spirit could you ask for at the dawn of a new year? When I stepped out of the door on the 86th floor and saw the midnight city spring to greet me, every uncertainty of our adventure blew away, I smiled and cried at once and thought I have every thing I could ever want in having just this one. He smiled and nodded, in return.

There was sand in my hair when I woke this morning, salt on my skin and drinks on my breath. There was freedom behind my eyelids and potential at my fingertips; today is the first day of the rest of your life, what on earth will you do with these gifts you've been given?

You get out of bed. Put one foot in front of the other. What a strange life, you think, and then you walk straight out into it.

on Rivers

The bartender pours ice behind the fan, jerry-rigged air conditioning on a day that requires nothing of the sort: fall is alive and well in its disturbed slumber, testing its roar in little bursts and preparing for the long road ahead. I know it is still warm, I know the sun still shines but lord, how that eternal fear grips me without effort at every blustery breath. I ran along the river and felt little whirlwinds play around my ankles, heard the crinkle of dying leaves, and something within me died as well. It's only age, I feign, but the truth is it is entirely the opposite: it is as much as life.

The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking, I have comfort enough for a small army, this is the heart I was asked to own. The years tear you down but the life builds you up, he said I am not the same person now as the one he first met and he is right. I am a thousand pages turned, a thousand sheets folded over, twisted and turn in the dimensions, I am more complicated by the day and look how many more angles I have to understand this world, to write these words, to love knowing full well the fragility of the endeavor. I am an ocean of sorrow, but don't you ever forget, I am worlds of love and I have committed to this circus now.

I will hold out for every Spring that promises to return, I will keep folding this paper until it turns into the stars.

the Wilderness

The horoscope lies, I mutter under my breath, while she just laughs and said I'm only reading it wrong. The dog returns after days away and the familiar patter of paws at the door is reassuring; you don't know what you've gotten used to until it leaves you. The weather turns, the season flips against your will and suddenly the evenings are dark, the winds cold. The fear grips me before I even reach the river and I think it's too soon, but no one listens. Another year dies. Another life is buried under your piles of knitwear, your weary uselessness. I woke in a strange bed and stumbled down quiet streets, something feeling crooked inside me like a violin out of tune: was I playing it wrong, or was the melody never mine to begin with? All I wanted was a moment's respite from myself. Instead I buy my time on credit and waste my life trying to outrun debt collectors, is this what I was hoping I'd be doing with my days?

The horoscope said this is the month when my dreams come true but I think we're running out of time and everything inside me still cries when I wake in the morning.

There was a time when I thought I had magic in the palm of my hand. I'm beginning to think now they were just matches I set aflame, and now winter is coming. Now we pay for the dreams we entertained. No wonder I'm so afraid of the snow.

The Time of Your Life

We tell all the same stories, again and again, it's strange how you can know a whole host of another's memories when the ones you have together are so few. We hash and rehash, try to find new gems in piles of sand, but the secret is the sand is what builds your castles, and all it takes to glimmer is shining the light just right.

I woke early this morning for a meeting, I went home from the bar for a late return to the midnight oil. I looked a young child in the eyes at dawn and whispered apologies for my negligence, apologies for my shortcomings and the way my priorities have twisted themselves to pay rent, to live a little longer in this dream. He sells his home to afford saving the world while you cobble yours together to create another. There are rights and wrongs here but you've lined your pockets with justifications and you wonder how they'll fare once winter comes. I play rain sounds in my headphones as though I can fake connection: the truth is some days we run on empty. The truth is I can run myself into the ground if you give me enough room to really make a go of it. Every now and then I read a piece of poetry so true I think nothing else is relevant.

I said I regretted nothing.
I'm beginning to think it was true.

Advertising Space

Your days are planned down to the minutes, you race from one box on the to-do list to the next and forget to remember you are tired, was it always like this? Summer careens towards its cruel end, it is hotter now than ever but the light is different in the sunsets, people's tan skin taking on the same feel as the leaves: a little exhausted, a little overdone. It feels like minutes since the new green of spring pressed itself through your eyelids and words spilled from your fingertips in gratifying curlicues, how old they are now, how tired.

But I sat in Washington Square Park today, college freshmen outdoor piano playing crazy bird people sweltering fountain romance Washington Square Park, and I knew. There is magic still to be wrung out of this season, there are late nights still to whisper and warm waves still to swim. There's an entire life yet to live though sometimes it dwindles in autumnal ashes, it rises again, and again, and again. You will rise, too.

I'll make sure of it.

Block

(Drag yourself through muck and mire. Scrub your knees against the rocks of your resistance, sand your eyes with doubt and indifference, fill your veins with paralyzed apathy. You know this is just as much a part of the process as everything else, you know excuses are only windblown trash on a street you must cross regardless. Sit in the dirt for a minute, let it seep into your pores and grab you by the throat, feel the air leave you and everything turn black. 

Then dust yourself the fuck off.  The only way to survive, is to live. 

The only way to get something done is to do it.)

Missed

I dreamed of airplanes again, of lives in transit, the comforts of home. I don't know why I keep having these dreams, I suppose I should be listening. A friend asks how I'm doing, and I answer working too much and working too little in the same breath. It turns out to be exactly the truth. I try to scrub tingles off my skin, try to wring myself out of this body to try to save it in the fall, this life would be a farce if it wasn't so tragic and once my work is done I realize I scraped the magic right off. Maybe there's plenty where that came from, I suppose we might find out.

I have this heart full of love, you know. I have these arms full of comfort, this head full of song, I try to use them on myself but I forget so often. In a dark room in the west village, I sat with a small child wrapped around my body, taking gentle breaths and thinking of eternity. We can all be reduced to humans. That is a magic that cannot be scrubbed off.

Come. I dare you to try it.

Mist

The bartender plays a new soundtrack, some sort of mellow bluegrass Americana, it weaves in and out of your consciousness and you forget where you are. She pours your beer as you walk in the door, the bar smells of old alcohol and mumbles: would that you could live in this space always. You think perhaps that is all you are trying to do with these words, build a line of credit that will let you live along a bar forever, and you will not be sorry. You always dreamed of being a recluse belonging, and now here you are: the drink has your name on it, the table in the corner, you make no excuses anymore.

We stood in the ocean this morning, last night's storm whipping up seaweed and shrimp carcasses around our ankles, a heavy fog rolling across the beach noncommittally, and all I could do was laugh. What a dream this life, after all, even as fall threatens on the horizon, even as old age sets in and everything is different from how it once was. Two years ago I sat across the river with a stupid smile on my face and thought how everything was different, and I had no idea. How many waves would I ride, how much terror would whip up from the depths below: how grateful would I be one day for just a moment's peace in the sun. I know every inch of your skin, every fold of your heart, what a tremendous gift is that?

The river looks the same now and yet completely different. I approach it carefully, feigning courage. Remember what lurks beneath. Believe in the wave that will make it all worth it.

Doors

Morning arrives too soon, already sweltering and relentless. I drag a heavy head to a kitchen table, to a coffee cup, to a pair of running shoes. Arrive at the river long after it's become unbearable, stumble a few miles and land on a patch of clover, letting the sweat drip as I search for four leafed promises underneath my skin. The phone stirs relentlessly, Sunday chatters and yet not what you're looking for, it's a practice in patience. I stare at the river and dream of the ocean, I dream of a lot of things but I don't sleep nearly as much as I need to. Play the reel over again. A to do list circles your drain, you are tired and impatient at the same time, you know the only answer is work. Watch the cursor blink at the edge of your screen, the minutes race around your watch. The obstacles writhe and stretch and build themselves in front of your nose.

The only way to get over them is to start climbing.

Thick Skin

Another cycle begins, she writes from the north, endless summer drawing impossibly to a close and everything beginning and ending all at once. I don’t know what to make of this life. I stand on the platform late, trains running rarely and the air thick with August, how was my skin so cold so recently? We sat in a restaurant in the midday heat, calculating dates and remembering times when everything was just beginning, it seems a lifetime ago, and I’m not sure anymore I remember who I was then. I tell him I’m better now, better every day and I know I mean it: for a short moment I forget the gashes across my lungs. A Hasidic man next to me takes off his large fur hat, a source of pride, a symbol of repression, I don’t know that any of us are as free as we like to believe.

Still, any moment breathing is better than not, this short moment before stepping onto the steaming platform is a gift and you swallow it whole. A train runs express in the depths, the workers blow a whistle and step off the electrified rails. The Hasidic man puts his hat back on. I smile despite myself, and it feels like this is the greatest gift: belief that everything may one day start anew. The train arrives, I make my way back home. Everything ends, I am still here.

I am here, again.