Strike

The news gets worse everytime you look at it. You still don't know if that means you should look at it more or stow away completely. Eventually even heads in the sand can be executed, a war doesn't need you to acknowledge it to happen. When you were younger, it was easier to see things as black and white and now suddenly you have your heart in all manner of coals. 

A few years ago, early in a year that still lay unknown before you, you asked the Universe for a change out of your control, for something to shake things up. The year that followed was a nuclear blast to the world as you knew it, the years after like continued fallout, and it was too late to take your wishes back. 

Does that mean you don't wish for things anymore?

It's too long a life
to only get by on
survival. 

Sink

In sleep, your sister finds a charred body in the crowd. You run through an unfamiliar town, looking for an emergency room, but by the time you reach it, the body is reduced to fragments in your hands. 

Is this the end of our Dream?

America, is this correct?  

The morning is mild, I walk down country roads painted in snowmelt, I stop to look at how the sun streams through barren tree branches, it wakes sleeper cells in me, genetic poetry from a life in the North, the stories all revolve around an innate longing to turn toward the sun. Don't tell me not to stare straight into its life-giving force, my eyes were made to absorb it. 

January meanders slowly through the days, as it does, you try to take a page out of its book and place it in your own: meander, slowly, you'll get there eventually so long as you keep walking. 

America, this is quite serious. 

America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.  

Unease

The snow thaws, noncommital rain wearing away at it without purpose. You wake with a weight on your chest, your inability to step up to the moment when the moment doesn't move you. This lack of bullheadedness does not serve you like you wish it did. You dream of flying to Africa but being a disaster at check-in, it's just another way of telling you the same thing. 

Get it together. 

But January is as January does. You wake late, your mind a syrup, your bones unable to muster enough oomph to even feel guilt. You dream of walks in the forest, of staring out of a window for hours, you know it won't hold. Perhaps it'll pass. Sit with the discomfort, an older version of you yells but it's no good. The discomfort doesn't want to be sat with, it demands action, attention, demands violence. 

You are weak
You give in

There's always tomorrow,  
you think to yourself,
knowing full well that one day, 

There won't be.  

(Nearly)

It arrives in a whisper, a hesistant stray equal parts curious and wary, 
tiptoeing past your doorstep when you're not paying attention but you 
see it in the corner of your eye 
hear it at the edge of your awareness. 

Just the slightest creak on a floorboard: 
a Word.

So when you sit in the silence, 
you find yourself needing to write a sentence, 
tell a story, 
put a thought to paper, you find yourself
itching 
to live in that world of making sense
through ink on paper, 
making real through 
make-believe, you find 
yourself

Yes, that's it, 
isn't it
You find
yourself.  

In the Snow

You sleep late, the quiet comfort of the upstate like a balm around your senses. What if we had it wrong all along and you don't actually have to suffer first to deserve peace after. It's like you don't know how to just be okay. 

The morning walk is still, snow-covered cemeteries and fresh air, every turn shows another dog out for a walk. You meet a nine-week-old puppy named Noodle. It seems right. You dream of a home now, a peace the kind that will settle in your bones. 

The problem is you've never let anything settle in your bones, so why would you now. 

You begin looking at apartment listings, but it feels like a show. You look to the woods, but it feels like a death sentence. Across the country, your sister becomes someone new. But only on paper. 

When you start looking at what life really is, 
it's not what they told you, at all.  

Shorted

An illness washes over your body, reminds you of your limitations, the flaw of being biology. You're not only in your head, you think. It is an annoying reminder. 

There is magic just beyond the reach of your fingertips, you're sure of it. At night, you dream of running and getting nowhere, you have the time to think that something isn't real about this but can't figure out what it might be. The answers elude you. The only thing you know how to do is sit down at a typewriter to figure it out, so you vow to. 

Again, again, again, I will sit down at these keys, I will wear them down until all that's left is miracle, surely if I stick around something will come of it. These are the repetitions of a writer at the end of their rope, these are the fevered delusions of a madman, but you said you'd give it all away for just a morsel of poetry, did you not? Are these the morsels you bargained for? 

The snowy landscape gives no answer in return. You cannot blame it. January wasn't made for unearthing that which has been buried in the frost. 

North

Red Hook is so quiet on Sunday mornings, lying in rest, a collective agreement to not. The cruise ship lies docked but no one's getting off yet. It's cold. January sunrise. You drag your bags – the same bags you schlepped home from Chelsea last night – back downstairs and down the street, a week's worth of dirty clothes and some leftovers you found in the fridge. The car is ready, waiting. The Brooklyn Bridge gleams in the morning light, the FDR is empty, you're careening among snow-covered trees in no time. Arrive in the old Victorian house before your coffee's even gone cold. The house is freezing, there's a charm to opening it up again. 

You are overwhelmed with kindness, with generosity, with friendships. How many keys are in your possession? They open doors across the land. You are not ignorant to that gift. 

One season goes, another takes its place. Some days it's enough just to see a new sunrise. Enough just to open your eyes.