Hallow

They yell from the street, expectant faces full of candy and paints, everything is a dream when you're five. You waste away the days mired in guilt, but there's always a Monday, always a chance at a clean slate. A new month begins, a dark month full of endings but you always found the word in that darkness, always sparked by its stillness. After a month of scrambles, you vow to do better, vow to build space for the beating inside your chest, it is November now, it is years and years into the jungle and you are still making your way through it, if you could

make it this far
you can make it through

All the rest. 

People Pass

The weather turns blustery, spirits traveling on cold winds to stretch their limbs and check in on those they've left behind, it's all roll of the dice who's worse off. I sleep late in the little shoebox, the radiators bubbling and no one to interrupt the spectres inside my chest. Close my eyes again and see all the truths line up: how the way we spend our days is how we live our lives, the distractions of love and happiness, at the end of it all, how only one thing glows like a treasure, how it never followed prescribed courses and retirement accounts. Later, I repot the little avocado tree that has been flourishing in the shoebox's window, see imprints of its roots at the bottom of the old pot, touch them tenderly to see a life straining against its edges. How comforting a home can be, even while you have outgrown it. How leaving your mark doesn't mean it's good or bad, by definition.

The only answer was always the Word. The only reason was always to let it roar until you die or it dies in you. 

there is no other way.

and there never was.

a Fool

There's an emptiness that arrives after departure, a reminder of things ignored and forgotten, long before the distraction. The to do list so long, but the tendrils of imagination swirling around the nape of my neck, aren't they always more important than whatever else clouds my judgment? What is this life if not one best devoured in poverty, in creative liberty, what point is the straight and wide when there are side streets and unknown exits off the highway. The car sputters and dies on the corner of my block, how else would I know that I love it now? That it promises freedoms and wilderness? My mother sits on my bright pink couch and says alright then, this makes sense. I make plans to put everything in storage and drive into the American West, into nights of a million stars and books yet unwritten. You call later, knowing full well all the lines already performing inside my head.

I can never thank you enough for all the things you gave me,
and I only didn't for all the things you swept from under my feet. 

Stall

The to-do lists and deadlines pile up around me, mountains of demands screaming in my eardrum while I cower in a corner, exhausted by the nor'easters dragging around my little shoebox on the corner. The super doesn't show, as he always never shows, we all battle demons but differently, there are flowers in my vases but tears in my limbs, I haven't written a good word all year, its absence rips at my sinew, devours my insides, I falter. 

There are things more important than six figure incomes and looking good on paper. 

You forget, so easily you forget. But when the word reminds itself to you..

How the heart swells beyond anything you ever dared to dream.

Espera

Sunlight beams in through the south facing windows in the little shoebox, impending winter reverses course. I run along the river, believing in another day. He writes, and I wonder what slumbers in me still, how long it will remain in hibernation. Bury myself in work, in the way a to-do list can twist and turn around itself. 

Sometimes we are more questions than answers. Keep your nose to the grindstone. 

Even babysteps one day lead somewhere.

Milling

The street downstairs is blocked off, they intend to tear the whole thing up by its roots, they intend to turn it over and maybe start afresh but all it means is you will not sleep till dawn

but would you have anyway? 

The weather turned on a dime, you pull out mountains of warmer clothing to make it just two stops into Brooklyn, just two steps into your imagination playing tricks on you, the Reverend is on the stage playing music and you can’t help yourself, there’s something about an old spiritual that makes you smile into a silence, he walks you reluctantly to the train and in the space between you forget to put on your mask, forget there was a pandemic. The heat comes on in the little apartment on 6th street. A moon is nearly full outside the window  

You sleep, but only on paper. 

Passing

The sun shines down on anxious New Yorkers, promises another few moments of bliss, promises a snooze button on the darkness or whatever dangers lurk. We sit on a pedestrian St. Marks drinking sangria and making jokes, we sit on an unsecured east village rooftop pondering the nation we chose, we sit in a tenement shoebox wondering what art is left to make, I think there is magic to be found after so much drought, that could not have been seen in the riches. He speaks in riddles but all you see are the dimples in his cheeks, all you will remember are a few breathless softnesses in a rickety stairwell, the last two years have taken so much from us that we must welcome the gifts when they are given with open arms, with the absence of defense. They say the weather is about to turn, they say gather ye rosebuds while ye may, but you have lived through a hell, you have walked through many a fire, if anything were to come out of all this pain, 

perhaps it will be the knowledge
that you did, too.

Open

We get seats near the top of the tiny theater, latecomers squeezing in along the rafters, no one knows how to do this anymore so we are all foals finding our footing together, there is a sweet kindness in the steps. They read poetry and verse, sing songs, tell stories, we clap and cheer and remember what life is lived in the margins, you hear new words tell themselves to you and you think maybe the last two years were rough because the magic didn’t have room to whisper itself to you in the stillness. For a short while you feel the illness that sits in you abate, feel the lightness on your chest that comes with breath, remember what it is to be human. Your heels click clack across the cobble stone all the way home, you love New York like your life depended on it and it does, oh it does, today a bright pink couch was delivered to the little shoebox on 6th street and I know what they will say about me when I’m gone but lord, I am not afraid to say it while I’m still here, it comes out at odd angles but all it speaks 

is truth. 

Trellis

October carries on in gray clouds across the weeks, dragging us slowly into the season like no one really has the energy anymore to worry about if the sun is shining. It's been years since the sun shone, for some, what's the point in waiting around. A million deadlines wake me from my sleep and I think we knew we'd look bad with a melancholy fondness to some of those despairing days, and here we are. Anxiety runs rampant through my veins and I can't catch it, can't draw it out of the speeding blood. She writes to say he's become a millionaire selling NFTs and you cannot begin to process the twists and turns of this world. Is this why people pick up and move into the woods. 

A lone morning glory blossoms on the fire escape, while the jungle of vines that went before it starts to wither. Is it worth any less for its late bloom? Or, perhaps, any more?

The day stretches out ahead of me in a panic. 

I don't have the answers, yet.

Lucy

The gears are rusty, winding themselves around curling irons and lipstick shades, ordering whisky drinks at the other end of the bar and wondering what the point is on a rainy October evening. But you run to the F train like something in your spine knows what it’s doing, you navigate late night brooklyn like it used to live in your blood stream, theres something about muscles reviving with use, fall waits in the margins, the avenues lie quiet on Sunday nights but the bodega florist on the corner will still wrap you a bouquet and Key Foods doesn’t close, this is New York after all, not some little backwater suburb from whence you came. We wax poetic about the city but it’s clear he doesn’t have the language for it you do. 

It’s late and you are anything but tired. 

That’s all New York’s doing. Don’t go getting it confused. The city never goes to sleep 

in you. 

Tomato, tomato

Rain arrives, cold air and gloom, for the first time since you don't know when you welcome it with open arms, light a candle that smells of old bookshops and hours without end. When you were a child, did you know time? Did you understand how it needles itself under your skin, breaks apart your luster, your ability to climb trees straight out from your window and veer down rabbitholes? 

No. 

And that's exactly the secret. They get you by eating away at the parts of your soul that thought time was a plaything, was a malleable clay, they tell you that each minute is weight its worth in coins and if you're not weighing it in coins it is worthless, this is how they get you. 

So it turns out your ignorant youth was right all along. Burn the scales, burn the lessons in which they teach you fear, keep their parasites out of your blood stream. 

Pay your rent, forget the rest. These trees were meant for climbing.

Ambition

I rise at dawn, strange dreams of old lovers in my blood stream, I am surreal for hours. Try to weed whack my way through a few pesky deadlines as they grow and gurgle around my fingers on the keyboard, forever a jungle and never a clearing, see the window of my own imagination closing as the demands of a supposedly real world grow heavier. When at last I shut the lids of the word processors and go out into the New York City afternoon to actually process my words, it looks lighter than before, easier. 

Return to words of my own making, the familiar sting of a bourbon glass in the margins, an entire world drawn up out of nothing, remember again why I came to this little town, why I came to these crooked conclusions, the world will mold and mold you and sometimes you are right to give in, let it change your shape but oh, when it twists your nerves do not relent, do not give up, those nerves bleed poetry the kind that makes you hear your own name the way it was given, makes you certain again without any doubt that your strange and wondrous image came out right after all, came out
just
how it was intended.

Indeed It Should

Return on the BQE in the early afternoon, a hazy skyline draping itself across the distance, Delancey street forever a traffic jam, I turn down 6th street and find a parking spot just steps from the front door. New York is benevolent when it wants to be. On the fourth floor, the tops of the honey locust leaves have yellowed in my absence, but the avocado on my windowsill sprouts a new branch. Tropical fruits guaranteed before the end of the decade. A change in season promised by the end of the week. 

I refresh the fall foliage map on my browser. This is me embracing change. This is me with a growth mindset. 

Do you know, I had the strangest thought today, in the little shoebox apartment just off Tompkins Square Park, the feeling of fall coming in the window, the piles of to do lists tumbling pleasantly around my feet, a novel manuscript warm in my hands. I thought, for just a moment, that I was happy, and that I might look forward to things to come. 

When you have been crawling so long on the burning coals, with only the goal to keep breathing,
hope seems an awful lot like an oasis in the desert.

Agains

The answer was always there.
Perhaps the great challenge of life
is to learn how to listen to it.

Crash

Fall asleep to waves, wake to waves, breaking against nearby shorelines, the ocean is a tonic at every turn. I go for a long run along the eroding bluffs, watch them crumble into the sea, see my cheeks burn in the autumn sunlight I cannot anger. In the late afternoon, sprawled out on a faded towel at the edge of a grassy dune, the words all return to me, the poetry, the dreams. After a year and a half of dread, somehow I can still feel joy. We are nothing if not incessant optimists, forever turning pages and dreaming them into rainbows. 

Perhaps that is what life is. Keep turning pages and believe in the ones whose colors bring you joy. 

Turn enough pages and you'll always find one that does.

Try Try Again

Your cheeks turn brown in the late season, belying the October truths as they fall from the trees, but in your chest you have bought yourself another month before you go under. We run a long trail to northern beaches, past the obscene villas, I feel my muscles strain and remember who they are. I begin to think the same of myself. The warmer days lead to quiet evenings, I squander valuable minutes in the inertia of regular people, is this what it means to live a life? I had been hoping for more. It's possible life is saying the same about me. 

We go to bed early. I lie in the oddly decorated leftover bedroom listening to crashing waves and cicadas outside the window, is that not the gift in its entirety? To have the ocean at your very doorstep.

Remember this, when your head fills with cotton again. The sea will heal you when you are not paying attention. 

You can make real the wishes that you never even dared speak.

Dipper

The morning warms. I speed through the mountains of work until the sun beams down on the splintered wood deck, what is life on the gold coast if not a carefully manicured humility. We sit on the beach and watch surfers feign casual while their wallets bulge, watch dogs careen along the breaking waves and everything has an air of suspended time, nothing is real here. 

Later, we stand in the dark and watch the Milky Way cloud itself in a ribbon across the skies, a web of stars pulsating against the insignificance of our impossibly short lives, my hair still drying from salty waves. How small we are, after all, and yet how much room all these insights can take. 

I go to bed alone. 

The life feels longer, then.