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For a whole day, I do not work. I turn off messages and spend the morning with other writers, poring in silence over the worlds we created. I lie in bed reading, bike home from the river in surprise sunshine, spend hours caramellizing onions: in essence, I live. My aches subside, the ball of lead in my chest. I return to the whims of my imagination, forget to check the time. A voice yells my name outside the window, Manhattan is a village and I never love it more than in the little winks. 

It occurs to me that I've spent years searching for direction, but the truth is I had it all along. 

After that it's just about yelling loud enough for yourself to hear it.

Writeshop

Your country disintegrates. You arrived at the tail end of a dream, and now it is devolving into a dystopian farce of regressive forces. Hope abandons like rats on a sinking ship: last, but eventually. My arm burns from so many hours locked into a new industrial prison, this was not the freedom the poets imagined. The bodies ache from disillusionment. 

The pain is unsustainable. You know this. 

But it is hard to find escape routes
that do not look so much like parachutes
refusing to open.

(and the Floor is Lava)

There are fires
the kind that set your heart alight that
lift you across the bridges of the impossible and
bring you so close to the sun that you two are
indistinguishable

You live for this fire

But there are others
the kind
that rage across your blistering skin and
turn to ash all that which you had so
carefully
tended inside of it

You do not die by this fire

But oh,
some days it is hard to believe it.

Projections

I am caught by the whims again, she writes,
there's a strange current under the folds
whispering my name
painting the streams in mysterious colors
turning itself into stories at my
fingertips.

"I haven't got time to change into this and change into that.

I'm writing a novel."

Circadian

It's the lightning that wakes me, bright flashes through the drawn blinds, like someone flicked a flashlight in front of my face. Shortly after: thunder. Massive, unapologetic shelling. My half-sleeping mind connects dots to the ancient mythologies, to hammers and wars in the heavens, for a brief rest between assaults it makes sense. 

I wake again, later, after it's over, just before it is time to rise. Everything is quiet. I miss the immediacy of the storm. Maybe I just miss feeling anything properly, like it's not wrapped in so much brick cotton. I begin to dig through the pile of work, only to realize my head is elsewhere, circling the green buds outside the window, twirling off into the clouds, swimming at the bottom of the city's underground. 

The rain continues, noncommittal, foliage expanding before our eyes; the doves are back on the fire escape with their tender promises. A new story weaves itself into your mind, there's no turning it down. Curiosity moves you forward. 

It seems more like a gift, than anything you've seen.

[Day] One (Day)

On the way back, everything smiles. They skip into JFK Terminal One and you see no traffic until the Williamsburg bridge: a slow, sunny traverse behind an ice cream truck, staring at the city. A parking spot waits just outside the door, the trees have grown a little greener, the east village lives again. The landlord writes, asks for more money but not more than that you believe you can find it. Two mourning doves court each other on the fire escape outside your window, Sunday afternoon and they have found themselves able to love again. 

There's poetry to be found in the twists and turns of a world, there are fables to weave out of the tragedies of a life, this is not how you had planned to appear on this threshold but what if the arrival is
in fact
a gift?

Mayday

Apartments in Philadelphia are dark, we decide, all the windows shuttered to the outside world and you barely know the sun is shining. How does one endure a life in isolation? We end the night at a bar that feels like America and you wonder what other life you might be living if you weren’t so terribly in love with New York City. But then can’t that be said for anything? 

Growing older is just having to live with the choices you make. 

In my dream, we finish a marathon. I think something about still having time to realize what one is meant to do but then I remember my age and stop myself short. The dream switches and we are racing through department stores: in search of what, I don’t know. Maybe that’s another lesson. 

May arrives with just a hint of something familiar. You think perhaps you see the path again, though you’ve been deep in the woods for years. 

You start to make your way 

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