Ends

A year on fire comes to a smoldering ember, is stomped  out by the collective exhaustion of a people dragged through its flames. We sit waiting, anxiously counting down minutes, knowing nothing really will change at the stroke of midnight but thinking maybe, maybe there’ll be miracles at the end of this clock, at the end of this drink, thinking I am going to make it through this year if it kills me, and hoping it will not. 

79 minutes left. We pour another drink, light a fire in the backyard and watch a full moon cross the heavens, one year I watched the stars in the black sky of the west and said the Universe has already given me the gifts, it is now up to me to use them. And this year the Universe took all our gifts from us, took our hard earned wins and the ground from under us when we’d always taken it for granted but god damn, it did not take our hope, and making it into the new year is how we prove it. 75 minutes left. You will start from the bottom, yes. But you will build towers and light stars, you will give the Universe gifts in return, 67 minutes left and in the new year you hold the Universe just as much as you wanted it to hold you in the travesty of a year that passed. 

It’s a new year. The you is old, but damn, if this isn’t a year it’ll be good. 

Announce

 (I am done
accepting mediocrity
in this life when I am working so
hard
to create miracles, 

am done allowing
complacent,
half-hearted,
attempts at my
attention

when I have whole
hearts
of attention to
share, I 

am no longer taking
applications
on paper napkins
without poetry,
on the backs of
receipts
without sweat stains and
echoing laughter in the
margins do you
hear me?
I am done
with anything less than
your absolute

Fireworks.)

268

I fail, at every turn I fail, not reaching the bars haphazardly splayed above me but tumbling instead into depths below, perpetually convinced that to not reach the top means to be firmly mired at the bottom. Does midwinter always feel so hopeless (the answer is yes)? A dreadful year comes to a close, but you never can outrun yourself. Did you do the things you thought you might make of your life (the answer is never)?

But I see the numbers rise on my list of notes written. See how this year has somehow, despite the muck and mire and the feeling that you are forever so many steps behind, added up to more stories than any other year before it, see how twelve years of keeping this record has been more prolific this year than ever. Sometimes growth does not announce itself in great fanfare. Sometimes it merely arrives, nestles in, after you've walked ten thousand miles one step at a time, after you've built your story brick by brick, sometimes it is just there, and you made it. 

The new year arrives with fireworks and countdowns and much hollering, but that doesn't mean that everything will, nor that if it doesn't, it is somehow less spectacular. 

Keep your eyes open. You may not be falling at all.

Dawn

She comes into the room while it is still dark, 4-year-old bare feet tip-toeing across 150-year-old wood boards and crawling up into the little nook formed by my half-sleeping body. As dawn stretches across the river, we watch the snowflakes start to fall, more and more until they cover the ground and blind the view of the old cemetery. I make a large pot of coffee and take out the sourdough rising in a cold stairwell; how mornings in the country move at different speeds. 

Later, at my desk, staring straight into the appearing sun, I flip through piles of paper to remember the year that past, try to build a new one ahead. Eventually, every memory fades into objects of our illusion, isn't this life so strange? I wanted you to be the one thing I never forgot, but now I can no longer trust my hazy ideas of what you were. I dream such strange dreams here in the country, perhaps it is no different. 

All years end, eventually. 

This, too, shall pass.

Flurry

The morning arrives dark, dragging itself into existence. I sleep a deep sleep and outlast my alarms, this does not happen. The long sleep should make me well-rested, I think as I wade through a day of heavy eyelids: nothing works according to your plans. Little snowflakes dance their way to the ground, they do not stick (what does?). It's only Monday, you tell yourself, always with the mantras, always with the reminder that better things can come if you endure this life. Were we only ever meant to endure it?

I miss a simple joy. 

But it's only winter. 

There is life yet to be lived. 

Isn't there?

Pleasantries

In the late afternoon, midwinter sunshine across barren fields, leaving New York City behind and speeding down the highway, it's a special kind of joy in the freedom of driving out that I haven't quite wrapped my head around yet. The joy lies perhaps most in knowing I can just as easily return. 

I arrived at the creaky little house right as twilight settled across the Hudson, a magic moment and happy faces in the door, a longed for breath of fresh air. Everything is surreal in the side-real, the sun seems to rise at different angles, the clocks move at speeds all their own. We sat at the bar later, a bar, can you believe it? and tried to catch up on things which refuse to be caught. A book of poetry burns a hole in my back pocket, what a dream it is to live in words, what a gift. It gets dark so early here in the country. 

I wonder if one day I'll show you. 

We can set the clocks however we like, I promise.

Rite

(The great magic comes over me. The late-night, grows-in-silence, paints-in-words magic that gave me every purpose, created every guiding light, the impossible magic that delights and astounds me, that tortures me in its absence, returns. I sit silently at the word processor and watch the letters turn into sentences into entire worlds under my fingertips. Sometimes I forget what it is to be moved by the word and think I have been abandoned entirely, that this madness was only youthful conceit at last to be washed away by wisdom and sense, but oh, it is not so. 

if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. 

May we never be so old,
that we cannot hear our own soul
when it speaks to us.)

Arriving

The wind rages through the night, turning over restaurant awnings and newspaper boxes. For the first time in a year, I sleep well into the late morning; it feels like a gift I do not know how to unwrap without guilt. The apartment is a mess of celebration and light, it's a sweet awakening in a silent day. You decide not to carry anyone else's grief on your shoulders. Not today. 

You have plenty of your own, and as this year draws to a close, your muscles are weary of the work. 

They say not to believe the sun will rise on January 1st with all the ills of the old year wiped clean, but it is too tempting not to. This year has dragged us through the mud and left us there, with nothing but our daydreams and memories of clear skies for solace. 

And yet. 

And yet, I leave this year with a clarity that could not have come without the dirt along my hem, with a longing for sparks that would not have set itself on fire in my chest had I not gone so long in stillness. What you want out of this life is becoming clear now, only through the mist of what you have not been allowed. We will stumble out of this madness like after a long illness, smelling the spring air as though it had never carried so sweet a scent. 

This holiday afforded me a chance to sit in the stillness, to hold myself in gentle kindness, and to reaffirm my vows to the city which has weathered every storm it has encountered since we first met. There is no greater gift than to find love, in whatever manner it appears, and love will not let itself be dispersed merely by global disasters and sorrow. 

So you see, this year was not for naught. You know, in truth, they never are.

Eve (revisited)

On Christmas Eve it rains. Great big torrents of warm water from the tropics wash Second Avenue clean and solitary, it is a sweet sort of gift of the season. Even after all these months of solitude, there's a particular kindness in silence; I turn the lights down and let the colors of the season rest in the periphery. Years of practice have perfected the routine: deep, gentle sorts of pleasures, slow steps and thorough breaths, dotted with delights. You sound awfully happy, he says, and though you know there was a time you never could have believed it, now it is true. Somehow, you have been given this brief breath in which to rest, in which not to fear, or despair. I know there was a time when the rhythm of your breaths calmed me in the night; I know there was a time when I believed all of life lay ahead of me and the Mad Word might follow me indefinitely. Such innocence is gone.

But I walked across the Williamsburg Bridge again, today, as I do every year, and while this year I have crossed that damned bridge more than perhaps ever before, turning around to see Manhattan tower before me still takes my breath away like it is the first time I see it. Returning across the span to the island, I can still remember it from that fall in my youth when every step on its streets seemed an impossible dream. This city has grown itself into a home, I have let it twist and turn itself around my every nerve ending, inhabit my every emptiness, I know the outline of this city like a lover I no longer fear losing, and that is the greatest gift. 

So that even in a year such as this one, a year so cruel, so intent on stripping us of every last shred of our humanity, so impossibly relentless, I can look out at these empty streets and still see the home I fell in love with once and a hundred times since. So that even in a life such as this one, I can be overwhelmed with gratitude that I have one thing that is so good, it makes the agony bearable. 

I have one thing that is so good,
it lets me want for nothing.

that Life is Okay and

In order to reach order, she says, you must allow for chaos. You survey the disaster that is your supposed sanctuary, try not to consider what it might reveal about you. Here is a woman who has lost her mind. He speaks of food like it's a language, of language like it's a story, of stories like they are possibility. You feel irreparably damaged, feel scarred along your nerve endings, like your eyes reveal your disability in how the sides won't crinkle right when you smile. Remember a time you weren't broken and wonder how things could have been different. 

They are not. 

He speaks of poetry and the mere mention softens your spine. You take more comfort in silent ink than beating hearts, none of this is new. You buy a shovel for the car, as the snow at last begins to melt. Christmas arrives in the strangest year yet. 

You asked the Universe for this. Did you make of your wish what you could?

that I won't be with you

When I was a child in the South Pacific, the children touched our hair and called us angels; this concept brought to them by crusaders with their white god, their pure heavens. I learned something on that island I could not quite place. I wrapped my pale skin in a lavalava until it made more sense than the alternative, curled my feet in deference, revered the hibiscus. When I returned to the north, they called me gingerbread, and I thought I never wanted to be different again. 

We can choose how we walk the path of our life, but we cannot map it entirely. I was given strange gifts for the journey but they are what I have now, I grew up in a life that tried to save everything but did not try to save me, these are the road signs I navigate. All I ever knew was the Word, all I ever knew was this city held a secret and that writing was the way I'd reach it.

You are here now: that is all there is. You have only the next step, where you take it. You did not pick your cards. But the time has come to play them. 

So go play.

In a Wonderland

The great snow passes. Leaves the city quiet for a minute, the city that's been quiet for a year. We come out of our caves later than usual to survey the damage; it's just enough to delight the children, but not enough to halt the life. Do you remember the blizzards of 2010, how we owned the West Village streets where no cars could go? I dragged a heavy suitcase down the subway stairs at Houston and unearthed in the South Pacific, what a life this is. I wrote a kind word to my father and he replied in tears, perhaps there is magic left in love. 

Wished for a life this year
it's brand new. 

The car is buried. Heat steams out of the radiator in great clouds. An avocado plant grows despite itself on the windowsill. 

I haven't told you yet,
but I'm gonna be with you.

Snow Day

The night before the storm is quiet, calm. I bike home along the west side and watch the Hudson River lie still in anticipation, all black glass against the lights of New Jersey. It's cold. When the snow comes, it is strange, like something you knew once but which left you long ago, something familiar in your bones but foreign still. Late at night, children come out to kick around in the streets. No one does any work on a snow day in the year 2020, we've lost all sense of time and reason, rhyme and season, what I'm trying to say is we've lost our minds, the snow turns to drops of ice against the window pane and these old tenement buildings haven't seen proper heat in a hundred years, the risers just crack with one deep breath of steam in the night, my body can commiserate. It's dark so early now I forget the day is over, midnight rolls in over my wide open eyelids and guilts me into rolling over. Do you remember when you were still there to roll over to?

I don't. 

It's strange, now, how foreign. Your skin against mine is just a crack in my bones. 

And every storm passes, eventually.

Pause

The days whisk themselves from underneath your feet, run through sunny spring days and into biting cold. Along the river, your cheeks flush with sunshine, or promise, sometimes it's hard to tell. He calls you later and feels a million miles away, you always hated to let anything go. Christmas approaches, a new year approaches, you look to the screen for answers but it has none, rumor has it the answers are inside of you. We're surviving a year that seems unsurvivable. 

It's a low bar. 

Or maybe it's just right.

But Soft

Winter comes, at last, the little tenement apartment takes its century old cracks and twists itself around the polar winds. I find a parking spot around the corner from the apartment, spend the street sweeping hour chatting up unknown neighbors and thinking New York still holds a little magic, after all. My muscles creak with unexpected use, I stretch my legs along the river and smile into the sunshine. There is hope yet. We end the evening on that irresistible block on west 4th street, three bourbons in, heat lamps beaming above our heads. This year has twisted everything around, has beaten you to the ground, but you are still human, after all, you still can delight in the little gifts the Universe can afford. When I wake in the morning, before dawn, the living room hums with colored lights, with twinkling stars in the windows. We all hurt, now, we all hurt. 

But we can stretch these muscles,
and build something new from their pain.

Snö

I grow silent under watchful eyes. My hands freeze at the keyboards — literally too. Outside, it snows. New York feigns London winter of 1962, you put on another layer of clothing and vow to keep your head out of the oven. The light therapy box beams at all ours now, I cannot fall asleep for the manic energy it affords me at night. Is this not the time for poetry? Surely, surely it is.  Surely the depths of our ennui, the darkness of our weary despair, leave only room for art and nothing else, this is not a loss. I pick up a pen again. Lace up my sneakers. Take a deep breath. 

We have so far to go, still. 

Can I tell you a story while we wait? 

Riverside

A day winds itself beneath your feet, twists and turns in the strange ways of a life. Every now and then, you strike a turn of phrase that seems you to bring you joy, seems to shake you from your slumber, and you remember the curlicue magic of the word, so long dormant under the weight of your darkness. He speaks to you of Mexico, of poetry festivals in New Orleans, of finding home in the American West, and you contemplate what it means to live an entire life. The East Village lies quiet, I write creaky poetry into its evening, and remember the madness I tried to follow into its avenues, and what remains. 

What remains is the seeds to rebuild, though. 

What remains is that this city has been burned and beaten for centuries, and yet we keep coming, yet we keep stitching it together in accordance with our dreams. It was always better just before, and of course the truth is that isn't truth at all. New York is always perfect, you are the one who is fallible, you are the one who is human. I look at apartment listings, I look at job prospects. That which will come, will come. 

The word is a seed
which grows anywhere you
Make it.

Haste

Monday morning comes, the firetrucks disperse from seventh street as the bulldozer continues to raze the rubble of what once was an unmoveable building. Nothing is forever. Even you. 

The to do list looms, winds itself around your neck, your head filled with cotton, whispers its demands into the sorrow that is your muscle memory. Don't make a backup plan, comes a small voice deep inside you. Have nowhere to fall, nothing to catch you. It's been so many years of tearing down the structures that held you in place, you wonder if you at last have done it. At the base of your spine, little spires of curious greens begin to grow, little wondrous words and turns of phrase that turn amazed, when all is said and down and you've burned your unmoveable cage to rubble, is there not always a story left in the ashes? When you have nothing left, does the word not always manage to remain? 

It occurs to me I've spent so much time looking for something I found long ago. Perhaps the cure you are looking for is against your own resistance. 

If the abyss is deep
and dark
and impossible

You will leap. 

Melody

A weekend comes, and goes. You get a brief moment's break, but what is a bandaid against a bullet wound? The days are sunny, so sunny, I ran along the river with my eyes closed, trying to blind myself with its powers, she says did you ever think of moving somewhere brighter but what does she know. A building three blocks up burns to the ground, takes a neighboring church with it. Those who've been here before say it reminds them of the way back when. Rents plummet. You wonder if maybe there's a chance to rise out of the ashes ahead. You want so much to rise out of these ashes. 

Three more weeks of a year that burned the ground from under us. Three more weeks of a chance at redemption. You start over a thousand times, at some point it's bound to stick. 

If you just set enough fires,
eventually you have a numbers game
on your hands.

It's Ok

The piano trembles in minor keys, dripping back and forth under heavy fingertips but it's only for show, it's a harmless sorrow to bleed across vocal cords, let it seep out into the ether and dissipate. Let it go. The sun beamed on the bridges to Manhattan this morning, how can I not smile at the mad stacks of life that are this city? How can I race downhill toward Delancey Street, with the whole island spreading out around me and not know that everything will all be well? I stare into the sunlight like a drug, like I cannot get enough, I fill my every nerve ending, every last cell with its light, 17 days until it turns, I know we've seen the bottom, my dear, I know we grate our skin along it time after time and think we'll never breach the surface again but oh, oh how I know there is always a moment when you kick yourself up, you are suffering now, make no mistake, but you will not always. Some day, this pain will be useful to you. 

No one reads a book
where the character just wants to make it to the end.

De:scent

There's that brief moment in a morning, when you linger in dreams and your backbone still assumes the fresh start of a new day. It disappears quickly, dissipates like morning mist on a still lake burned off by summer heat and you don't know how to recapture it. Could you start over? Reverse your steps into bed and paint a new backdrop for the day? I stare into the light therapy box like it has answers, like it has promises, but it only beams its sunny indifference at me, I am still alone with this cinderblock in my chest. She says fake it till you make it but it seems to me eventually you have faked it so long you no longer have anything real inside yourself and then what does it matter if you are smiling on the outside?

All we want is to be seen, to know that we exist. 

I turn the camera off my computer. I know exactly what that means.

Re:trieve

The days continue in tar, you wade waist-deep in it now, there's sunshine on the horizon but your legs are lead. The bills do not care for your diagnoses, do not care that you are trying to make it just one more day, one more hour, trying to get to a bank in the whitewater where you might breathe for a spell. They'd like return on their investment, and you're looking like a hazard. 

I begin to chip away at the mountain of work ahead, try to eke out a path where there is still only darkness, but you are carrying an elephant of lead on your shoulders, is it any wonder you feel so tired all the time? The wind picks up, carries the last leaves of autumn into oblivion, wraps its cold grip around the city, I fear I have so little left to give a year that demands more than we could ever have guessed. He says tell me one thing you like about yourself and all I can think of is the cotton between my ears. I get back up again, I say finally, matter-of-factly. I no longer have access to feelings like pride, like joy, but a few rational shreds remain. 

I dust myself off
and I get the fuck back up.