108 degrees

My envy of the waterfowl in the Buttermilk Channel knows no bounds. 

I am a thousand degrees of humidity. I am a pile of loosely frazzled curls atop my head. I am summer, am joy.  

I am joy. 

How many dark months did I not remember this feeling, did I think it a figment of my imagination, a youthful state to which I would never return. And now, how easy it is, how self-evident. Of course you are a million morsels of happiness, what else could you be? 

I am yearbook signings and last day of school giggles. I am temporary goodbyes. I am adventure on the horizon. The heat wave breaks and breaks against the glass monoliths of Manhattan but does not break me, this is the difference. 

For so long you thought you had nothing, were nothing, the illness takes and takes when you have nothing left to sacrifice, sometimes I think I live a half life, offering so much upon its demanding altar. 

But would the light, when it comes, look as bright if I had not the black of night with which to compare it? Would I know the preciousness of this joy if I had not endured months in its absence? Do you not think, when I go to die, I will add up both sides of the coin and find 

That the life came out 

To full? 

Raise

You sprint to the end of an era; your landlord throws you a lifeline and tells you to hold on to it for later. Your parents ask if you couldn’t cross the ocean and babysit their plants instead, you are a perpetual potential to those around you who see your flailing tethers and long to hook them to their agendas. 

It’s too sunny, too warm, the breeze to mild for you to be angry about this. 

We sat in Battery Park and watched our heritage dance around us until dark, sat at the edge of Red Hook and watched the sun set behind the Statue of Liberty, I sat under a tree in a spot of shade and watched clovers hide their fourth leaves, life is a mystery. I packed the contents of a year into the open nooks between contents of a life in my storage unit, 

life is predictable. 

June has arrived now, my darling, summer has arrived to take us all somewhere new. All you have to do is hang on. 

All you have to do is live it. 

How Brilliant It Can Be

Thunder rolls in, covers your windows in immediate night, branches lashing against the panes. It's gone in an instant, taking a few degrees of swelter with it. You can't be mad. If anything, you wish you were out there in it, your senses could use a little shakeup. 

Tomorrow, a holiday awaits, the one that always cracked your chest open in all the ways it could. The longest day, the shortest night, but then the day when it turns. How winter lies in wait with every summer. How darknes hides behind every light. If you want to come back in the fall, just let me know. We'll work something out. 

One week until adventures begin for the season. 

Sometimes it feels like you are doing everything right.  

Print Shop

Another gloomy day, you wonder how much of this you can endure before thinking that maybe it's just a sign, that maybe the universe is looking to push you out, out. You look at weather forecasts in New Hampshire. 

The weekend is a mess of a country in tatters. Of assassinations, parades, and marches. An audience member asks, what am I to make of my American dream? and the presenter says, it was never meant to be easy. You repeat it in your head. You had 30 years of easy, and even then, once or twice, the easy got stuck in your throat. 

We fight when we believe we have something worth fighting for. 

A dream not worth fighting for, 
was only ever a figment of your imagination. 

Jag Fattar Ingenting

More rain, June disappears in a cloud cover of its own making and you're ready to go along with it. The top-ups are so temporary, so light, like hummingbirds resting only for a second before they're off again. You feel like there should be a key here somewhere, a door, an answer, but you are left with nothings, with more of the same. 

Wherever you go, there you are, she said. You spent a lifetime trying to prove her wrong but have ended right back where you started with nothing but sand in your hands. 

It didn't have to be like this, you think, but maybe that's exactly where you get it wrong. Maybe this is all it is, and you should have learned how to make your peace with it.  

Saltwater

The cure for anything is salt water, it rings and rings in your ears and you never tire of hearing it. 

I get on the parkway, driving against rush hour traffic in the sunny mid-morning, the New York Bay glittering at my side. There's a metaphor here about going against the current, about how easy it is, but it comes out sounding so trite against reality.

The waves at Jones Beach are a rough but consistent, dragging a slew of seaweed and silt from the ends of the earth to your ankles. Groups of youngsters shriek and giggle at the cold but you dive right in, the brief short circuit of winter waters like a wake up call. Dive into a wave, swim over another. Surf a short wave to shore, float across the billows. Once one wave passes, another appears in its place. Sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, forever the promise of a perfect wave just beyond this one. 

Stand there for hours losing track of time, what use could you have in knowing what the clock says. You never regret one last dive in the water reminds itself to you and you let yourself stay longer. Your shoulders fizzle. Another dive. Your legs tire. Another dive. A dolphin leaps at the edge of your vision,you look around to see if anyone else noticed. The Universe winks at you now and again. Summer is here. 

I return to the city smelling of salt, skin flushed, head tired. All the debris that lingered in my chest has been washed away, nothing matters now. I look at houses along the shoreline, consider a fall spent marinating. My landlord writes to say the rent is going up and anyway I don't know if you were planning on coming back. All the world's potential lies ahead. 

All you have to do it dive in after it.  

Weathered

Another day of rain, you wake early to hear it washing the windows, and fall back asleep until it's turned into a nuisance against your temples. Pull the string on the ceiling lights – in June, who ever heard of such a thing – and ignore the headache trundling across the top of your brain. You're back to believing the Universe is trying to tell you something, you just don't know what. 

I'm a boat out of steam, a balloon out of air. I'm hell and a hand basket, I'm a hunger of picky eaters. The shoebox on sixth street has doubled in price, but I'm not looking to go back in time.  

I only wish I knew
what there was 
to look forward to.  

Unrest

In California, a smoke cloud billows out of the military siege. Do you remember how it was last time? And the time before? Do you remember who sat on the right side of history in the end? 

A wasp gets trapped inside my bedroom window, too exhausted to leave when I clear the path. I feed it sugar water and strawberries, it delights and revives. We could all do with a little comfort, a little care. 

Instead we are kicked into a world of each-person-for-themselves-ness and suspicion. I look at apartment listings on the lower east but wonder if perhaps the answer lies in a country cabin no one could reach. The questions are the same year after year, why

do we keep asking them? 

The application asks if I've ever been a communist, ever been a terrorist, ever been married to more than one person at a time. It seems the Vogons are alive and well among us. 

I'm packing my books. I don't need this reality from you.  

Applicate

I dream of wayward office fans in hospital rooms, frantically fighting for off switches and wake to a window AC blasting, my dreams have been so strange lately. I dreamed I passed a woman in the street who used to me like a mother to me and haven't seen in years, what of it. It is summer, the world is trying to whisper to me. I'm trying to prove myself to you, America, I'm trying to mold myself in your image, thirty-two years we've spent together America, isn't it time we made it official? For better, or for worse, I've already given you all, isn't it your turn to prove what that means. 

If you like it, 
then you should have put a ring on it 

but I'll settle for your papers. 

In a previous millenium, I could've never expected that we'd be here,
America. 
But I fell in love, despite myself,
full of the audacity of a secure attachment, 
full of belief that we'd both be allowed to be our selves

And still have a place with the other. 

Now is the time
we show our hands.  

Helter Swelter

June arrives, the heat moves in across the bay, dragging Canadian wildfire smoke behind it. The sky is hazy, but your mind is clear. How all it takes is a better connection between the synapses, you do not understand this disease, what does it want with you, what purpose could it possibly have? This isn't the way to climb down from the trees, you know. 

But it doesn't matter now, I don't have time to waste thinking about you. You had your time, I gave you all of mine, I gave you my energy, my will to live, all the attention this little heart could muster was yours, and that's done now. I don't want to waste my days pleading with you to give it back.

It's summer now,
there's magic waiting in the wings,
I haven't time to think of all your death,

when all I want to do is 
live.  

Laundry Day

At last, summer arrives to the metropolis. Sunlight streams in through my window, waking me from hung over nightmares with the gentlest reminder of life. I take a long walk around the bay, reluctant to return to a buzzing screen and demands on my time. It is summer. 

The last weeks of school before summer break always felt like a tingle, like a promise. 

“What do you like doing best in the world, Pooh?"
"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best-" and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called. 

You are in the middle of the promise now. 

And all you have to do 
is enjoy it.  

Mayed

The month ends, you miss it already. Try to retain the forward motion, go through your closet, willing to burn it all. Summer races across the plains, you know how it goes, how sunshine extinguishes like a match, but you are just at the beginning now and everything tastes delicious. 

In 43 years you have not learned how to make the most of every moment, you have tried forever to savor the summer days as they pass but you reach every fall with a twinge of regret. 

 Perhaps that is the life lesson. Run, run as fast as you can, you can't catch ephemera. 

It doesn't mean you shouldn't drink as much sunshine as you can, 
while you're trying. 

Art (Bar)

Friday arrives like a gift, I wake at dawn and am not mad. Last night's miles linger in my muscles, last night's creative output like a badge of validation on my breast. You were never meant to write in the mornings, Bukowski could've told you that decades ago. But you didn't need to hear it then, you knew all about it then, it's only in your old adult age that you've tried to join the throngs – what for?! what good did the throngs ever accomplish?! – like you made a deal with the devil but came up short. Grasp all, lose all, said the dog without his bone. 

Writing was made for nights, Fridays were meant for tumbling into the Village and dragging yourself to a decrepit old bar that charges 90s prices for cheap bottles of bubbly. May goes out like a lion, out like a buttercup, spring dances like it hasn't a care in the world, what care could you have when you are spring? The peonies along the bay are over already, tumbled to the ground, but just as bright, just as joyful, just as unafraid. 

May is mighty, now, unstoppable. 

You can be, too. 

Heritage

They drag me back to the keyboard, a strange sense of loyalty, of promises made, I find piles of old words and realize that they still have the power to move me. What gives?

Perhaps you should let the words take the reins for a while. The pursuit of money isn't getting you anywhere, anyway. Perhaps just be a roaming poet, a silly soul lost to the wind, what harm has ever come to you from daydreaming, that has not been wrought times a hundred by the real world? There was a time when you thought New York City was a magic, and you've let them beat it out of you with a thousand pin pricks, this is not making good on your promises. 

May has been gray this year, has been hesitant and middle-aged and bored. But I found a four-leaf clover in the park this morning, avoiding the eyes of the local roaming tramp I looked down to find a small firework from the Universe, what do you make of that? 

You have to go looking for treasure to find it. 

You have to be ready for madness
for it to enter your heart.  

But Soft

How the days tumble ahead of themselves, May racing to the end of its short life, a brilliant flame extinguished too soon, you already long for it though it is still here. What can you make of your own wild tendrils before they crumple? The ideas are staggering and frail all at once. It is light out so late in the evenings, now, this is the reward for not dying, this is the treasure you reap when you do not go down with the Kraken. It seems impossible to forget yet in the midst of things, how the memory washes away with the tide. 

All you need to do is savor it,
you know. 

All you need to do is
be here now,

to honor the summer
you've been given.

Overcast

The cloud cover remains. End of May and a chill on your nose, you wonder how people live without considering the weather. It determines your every mood, your every move, so natural that you can't imagine wishing it different. It would be like wishing to not have to breathe. 

I looked for four-leaf clovers in the grass this morning. It was the first time in so long, I have forgotten what it feels like to tingle in anticipation. To feel a small spark of just joy, nothing more or less complicated. There's nothing at stake, nothing to win or lose, just a wink from the Universe, just a moment of feeling singular. I found nothing, of course, and the cloud cover remains. 

Sometimes we have to create a foe,
to remember we have something to fight for.

Poke

He slips and falls into your inbox like a cat caught pushing flowers off a counter: everyone sees the broken glass, but the guilt hangs unclaimed in the air above. Did you mean to wake the sleeping bear? is a question you're not sure you want answered, so you tuck it away and put on another sweater to ward off the cold May bluster outside. He belongs to a different season all together, and you're not sure you speak a common language anymore. You were never good at goodbyes, yet you perpetuate them into eternity. 

Always one foot out the door.

She writes from her Brooklyn sublet, packed up and ready to depart again. There's something so satisfying about winding down a stay, isn't there? she preaches to your choir, and you itch to wipe your slate clean, restore this railroad apartment to who it was before you piled your hopes and dreams on its shelves, pack only words into your station wagon and head off to new adventure. 

One foot out the door means you always have one foot stepping into another. 

For every goodbye, there's a promise of hello.

Wistful Thinking

Everything catches up with you eventually. You get a few days of blissful ease, of ignoring your ps and qs, but eventually you fall off the wagon if you don't keep holding on. In the light of spring, however, falling feels more like a jolt from a strange dream than a crushing defeat of the body. You dust yourself off, begin to sprint, catch up with the horse and get back up on it. 

You were raised to believe that routine would kill you, that anything reliable, predictable, would drown your lungs and tie you down. How long it took to learn that some routines can come with you where you go, that reliable is a state you can create within yourself. 

How long it took you to learn
that even freedom is a habit.

Binaural

A coastal wind sweeps in over your marine village, you bask in a sunlight that doesn't seem intent on turning you into a glob of jelly in the streets. Take the ferry to Wall Street and arrive with your hair in a whirl, you refuse to complain. I waited a whole winter for this moment, and it's just as sweet as I could have dreamed, if I had known how to dream in the midst of the dark. 

There isn't much to say in the swirl of a May leap ahead, you try to hold on andgo where it goes, your to do lists flying out of the open windows. Seize this ray of light, make hay of this chance at life that arrived on your doorstep. Let's not quarrel now, my love, let's not think of the missed connections and fumbled advances, we are here now, my love, let's pretend we never have to be anywhere else. 

May is the flowers a lover brings you to apologize for the fight, is the encouraging gaze of a parent coaxing a child's first steps, May is the gift the Universe gives us, a chance to prove our worth. 

We are here now, my love,
and that is plenty.

Gale

Monday morning wakes you bright, though your late night body and wine-soaked brain feel anything but. Step ut into a morning walk painted in bluster, how a small hook of Brooklyn can feel like the Maine coastline when it puts its mind to it. You try to remember the dread that coated you on these walks mere weeks ago and cannot access the feeling. This is the great gift of remission: amnesia.

There is nothing but life, now, nothing but potential and open doors. The choices that seemed so hard before seem like treasure now: how many different enticing options lie at your feet? New York City is a blustery whirlwind of sunshine, a network of blood vessels, coursing through the world. You sprang into life with a dream once, and you're hobbling out of the woods to find the dream hasn't died, what more could you ask for? Summer lies ahead, the world lies ahead, and all you have to do is everything. 

The possibilities for joy
are endless.

Front

Every time you think the skies begin to clear, a vengeful weather god snickers and sends a storm your way. There is no metaphor; it is thunder. You think to yourself how a few months ago, the sentiment would be reversed, how in illness you go looking for signs from the Universe, meaning in crystals, answers at the end of hypnosis, and now how easy it is to see the world for what it is. If you were never ill, you might not have had this imagination at all. 

If you were never ill, these stories might not have told themselves to you like they do, appearing like little gems in your periphery, creating worlds for you to step into and for just a moment forget the one in which your body is wasting away. 

Without this illness, would rain only ever be rain,
and never a whisper of magic?

Summer Skin

It stirs in you now, a process that cannot be stopped, a sprout emerging from the earth and unable to contain itself. I wake with a deep breath in my lung, I smile at strangers in the street, this morning I remembered, for a moment, what longing feels like and it jolted me like a burst of electricity. Do you remember how it felt to want to touch another person's lips so much that you thought you may explode?

May gasps with that feeling, out of breath with anticipation. Everything is about to start, everything is about to happen. 

For so many endless days I thought I didn't know what it was to want anything anymore, I didn't even have it in me to want to die. It's a strange illness, how it strangles your memory of who you are and why you are here. And when the illness recedes, and your self moves its jumble of suitcases and frantically packed plastic bags back into your chest, how clear it all is. 

You were there all along. 

This skin always fit you best.

Ends

She returns to the airport, bags full, heart kneaded. You drop her off and collapse on the couch, watching the hours while away but not unhappy about it. Sometimes we need to sit in silence to hear the things we said. 

The rain continued unabated the whole day, seemingly in agreement. Red Hook comes out of its shell, prepares for its season in the sun. You find homes on other shores. May itches in you like a seasonal allergy, a chronic condition you're in no rush to kick. 

I remember what it was like to want to kiss you. 

But not more than I remember how it feels
to have the road underneath your feet.

Screen

The rain hangs over the city like a threat that cannot quite commit. You get a reservation to an impossible restaurant, the last few hours trickle away and you wonder if you made the most of it, if you let something precious slip away. There was a time in this city when you thought maybe you could have everything, and the loss claws at your insides, but everything circles back when you live at the center of gravity. Good things are coming back. 

You will be ready when they do.

Forget-Me-Not

You hit the FDR at the very beginning inklings of rush hour traffic, a slow meander up the East River, a burgeoning irritation, a two-mile-an-hour crawl through the Bronx, but once you hit the Taconic, it's all winding roads and happy dances until cocktail hour. The dog greets you, their smiles greet you, the upstate is rainy and cold but yawns itself into sunshine by morning. You walk around barefoot, trying to grasp if grass under the soles of your feet can set something straight which has been crooked. 

There's a quiet peace which settles when you are out of your illnesses. A gentle acceptance and ability to breathe through the neighborhoods, a lightness. You wonder if people live their entire lives like this, but it's best not to think of it too long. A chef in Cold Spring says come stay for the month in August, and you start to pack your bags at the drop of a dime. 

Returning from illness is a reminder of all the things you could have been doing but haven't. It carries also the seed that there is time yet to do them. This is grace. 

The rest, it turns out, is up to you.

Of the Lights

You wake early, again, again, your spirit light, your mornings an exercise in hope. Get more done before nine than January you did in a day. You do not resent her, do not consider yourself above. There's a magnanimity that appears when your disease wastes away, a generosity of the heart that you miss when it is gone.You know the illness is a part of you, but this, this sunshine soul,feels like stepping into.a box that was tailor-made to fit your shape. This feels like everything aligned just so, stacking the rings of your wind pipe so that you can breathe again, as if for the first time in months. 

You waste no time in catching yourself up.  

New York beckons outside your window, summer beckons outside your window, at JFK airport a gate prepares to deliver your most precious cargo, I'm saving you a seat at our favorite restaurant, you know the one in the West Village with the tables squeezed so tightly together you weave your stories into the ones of the couple next to you, I''ll ask them to chill the wine for you, I'll ask them to make room for any tales you want to tell. Summer is ours now, New York and life. I took so long to get here I nearly forgot the way.

But all roads lead home,
if you let them.

Stars

The rain does one last lap around the bay, hides the highrises from the world in a drape of gray stuffing, washes the dusky streets in a cold wind. By morning, it's all gone. Blue sky the kind that pierces your eye, sunlight kissing your skin, the hope of the world again. The hours while away and you don't know how it happens, but you no longer have access to the darkness that would have you worry about it. 

The space it left behind has been filled with lilac scent and whimsy. 

I stuff my bags full, laugh as it spills over onto to the streets, into the arms of people I meet, over the words and creations I try so hard to bring to life. Little darling, it's been a long, cold, lonely winter. 

But you are here now,
and that has made all
the difference.

Space

The rain lingers, cools the air to a chill, hampers your forward motion and you don't know which direction to aim it now. Work simmers around you like an ocean full of crabs, you are reluctant to go in even though you know you can swim once you commit. The itch to write reappears along the inside of your skin, all it took was a whiff of smelling salts to emerge from its hibernation, all it needed was one long evening with no sunset. She packs her bags, prepares arrival. You cannot step in the same river twice, and this town has molted a thousand times since last she saw it, but no matter. 

The butterfly always carries a part of its caterpillar life into its new reality, despite the metamorphosis, despite the turned page and new eyes. 

Even when nothing about it looks the same, 
it turns out, 

the memories remain.

Queen Mary 2

Trudge to the bathroom in the early morning, eyes grumbled and vision short, come out to realize a giant cruise ship fills the whole kithen window. A Monday morning cruise ship, all off schedule, everything is Wacky Wednesday, you revel in recognition, in how much you loved whimsy in your youth. How do we reclaim such joy in our adult years? 

Emerging from the depths to remember what it is to want to feel joy is a gift, when you've spent so many months forgetting. You reapply your lipstick, feel the color return to your cheeks. What harm can rain do, when you can create light on your own. The little girl waits at the edge of the cursor, patient but eager, she wants the rest of her story now, wants you to tie her question marks together, to carry her across a finish line that is really only the doorway to somewhere else. 

I want the same, my dear, I do. Let me gather my strength, let me collect my things. I've fallen apart across the floorboards but it doesn't matter now. 

All that matters
is that we get you
home.

Back

The rain arrives, cooling the steaming streets, calming your labored breaths. You wear lipstick to remind yourself that you are alive, brush your hair and look at the cars on the sidewalk, how no one sits in them during street sweeping hours like we used to in the East Village. Life is easier in the country, even if the country is only across the river. You find yourself wondering if the hard was what made you better. You've grown soft, now, all velvet skin and voluptuous curves when all you ever wanted were angles. 

The streetsweeper doesn't show, anyway, rainy days mean perhaps the storm drains take care of the work for you. I've brought the geraniums in from the fire escape, their delicate petals shielded from the world. Soft. But soft with longer lifespans. There was a time when I used to tell stories of death and destruction but all I'm left with is children's literature, and with children you have to offer hope if you take something away. 

No winter without spring, no death without new life, no sorrow without a hard-won joy. 

They say we try to give ourselves the childhoods we ourselves did not have. You always were one for delivering your messages on the nose, but this seems a little obscene even for you. Look at your manuscript, turn it over in your hand. 

See what kind of answers you are trying to give yourself.

At the End of the Day

That humid New York heat rolls in from the bay, like a tongue, your skin is clammy, it's hard to catch your breath. But the mouse ears are sprouting on the trees outside your window, the world lives, you live, just shed your winter skin and turn on a fan, this is no time for complaining. A new future lies ahead and while you're not sure what it will look like, at last you feel you want to find out. 

A little girl waits patiently at the end of your cursor. A young boy has joined her, from another story, another land. You're no end of ideas, no end of tales, when you were seven years old you told your father you wanted to be a writer and he said Yes I think so, it sits in you not like a memory but a corner stone. 

It is May now, my dear. 

And in May,

in May, 

We live. 

May Day

You're late to the research center, realizing your mistake when you're already halfway there and arriving on the upper Upper East Side sweating, jittery. They strap you into a tube and put on a nature documentary. You wonder if you chose the wrong profession, if you should have focused on swimming with otters, if you should have followed the path on which you were born. Shoulda woulda coulda. Every path is a hundred others left behind. 

You wonder if this is your midlife crisis
or if it's just May tickling your senses. 

The machine makes loud noises and you don't know how long you've been in there. Come out dizzy, reborn. Sail down Lexington Avenue until you land at the Monday bar, buzzing on a Thursday, this is not your day in the custody agreement. Someone has ordered pizza. You love New York so much you wonder how your heart hasn't burst already. 

Realize it already has, a hundred times over,
and somehow still beats after all these years.
This lesson is your greatest gift. 

You chose a path decades ago, tried leaving it time and again, always found your way back through the thicket. Some paths follow you in the woods. 

It is May now, you believe in a future now, you remember what it is to long for something again. Now is not the time to saunter, now is the time to run.

Dweller

You wake early again, sunrise flooding the open windows, New York waking up below, anticipation tingling through your synapses. May. 

When the illness recedes, you are as ever left dumbfounded, surprised by what happened, as though an unannounced storm rolled through and buried you, but now only sunshine remains. You think you should be used to it by now and it hurts that you never are. Maybe it's a sign of some remaining humanity within you. You don't want to accept that this might be a life. 

The streets look different without a coating of despair, clearer, cleaner. Your mind resumes its normal gait, words and memories are quicker to hit your lips. The obstacles at your feet are still as high as they were before, only now they don't seem unsurmountable, now it feels like you have the right shoes on, chalk on your fingertips, now you think all you have to do is climb. 

There is no time to mourn what is lost, now, only time to extract every last morsel from the marrow of what is given. It is May now, love, and in May we fly. 

It is May now, love,
and in May,
in May,
we live.

Turvy

The day starts out crooked and gets more twisted from there, missteps and mishaps at every turn, you wonder if the Universe is trying to tell you something about New York, which would be worse than if it was trying to tell you something about yourself. The weather is gorgeous, late April breath of fresh air, a breeze from the sea, a benevolent sun, why do we spend our days wrapped in digital screens and darkness, why do we waste our lives. 

You know it's only May tingling through your synapses, making it hard to sit in one place, you know it's only millenia of your ancestors coursing through your veins, whispering, what else? and you're dying to find out. It took too many odds for you to even be alive, who are you to throw it away at a computer screen. 

The little red station wagon, lingers in the street below, you can see it waiting from your fire escape. The gas tank is nearly empty but it's got miles and miles left in its spirit. You are tempted to pack everything up and leave. 

You can't outrun yourself, they say. But what if staying put is the attempted escape. What if a body in motion is the self that is you? 

I open the window to the fire escape. A Fire can be so many things.

Routines

Spill coffee in your keyboard, it begins a strange and frazzled journey across the documents on your screen, telling its own stories, unleashing its vulnerable secrets into a world unprepared. You disconnect it, wipe it down, give it a moment's rest. Think how you've done something similar for yourself of late. You've been reset and come back better. Your mental illness wanes in the background. 

Everything is May now. Everything is the chance to get away, to start afresh, see potential beyond the horizon. It took you longer to get there this year, winter an endless sludge around your senses, but you arrived at last in the sunlight. Now you get to spring forward, now you get to be the parts of yourself that are easy to love.

Now you get to live. 

When you say spring is a gift every year, that is what you mean. When you say May comes in like the first breath of air after drowning in the sea, it is not hyperbole. When you spend so much time just waiting to not have to survive anymore, wanting to live becomes a treasure above all others. 

Now you get to live.
So you intend to.

Brooklyn, NY

Pennsylvania disappears like an ocean of bad drivers and pricey turnpikes, you grumble all the way to the East Coast but find a parking spot around the corner from dear friends and spend a night on their Philadelphia pull-out. A toddler wakes you in the morning before you race the last few miles to the Verrazzano-Narrows and slide into a Brooklyn side street, all the plants intact and a giggle bubbling in your chest. You love the country, but the Manhattan skyline is what lets your soul rest at last. 

There's no road map yet for solving that equation. 

But you're not about to stop trying. 

You came two thousand miles across the country, did you bring the dark Word, or did you merely bring the Wow, is it you who are angelic or is it the road you leave in your wake? I am already nostalgic for a roadside inn in Nebraska, for a styrofoam coffee and a thousand unknown miles ahead, for counting cars on the New Jersey Turnpike and remembering the America I already found, time and time again, trying to see it beneath the thick coating of this dark black cloud. 

We are still here, America. We are trigonometry that refuses and easy solution. 

But we're not about to stop trying.

Ohio

You leave Missouri and cross Illinois in the blink of an eye, good riddance, the Mississippi River far behind you. The scenery changes, trees begin sprouting, the temperatures rise in hesitation. The little car that could rolls through larger towns now, impatient drivers and fewer semi trucks for company. New York beckons at the other end of the continent. 

This country is hellbent on kicking us out, on making us regret our choices, on rescinding our piece of the dream, but don’t you know? Clawing your way to a better life is what this country was built on. Settlers feed the machine. 

I am not done with you yet, America. This heartbreak isn’t ours today. 

Rerouting

You wake late, bludgeoned by a blackout curtain and a quiet highway, disoriented in the timezone of the middle. Race down a misty highway but take a wrong turn and curse your naive time optimism. The GPS winds you through industrial zones and lush, suburban neighborhoods; you do not know how to grasp the scenery. Agitated, you force a stop, a breath, a reset. Realize you are in some sort of lovely park, spring breaking through like a new tooth, a blue heron eyeing you suspiciously fromt the edge of a pond. You are crossing America, you can stand to be sidetracked.

You are crossing America. 

If you have to get lost now and then to realize how lucky that makes you, 
then maybe that's on you.

Rock Port

A thousand miles approach, it took half of that just to shake the weight of generations in your blood line. Wyoming disappears in a thunder cloud, Nebraska a carpet of cows, until at last the fever breaks and you can breathe again. The rain rolls across the plains until you pass into Missouri, American bends and stretches underneath your wheels. You wonder why it feels like a farewell tour. 

Wonder why it feels like America is slipping through your fingers when you're still woven in it. 

The sun sets over a rest stop along the highway. It doesn't care for your questions. You cling to that calm like your future depended on it.

Stride

Departures approach, you revel in the limitless feeling of filling a car, of two thousand miles before arrival, of a moment in limbo. America trips and stumbles around itself, but you know that I-80 stretches itself from ocean to ocean, ties a nation together which refuses to be joined. It reminds you the marvel of arriving on its shores, how deep the breath in your lungs. You want to see that it is still there, that all is not lost. 

You're not sure what happens if this is not the case. 

It's time to buck up, America. 

I am not ready to lose you yet.

With Nothing to Say

Your head is all song lyrics, all steady beats and predictable key changes, a breath aligned to order. A desert sun appears above the valley, reminds you of 30 years in its folds. Thirty years of warm skin and just the slightest taste of freedom always on the tip of your tongue. You trace directions over road maps, see your wheels slide across America, wonder if it's a swansong or a vow renewal. Sometimes these things aren't apparent until firmly in the rearview mirror. 

America, are you willing to carry us over the burning coals, or will we turn to ashes underneath the weight of your love? 

America, I'm addressing you. 

I'm talking to myself
again. 

But You Can't Edit

The flowers on your mother's windowsill stretch and bulge and dazzle with their vigor, put you to shame with their will to live, their aptitude for hope. You walk alongside a spring brook and try to feel the same, try to muster the courage for another step, and another. They're trying to break your spirit, you hear across the airwaves, and you know they are right, you know it is the time to look for plaster casts. You're almost ready. 

Driving home, late in the night, the mountain pass turned itself inside out to a wakeup call of a blizzard, dark roads and lone semi trucks painting a scenery around you that spoke only of vastness, only of space. You are so small, so insignificant, and it was always your greatest comfort. Now we must be small and significant, somehow, and you do not know the way. 

Everybody's looking for the exit. 

Why must you be so hell-bent on diving into the depths.

Spring Rains

Arrive in the desert to find heavy rain clouds draped across the mountain ranges. Thirty-two years of landing in this valley, each step feels more precious now than the last. How many more times will you discover this place, before it is taken from you yet again?

There's a reason I cling so the people I love, to the trinkets I own and the homes beneath my feet. Time and time again, that which I desperately wanted to take for granted was taken from me instead. I lost you over and over, until I started throwing everything away before I ran the risk of losing it. I left you in the doorway, don't think I don't remember, don't think the look on your face isn't etched inside my skin, you didn't know I was all quicksand and bushfire and all you'd be left with were wounds. 

A car sits in the driveway, awaiting further instructions. Everything you own is drawing nearer to itself. You are gathering up your belongings, for what? 

Are you leaving,
or are you the one being left behind?

Check In

You cling to the ticket like a lifeline, teeth clenched, hissing, you've saved me before so you better save me again. It's a one-way ticket, you scrub it of symbolism. Is this our last hurrah, America. Is this our last cross-country embrace, two thousand miles of farewells before the earth scorches my feet once and for all? Generations have come before you, seen worse, seen better, endured. Who are you to waste what you've been given.

Who are you to demand the city on a hill, then not get buried when it tumbles to the ground?

I pick a window seat. Pack a bag light with content, heavy with fear. Brace yourself for what you might find around the bend. 

Stomach-dropping

You venture into old waters, try them on for size, find it harder to float, find the rocks at the bottom to cut the soles of your feet in a way you swear they didn't use to. Everything is rip tide, everything is a tumble to the bottom, you try to catch your breath in the in-betweens but they are too short, too full of silt, your lungs contract in rebellion. 

Do you remember that Christmas in Los Angeles, the way the ocean seemed to lead to forever? It felt like the only truth I'd ever need, then, but now I think it wasn't even me on that beach. I think I was a caterpillar, painting large eyes on my back, putting up fronts I had no business pretending, and I'm only now in the chrysalis, breaking down my every part into goo before I can make myself real again. 

I didn't mean to show you these broken bits, these wrong turns. I didn't know I wouldn't be allowed to be remain a camouflaged caterpillar forever. I fear winter will come before I break out of this cocoon. 

I fear winter will take us all
before our time.

Varje Måne Trasig

The Universe rages, strips you of meaning, of understanding. You try to remember how to hold on to hope, to hold on to art, but it's been to many days without to now suddenly be with. The grooves of the wagon wheels' incessant treading have become canyons, depths the sun never reaches and you don't know how to climb your way out. Is all your life just going to be a question of whether or not I want to make it to the end of that day?

I loved you once and thought maybe that meant all the other questions had been answered. 

There's nothing special about that,
I learned.

Showers

The weather teeters, barreling from freezing rain to steam to sunshine and back, there's no point in keeping up. Dress for all the weathers and hope for the best. You haven't done laundry in weeks anyway, so what is wear. A woman sits on the floor and reads her trite poetry and you think, I can do better than that, but can and do are not the same. Instead you spend hours looking at real estate listings, like dreaming precludes you from having to make decisions at all. 

Are you done living other people's lives, yet?

Are you done being available where they need a buttress?

It's so little life we are giving, so few minutes, such frail cargo. May lies on the horizon like a lifeline, like a promise that maybe you'll feel an itcha again and want to set out. You know no other ways to live a life. 

You're trying to figure out if it's too late
to learn.

For Show

The day is drizzly, a chill runs through your apartment, no sunlight makes its way all the way into your nooks, you are not mad. Little flutters of ideas, of stories, make their way through your synapses, all you ever wanted was to tell a story and it's there, somewhere, but you are only almost able to grab it, it slips through your fingers. You draw up maps for a summer on the road and wonder how you can feel so lost when you haven't even left yet. 

Wherever you go,
there you are. 

You know that's the problem

You just don't know the solution. 

Is Your Land

It is not time, you hear yourself think. This is not how we go. Thirty years in this soil cannot be lifted from my roots with an airplane ticket. Those around you scramble to jump ship and you wonder what stubborn nerve it is that always keeps you in these fires for so long. 

It occurs to me that I am looking for a fire hose.

21

How many years have passed since that bright spring morning at the end of March, at the end of innocence.

(Do you remember how the air went out of you? How you retraced your steps to see what you could have changed, how you could have a saved a life intent on not being saved, how you could have caught a body determined to leap.)

It's been twenty-one years and I still think of you every time the ledge gets too close. Remember what it means to end a life, what it means for a life to end.

I saw in you the hope I had not dared wish for myself.

Wildfire leaves too much for the survivors to sort through, to carry, to breathe. You couldn't survive the flames, so you singed everyone in a mile-wide radius, left them scarred forever in your wake. Some days the only reason I live is to contain the smoke in my own lungs, and it's as good a reason as you can get.

I went home that day and made my loved ones promise that no matter what happened, they would never make it their end. I promised the same in return, and didn't know how much of my life I'd spend fighting to keep the promise. It was an awfully high building. It was a sunny day at the beginning of everything.  You changed my life and I will never get to tell you. 

 * * *

Mostly I remember what you left when you went away. Life is finite, you have but this one. Your family has but this one, your friends. You do what you will with it, of course. But it seems wisest just to live it, after all.

There may come a day, when you won't regret it, and that day is worth all the wait.

the Nothing Art

Sundays are best kept to themselves, puttering on their proverbial stove tops, left to their own devices to meander through an afternoon. The secret to getting things done is taking a step back and letting them happen of their own accord. The first cherry blossoms burst in Brooklyn, the first awkward sunburn appeared on my arms, all of the questions are still unanswered, but you got a little reprieve and this time you do not turn it down. 

It nearly kills you, every year. 

But every year, only nearly.

Alight

Eventually, the sunlight becomes so bright that it beats itself into your synapses, no matter how hard you clench your eyes. You try to remember why you wanted to die and find it difficult, just a trick of the lights, try to make meaning of disease and find nothing of substance. It was just illness, and now, perhaps, it is over. You escaped the allure of the reaper, and now you are forced to live with the consequences. 

There's a moment in the liminal space, just before you find your footing, where you feel a great emptiness, feel yourself returned to Stardust, could be weightless, could be nothing and all you can do is hold your breath and wait to find out. You are not anchored by hope, yet, not elevated by meaning.  

Have you come for me?

Not today.
Not yet.

A Seven Nation Army

You lock your door, prepare for a revelation, but sit instead with bubbles in your throat and question marks in your ears. This isn't the great insight you had been asking for. 

The world outside your door demands answers you cannot mold with your own two hands, the clay runs through your fingers like sand, you are afraid to take the first step because of all the others that demand to follow, this isn't the dream I was promised, America I have given you all and now I'm nothing. You used to believe the path would be found in poetry, but now you seem to have forgotten how to read. 

It occurs to me that I am America

 

I'm not sorry. 

Through the Days and

You lose your days and nights into lotus apathy, indifferent to the passing of time and the loss of your dreams. How long can you sit here paying rent without reaping the magic you were promised? There was a time I believed in the lightness of breath, a power in my step, a love in my words. I was so sure of it, and now I begin to question. Sometimes illness drags the life from my eyes, and each time I forget that I have been here before. I convince myself the days have been sunshine and daises up until this point and that now, somehow, I have lost it all. 

But the daffodils are sprouting along the Buttermilk Channel, this afternoon I went for a run along the East River and there's a manuscript on my desk that is getting better, we passed the equinox and you aren't dead yet. Something, something will come of this, your life isn't over yet. You are bleeding, yes, but scars can look like maps when they heal.

Resonance

The Bowery is sunshine and smiles, bright yellow daffodils beaming up at you as you pass, but you are busy beaming up at the sun in return, busy walking your beloved Manhattan streets with your eyes closed because they have never steered you wrong before, you've never been lost a day since you landed on this island, it's only been rain clouds in your vision, they confused you sometimes, but you were always grounded in your palace in the sky of New York. 

The technician pronounces your name right, says all you have to do is lie still and enjoy the break, and you nearly fall asleep in the noisy tunnel, wonder if there's a future in which we are free again. The Tuesday bartender is not the same as your Monday bartender, you do not know how to explain how your roots have seeped into that corner table and don't know how to leave. 

The truth is, New York, I don't know how to leave you. I don't know how to be torn from you again, to build a life in a world that isn't yours. He calls you a fascist for staying but he doesn't understand. This bar saw you through the end of the earth already, these streets carried you past your own destruction, this grid gave you love the kind you never thought could be for you. This country gave me a person I never dared believe I could be, 

what disrespect would it be
to turn my back on it
now?

Train

The unbearable weight of the world lies draped over your brow in the late morning, the cloud cover outside mimicking the sentiment. You cannot shake the feeling that everything is going terribly wrong. He says by staying where you are you're aligning with the fascists, and you cannot begin to take on what such a friendship does to your soul. 

By late afternoon you are desperate enough to ignore the ache in your knee and lace up your running shoes. The piers are gray and windy, only a handful of runners out, and you are glad for the peace. Each step unloads a burden, each quick breath fills you like a balloon. Manhattan lies across the water, colorless, quiet, awaiting your decisions. You wish it could tell you the future and make those decisions for you. 

The first clover leaves have sprouted in the park. 

It's about time I went searching for luck, again.

Crush

The illness circles back like a storm on the horizon, you feel the pressure change before you've even looked out of your window. A week ago, how sure you were that the return of sunlight had washed your senses clean, that you were leaping into the freedom of remission. Now, instead, you grapple with the crumbling columns you'd built to hold yourself up, see them falter against the light of reality. List your failures in a neverending loop behind your eyelids, stack your virtues on the scale and see where the Ferryman takes you. You promised someone a long time ago you would not die, and it has cursed you to endure the unbearable for an entire lifetime. One foot in the styx, one eye on the horizon. 

Nothing matters. 

How can you make it so that you do?

Point

March always came with such a painful pull. Of course it hurts when buds are breaking, you were raised on the pain, your lineage knows nothing else, but you forget, everyt winter you forget. Was it always this painful to live?And the answer isp robably, yes. Even when it gets painted in such a rosy hue, even when your memories get blurry, softened with age, raisins picked out of a cake on which once you choked. 

Your endless optimism is starting to falter,
your eternal sunshine is at last grown dull. 

There was so much I wanted to do before this happened. 

Now I wonder if I'll get even one accomplishment under my belt.
If the world will fall apart
in step with me.

Standing

The ache remains at the base of your spine, the core of your self; physical pain indistinguishable from emotional, you know longer know where you end and the Universe begins. The lightest of your breaths yearn to be normal, but any air that reaches the bottom of your lung knows, it knows, what you really want is the cosmos. 

How can we settle for the concrete when we know the sky is just beyond reach?

You twist your limbs inside out 
but you never get where you thought
you were going.

Greenhouse

There's a restlessness brewing, its itch is spreading inside your skin and cannot be blamed entirely on the lingering sunshine, the mild afternoons. It says perhaps you are not where you are meant to be, says perhaps there is a freedom somewhere out there that would put your mind at ease. It scours apartment listings but also dreams of a house in the woods, wonder who it is you could be if you stretched your limbs to where they didn't know they could reach. 

You get nowhere in an instant. 

Every journey worth taking
is a thousand miles
and more.

It's the End of the World (as we know it)

The mornings will not start, the sparks appear with the sprouts but there is no fuel in the tank, there is nothing to light. You find an old letter, 26 years but the handwriting is still yours, the wandering mind still familiar. How you saw the end of the world, how you asked where to spend its dying days, how the madness of power hungry men always seemed to eclipse the needs of the rest. 

You still have to live, is the thing. 

You still have to carry on until your dying day. The days will not die for you. 

Might as well do something with the time you have 

left.

Title

It's a lifetime of hope and hope lost, is it not? It's a pile of days, an unending stream of waiting for it all to begin, when truly some of it is already over and you forgot to enjoy it. Spring leaps into my chest like a young child, unafraid and unconcerned with your scars, but my lungs are still full of soot, I am not ready for joy, not yet. There are steps to this dance I never quite figured out, and it makes my palms sweaty still to try. The rhythm seems perpetually someone else's. 

I do not remember a time when I
was not broken.

MRI

That's a great knee, the doctor says, laughing, before he tells you they need to look closer for whatever criminals are lurking in its depths. You ask can I keep running like it was all the matters, and in that moment you realize it is. He speaks sunshine into the spring afternoon, smiles blossoms at your broken bones, everything seems possible and you walk down the Bowery with your jacket off. 

You know it's happening, well before your spine has caught up. There's a lightness in your step, a breath in your lung that deceives you, reveals the returning life before you dare fully utter it out loud. You try not to look directly at it, try not to let yourself give into it, lest it get scared off at your enthusiasm. Joy is skittish like that, before it gains its footing, before it sinks its teeth into your shoulder and holds on through the shakes. You have been skittish too, but every now and then you stretch your fingers into the earth, let yourself exist and remain, and that's alright. 

Another winter passes when you did not die. It is over now. 

Now you are allowed to live.

Dismantled

A nation founders, moves forward on wobbly legs, muscles and bones cut off from the inside, it will not last, but how long until it crumbles? Will you make it out of the rubble in time? 

Patti Smith sits in a venerable old hall in the Cooper Union, speaks of art and creating and silly anecdotes and bits of magic. You remember again why you came to this hodgepodge of a city, why you built your veins around its pulse, inserted yourself in its buildings and let yourself dream of belonging on its streets. A nation crumbles around you, now, what are you willing to do to save it?

I am only looking for answers, now, New York, no questions, no dreams, I have my bags full of those. I want only your solutions now. Show me how we can stay together; metaphorically, too.

March [On]

A new month rises outside your window. It brings sunlight, little sprouts in the ground, signals of hope beamed to those who know where to look for them. You are on high alert for every last one, tracking sunset minutes, sensing vibration along the surface of your skin. You are tired, now, down to your last breath of air, your last leg, but you are alive, and the sun will let you sprout out of the husk you leave behind, its decaying self leaving nutrients and energy for the new self you grow out of it. 

The cycle continues, unaffected, unabated. It is a comfort, when everything else falters. 

A young girl on the subway platform asks if she is going in the right direction. It's her first time riding the subway. She's here to see all the things TikTok has told her to see. She is excited and terrified at once, you know the feeling well, adore her wide eyes. She asks if she can sit next to you on the train, tells you her itinerary, tells you she's never going to take the subway again but you tell her she will. You'll get the hang of it. Try to remember your first time on the subway. It must have been a six train. 

You always did love the six train. 

The years pass by you like caresses, you think it's all suffering and weights, but when you actually stop to look, have you not been blessed with the most magical days? New York came to you in a dream, eveyrthing came to you in a dream, you've been hiding in the darkness for a few months now but the sun is back now, little darling, life is back now, the magic is just getting ready to return, this is not the time to close the door. 

This is the time to sprout.

Hold up

I hate to say it, she says – still saying it – it's in wartime that we get the great art, the great creativity, she paints silver linings to your nuclear fallout and you know she's not wrong. It's just there's so many decades of disaster alongside it. Who can even afford to do art in this economy. New York City laughs at you in expensive. A clown yells at a hero in a house that was supposed to lead the world.

The thing is it's not just me I'm mad at, it's you. You, universe, with your callous indifference, with your reluctance to release any more magic; I know you could, I've seen you do it. 

I've seen you do it to me. 

If you're trying to push us to our breaking points to see what rainbows might be extracted from us, you're doing it right. But there's no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. 

How can we forget what we have seen?

A Clearing

Spring announces its impending arrival, sends reminders in the form of afternoon sunlight and snow drops in tree pits, ignoring your pleas for another hundred years of darkness, your incredulity about ever feeling hope again. Spring does not care. Spring is the honey badger of the eons. 

You try to shield yourself against the light, against the way your lungs are lighter, try to protect yourself against the devastation that may follow in the wake of hope. I am not strong enough to survive the downfall. In the dark cave, at least I know I can endure. 

Spring isn't satisfied with simply enduring. 

The years pass by us unannounced, unyielding. They don't allow for negotiations, for breaks to think about if this is how you'd like the time to go. It is the only certainty, and it offers no consolation. 

Staring at the sun never felt so much
like succumbing to a black hole.

You Can't Carry It With You

You wake early again, sunlight climbing across the horizon at a different rhythm. You know the change is coming. 

Moving out of illness is hope on your brow, while your wounds are still raw. It's the energy to breathe but running out of steam a mile into the run. Your father asks if you're making enough money and you say no, but things will get better. You always were a bad liar. 

At the writing bar, his face greets you at the door, defeat like a hundred pounds across his shoulders. Do we move to Italy, he says, and you don't know how to explain that emigration sits in your veins like platelets. You want the blueprint? I've got you. 

Your sister writes to say she's applying for citizenship. 

The world changes before our eyes, chess pieces moving across the board in ways we didn't know was legal. Legal takes on a new meaning when the Emperor crowns himself and has no clothes. But inside your creative mind, the colors still paint themselves according to rules all their own, stories whisper their dreams in your ears, you know this was always your only way. Magic is made in suffering; diamonds are made under pressure. 

You owe it to the world to keep at it.

Once There Was a Way

Digital photo albums are traitorous, treacherous, they may inspire you to playgrounds you'd forgotten but just as well remind you of playgrounds you had forever lost. How the years disappear from us, the joy in our eyes, how everything fits in a to-do list. I take a walk to the old wharf, disappear under giant cranes, imagine steel creatures in a faraway land. I step on icy snow drifts, remember how as a child I could spend hours just breaking ice, just moving snow, no purpose except to do just what I was doing. 

The muscles of imagination stir, stretch in the late February sunlight, shake themselves off and stare bleary-eyed right at me, as if asking me for answers – as if I had any to offer. I test them out again, bolder this time, sitting in silence and allowing the stories to come, running with them, looking for magic in the margins. Little sparks fire off in synapses long sleeping. 

Nothing is lost forever, not really. It may look different in the light of this day, but you mustn't mistake that for oblivion. It may take a little coaxing to stretch its limbs into the sunlight, but how worthwhile when it does. 

You're never so far gone
that you cannot come home again.

Log

Sixteen years you've been coming to this watering hole, sifting through the madness of a life and finding the kernels of Truth between its pages; thousands upon thousands of entries dissecting a day, a life, a city that refuses to be contained. You love it as much now as you did then, but it's different, perhaps, a little more frail, a little more hard-earned. Your edges are scuffed, but somehow the city looks past it, accepts it, lets you back with your scars and flaws, has a spot just for you even at your darkest, just like you commit to loving it even when it hurts you, spits you out, forgets its own name. 

The young man at the bar makes eyes at you, tries to insert himself into your conversations with the bartender, tells you how he just got back from spending some time in the Berkshires. You try to read his age by the crinkle in his eye, the gray by his temple, try to gauge his mind by the content of his contributions. The bartender dismisses him with the periods in her sentences, but you are all commas, all ellipses, you had forgotten what a run-on sentence looked like. Winter sits so deep in your synapses you had forgotten what a response looked like. 

It's trying to kill you, you know. That's what winter does, what it is. You cannot blame it its nature, it's only doing what it's meant to do. It brings you to the bottom, so you can feel the sprouts grow within you when the spring sun returns. 

It's just,
when you hit the bottom rock,
what you have to do is use it
to push off to the surface.

Vermont

You try to speak of creativity and writing but fall back into the torrent of current events, time and again. What can we do? he says, and paints dreams of a future in Vermont, of a life where his love life and ideas may remain legal, both. All we can do is keep writing, I say, and we remember the last time around, how we made magic in the oppression, how we were daring in the dangers. 

The war is darker now, the woods more tangled. But there are sprouts in the ground, sunlight through the thicket, there isn't a path but a place to plant your next footstep, we never know what's around the bend, we only know we have to keep moving. Wrap these tendrils around you, build a mountain of stepping stones, make the path by walking it. Tie ribbons along the way, make the journey clear behind you, offer others a way to the exit if you can find it. 

The war is darker now, the woods more tangled. 

But even woods have to end, somewhere.

(history)

(thumb through pages past, year after year of Februaries scattered in your wake, always with the same beginnings in darkness and ends in surprised sunlight. you die every year, every year you let six feet of dirt cover you, but every year you outlast the dark, and when the sun returns, so do you. 

there may be a lesson in there somewhere, but it's too simplistic, too asinine. send it to an agent and hear them say it's too unrealistic. like you didn't have four decades of its scars under your skin. 

it's only disease, it's only disease, it's only a cancer rotting your flesh from the inside and once it passes, you will see your thoughts as they are, again. 

it's just every year the groove gets a little harder to step out of,
the familiar tracks get deeper in the mud. 

all you know how to do is add more pages to the pile. 

even if what you're building is a pyre.)

Collapsed

There's sand in my lungs. 

I didn't mean for there to be, didn't mean for the days to get so convoluted. The remains of a writing day lie in the gutters around me, wasted, unused, I want a do-over, I demand a recount. But tomorrow is a school day again and there are time sheets to complete. A full moon shines in through the window of the little closet where I work, everyone else lies sleeping and I am glad for the company. 

I miss Avenue B. 

It seems I started a life that was halted by death and despair, I threw it out and hit the road, I ran to the horizon like I always do and I don't blame myself. 

You did what you had to do. 

There are a million lives we didn't live, infite paths we didn't choose. It'll do you know good to think on them now, they are lost to the star worlds, linger in your spine like dust the kind that gets in your eye. 

Like sand the kind that lands in your lungs
and rattles your cough when you were trying to
breathe. 

We lived through a plague and were rewarded with the downfall of an empire. Winter remains, heavier than ever, longer than ever, no wonder we are more gutter than rainfall, more dam than flood. 

Your words are better in agony,
but only if you survive long enough to

write them. 

Train

An hour into discussing your childhood trauma with the bartender (who claims that listening to patron's sorrows is not something she does, despite her profession), a young man hops down the steps to the bar. The Irish accent says he's here for training. He shakes your hand. Maybe you seem important, maybe your piles of papers make you seem like you belong to the bar, and to be frank, at this point you sort of do. 

The trick to anything, you've learned, is time. To relationships, to knowledge, to love. You cannot fast track it, cannot breeze past the baby steps. You don't have to impress with your power moves, you just have to show up. Return, return, return. Look people in the eye now and then, nod. Lace your running shoes and just acknowledge the road. Return to your manuscript even when you think you've been away too long, and are ashamed to hold it again. Read your poetry word by word by word until it multiplies and branches out around you. Walk these city streets until you don't remember what it felt like not to know its air in your lungs. 

Time escapes us and it feels like a loss, like sand running between our fingers and a life slipping away, but it is the opposite, I promise. Time adds up and layers and builds a life, fortifies your synapses, creates your miracles. Time is not a thing lost, but a life gained. Say it louder for the people in the back 

Time is not a thing lost

but a whole damn life

gained. 

(but then)

(but then, you spend a day immersed in words, yarns of your own spinning, page turners from the lips of others, you spend a day swirling around in worlds far beyond where your fingers can stretch, and it's the greatest gift you have ever known; you forget, and forget, and try to beat into your head an adventure you didn't want to lose but you never really lost it, it seems, it was only a muscle that fell weak from disuse, only a memory that faded from not being recalled. 

the magic doesn't go away just because you don't see it. 

but you do have to look for it, to find your way back.)

Life Outside the Music Box

At some point the City, or I, will have to prove we really want this relationship to work out and are willing to fight for it. At some point it won't be enough just to be here, to be happy.

Fifteen years it's been, since I first returned to New York and dazzled in our honeymoon moments, delirious with the possibilities of having made it back. Every new corner turned was easy then, was another gold coin added to a bulging purse, the setbacks only fodder for emerging grit. I am older now, tired, I take the corners for granted, trying desperately to remind myself to find awe in their whispers. Can I ever find that tingle again? I am older now, tired, I lost too many years to a pandemic and an illness, are these all excuses?

Surely there is magic still to be found in this love story? Comfort in longterm commitment, a security in having seen each other through it. The bodega downstairs drags Valentine's bouquets into the street, rustles up some Pavlovian bell rings to alert dozing partners to fulfill their most basic requirements. 

That wasn't what I was looking for, New York. That was never what we promised one another. It's just, I can't seem to remember what you promised, at all. 

And I wonder if I just filled in the gaps, on my own.

Doldrums

It's only winter, right? she says, unwilling to order a drink, unwilling to take her coat off and commit to the bar. The bartender already gave you your drink for free, a strange friendship built in the ashes of what burned from under you. You forget sometimes to be grateful, it seems the worst sort of indulgence, how dare you be blind to these jewels when they're given. 

It's only illness, right? you whisper to yourself in the stillness, less question and more plea. Years and years of the same desperate wish mumbled into the night sky, and still every time I sit at the bottom of the well I think no, but this time it really is just that everything is meaningless. A tyrant king sets your country on fire, and you wonder if this isn't the right time to finish writing your book. 

Every road leads you back to your writings, after all, every tumble into the well, every mountain peak scaled, the only beacon that has never extinguished is your devotion to creative twirls. You forget, sometimes, in the deluge of daily monotony, but it does not forget you. 

That's why you know no better love than its unconditional, reliable, existence. Why you know no other love, at all.

Honey, It Already Did

Repeat after me, you say under your breath, it is the illness speaking, it it the illness hanging over your eyelids, the things you tell yourself today isn't the way you'll feel forever.

You start drinking at noon. 

If you can't sweep the demons from your doorstep, bring them in and knock them out

instead.

Tumbled

For days, your spirit soars, covers the distances with featherweight strides that seem impossible in the empty depth of winter. You think perhaps you've unearthed some long-harbored secret to survival and wonder if you're too well, now, to complain. 

But then the morning comes with ice picks for alarm clocks, draping boulders across your chest, no explanation, no excuse. Your health insurance company says you are fine, so they will no longer pay for your attempts at climbing out of the chasm. An airplane reels into the Potomac River, you can't remember the last thing someone said something to be happy about.

You're out of milk for your morning coffee. 

There was a time when you thought if you only made it out of your 20s, you could live forever and die when it was time. Saw the impulses of youth claim people who felt like kin, counted days until you aged out of the woods. 

Neglected to see how many of your ilk gave up at 31, at 47, at 62. How the woods do not belong to an age, but to a blood stream, to a temperament, to a destiny. You wanted to be one of them so badly that you forgot to read the fine print. 

When you sign up for sifting through the madness,
you agree to carry the woods
for as long as your legs will hold.

Some Days are Fine

When you turn around, you see mountains of words piled at every corner, see years of quips, of meandering verse, you have not been silent, only mumbling. Some years have better words than others, some years look different in hindsight, some are painful in their optimism, knowing what you know now to come after. She explains to you how what you write doesn't matter if you don't network your way into getting it out there, and you wonder if out there really holds the allure people think. We all think we are unique, but suddenly we are living through the collapse of an empire, and they don't tell you what that's like after the credits have rolled. We all have dreams until the war comes, then we just have survival. 

You don't know how to write prose in a world that's falling apart. 

You just know it's been done before,
so who are you to be weaker
than that?

Wear

The bursts of energy behind your retina begin to feel like the last sputtering efforts of a gas tank on empty, a lighter down to its last drops of fluid, wanting so much but collapsing before both feet have really left the starting blocks. It's a grueling roller coaster ride, an act of sitting on the giant's chest as it breathes heaving breaths in and out. You soar in the air, only to compress under the weight of your own gravity at the bottom. 

You are determined not to give in to the g forces as they play with you. 

Thumbing through pages (upon pages) of previous years' words, you find patterns too astute to be ignored. Your words are better in despair, simple thoughts emerging like poetry from your melancholy fingertips. In peacetime they arrive at the door like newspapers, like bar food menus. You cannot force the melody, only sit back on the ride and wait for gravity to press the words from your lips. 

I am tired, now. 

I will not always be.

Nychthemeron

You worry about the end of days, about the end of your creative solitude, of demands from the outside world, but when you count your pennies in minutes, you see that you have eons of time unaccounted for, minutes and hours in piles for your creative stretches. Yesterday I saw myself in a light that I thought long had been extinguished. There is magic in Words, still. January spreads out less like a villain and more like a promise, less like the monster that hides in every dark corner and more like a moment's reprieve to hear yourself think again. 

My physiotherapist gives me a hesitant nods, lets me out onto the pavement with a hundred conditions and stern reprimands, says you can jog, only jog, I take trembling steps like I do not know this ground beneath me, do not remember this air in my lungs, but of course that is a lie. 

For every step I take, I feel more familiar. Every breath leads to another, and things begin to make sense along my spine again. I learn new words, new songs, only to find that they are well trodden paths, that these muscles have memories that are not just darkness, not just step-by-step instructions for grinding a life into pulp, beacuse they know, also, how to run into a sunset, how to be weightless in the frozen air. The last few blocks I sprint, I gain speed like i'm trying to fly, I hear her voice saying jog, inly jog, but January is giving me gifts I didn't know I could ask for, how do you expect me not to break myself
to catch them?

Out of Snow

The remains of the snowstorm linger, patches of ice untouched by blue salt pellets which get strewn like rice at wedding, like an act without consequence, everywhere else in the city. I navigate slick sidewalks in morning light still piercing in its chill. You remind yourself you were born to live through this, and worse. A furnace within you hears the call and kicks into high gear, you return home steaming. 

It hasn't passed me by unnoticed that this returned derangement has set affairs in order around my spine, has opened treasure chests long closed in my imagination. The irony is not lost on me how the flood of mental illness seems to break the dams and release the floods without which I have been aching. I resist the trope like I paid a full college tuition to be delivered out of it, and I'm not yet prepared to swallow the debt.

But I wake with the remains of intricate dreams on my tongue, long stories weaved like ribbons out of the air. I sit quietly on the bus with the constant chatter of podcasts and top 40s muted in favor of letting my thoughts wander, my eyes follow their flights of fantasy to illogical conclusions. Any moment I don't spend bleeding sorrow and despair into the January winds, I am carried off into stories, into the idea that the walls are porous and if one just takes that first step, Wonderland lies waiting beyond. 

I said long ago I'd give up all the comforts a Normal life affords, that I would accept this disease willingly, so long as it let me remain in the land of the Word, and so many times I've had to eat those words when held over the cliff's edge with nothing to show for it but empty pockets. But then there comes a moment, in the unending night, when you see the tendrils of a story sprout from the darkness, see them coil and twist around the tar in which you've been buried, see them grow and turn to stars in your hand, and every prayer you've ever held to join the land of the living melts from your lungs like an ice patch on the street. Perhaps it kept you safe, for a while, and shielded. 

But the bruises are what tell us we've lived.

Cup

A cycle repeats itself, twists and turns in uncomfortable threads, you've seen this wolf before but the sheep's clothing is abandoned, there was a time when you rose in rebellion, marched on the bastions of rule, but those days are gone now, you are tired, defeated. 

But there's an ember from the last round that lingers, there's a Santa Ana wind in your ear drum that remembers how to set itself aflame, the four years that followed the last time you fell were also the most beautiful in weaves of creativity, in beacons of potential. When everything crumbles, you have no choice but to put yourself together, 

When everything turns black with evil,
you have no choice
but to turn the flame into a
flashlight
and lead the way 

out.

Dirtbag

The wagon wheels sink into the mud, their tracks deeper and deeper until you fall in and they run you over once and for all. It’s only the disease talking, you repeat to yourself like a hex, like maybe if you say it one more time you’ll believe it.

You do not.

A snow storm arrives, blankets the northeast, hides Manhattan behind its front. One day in the future we’ll try to tell our kids we saw this kind of snow all the time, and they’ll roll their eyes. You wonder if maybe humanity should dip out early, leave the host to clean up the mess we’ve made. 

It’s only the disease talking. 

There was something else you wanted to do with your life, something other than wither away on a deep couch in a dark room, counting tree rings on the ceiling, counting your blessings and coming up short on change, there was something you meant to do with your precious minutes other than squandering them into an abyss that won’t give you the time of day in return. The monster doesn’t owe you anything. 

A disease isn’t here to hear

what you have to say 

in return. 

Reright

You have to tread yourself into the same wheels you've attempted to lodge yourself in for decades. If it is the thing you want most, why is it hard? Is it supposed to be hard? You shoehorn your way into a day of it, try to sink in when the clothes don't fit, try to remember what it is to do something for sheer enjoyment, try to remember what it is to enjoy something. Your chest feels calloused, like anything alive in there is ensconced in eons of cement. Surely there was a time when sparks coursed through your veins? Where are they now?

Where are you?

The madness must be in there somewhere, still, the colors and fireworks and ridiculous dances that lead nowhere but to joy. They must be there. 

If they are not,
it seems,
neither are
you.

And Again

“Sit with the discomfort,” the note says, and you immediately have fifteen reasons why it’s wrong. Later, in the safety of your own silence, you have only reasons for why it’s right. You feel January sink its claws in you, drain the light from your eyes and hang cement around your ankles. I run every screen and sound I can to keep it at bay. Sit with the discomfort, my ass. 

I know what it feels like to be eaten alive. 

What lamb sits gently and lets the lion feast?

Fieldstone Lane

We sit glued to house listings, generations of movers looking for dopamine hits in pictures of sunny kitchens, of grassy porches. We calculate pros and cons of someone else's life, pass judgment around the table like a parlor game. The same blood runs through our veins, it is how we make order in the world. She writes from the Lower East to say I'll meet you at Penn Station, that's true friendship, and you know in your bones there is no way you'd rather return to the city. (Your father asks you, as he does every time, if it has to be New York, and you've stopped giving him nuance. All you have left to say is yes.)

Nothing and everything changes all at once, in every minute. There are rules to this game you have yet to figure out. The mountains lie quiet, snow-capped, stoic around you. A flight prepares itself in the other valley. You grab the loose ends scattered around you, 

wonder if this is the year you teach yourself how to tie knots.

Corn Dogs and Dog Days

A year of play, she says from across the country, and you let your neurons run with it. You played for much too long as a child, you were meant to have left it behind ages ago. but you refused, you couldn't help yourself, your mind was a mile a minute with imagination. 

A year of play, she writes inside your eyelids, across the whiteboard of your grey matter, into the oxygen you keep trying hard to breathe. What would happen if you let yourself, just for a little while, be free? 

The year is long but the life is short. Or was it the other way?

You throw out the clocks. 

You were never on time, anyway.

Move

The moving truck expands into the universe, grows by the cubic foot into an unwieldy caravan across the desert. Nothing goes according to plan, but since that's what you expected, it suits your plan nicely. You didn't know you would start the year in communion with the long-haul drivers of the right lane, but we are not always masters of our fate, and sometimes it is best to roll with the punches you've been dealt. 

As the palm trees of southern California give way to sprawling deserts and climbing canyons, a peace begins to settle in your foot on the gas, your elbow in the window. The truck hems and haws through the mountain pass, but makes it to the top, rewarded with its blankets of stars, its slow roll into the valley village. 

What do you want your year to look like? What do you want your world to look like? 

We can't control everything. You do not build the mountain. 

You only try to make it across.

2025

A new year begins as they so often do, in red-eyed delirium, in the slight aftertaste of nothing new under the sun, these celebrations always leaving you wanting so you thought you had stopped looking. Morning is heavier still, dragging last night’s lipstick past the early morning yogis of Fort Greene and landing world-weary on your Red Hook front step. 

There seems to be little to look forward to this year. The country falls apart under the watchful eyes of those frothing at the mouth to be first to set it aflame. You grow older but seemingly no wiser, you are tired. 

A podcast host speaks of play, of how the very essence of humanity is that which our modern supposed civilization has cast aside in favor of rationality and capitalist productivity. You mourn the passing. 

Wonder if there’s a way back.