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.