13.1

Around mile four, the sun set over New Jersey. The evening was cool, and gentle, the plaza brimming with romantic strolls and just one more effort to capture the particular peaches and pinks that sink into the ocean on August evenings. At mile six, a familiar view of midtown from the west side sparkled and glimmered in the twilight as if to remind me what this was all for (I do anything to stay here, to earn you, that's what it's all for and we both know it), before I turned around to head back home again. At mile nine, my legs grew weary, pleading with my brain to calculate remaining distance and admit the futility of the effort, give up. My brain knew that if it took a second to think, it would never get back up on the damn horse, so better to hold on tight to the goal and carry on.

By mile ten, I had stopped thinking. There was only the next step, now, there was only the familiar sights of bridges to Brooklyn, of black waves in the East River and the comforting weave around scattered tourists. Somewhere around mile eleven, a full moon came out from behind the clouds, as if casually offering support it would rather have given enthusiastically. It carried me the rest of the way.

After thirteen miles, the promenade was dark and mostly quiet. My steps slowed, I stopped to look at the full moon and consider obstacles, consider determination. The music in my ears was happy,  the blood in my veins giddy, I longed for the ocean to tell it my joys but the waters were busy caressing the moon and I couldn't blame them. A new day lies ahead, like an open book, like I get to write the pages of my own life, like I clawed myself into the life of my dreams and now here I am, now what?

That's the thing about dreams, after all.

Once you've caught them, you're already chasing the next.

Relax

The hustle builds inside you, gathers steam, roils around and pushes you forward, ever forward, ever counting the minutes left in your pockets and how you best can spend them. Summer is sticky again, but the evenings are dark now and you know it will end one day. She writes you from the north and says does it all start again now? and you know how after school season itches like a mosquito bite at your edges. You land exhausted on your bed, night after night and the alarm so early but the earlier you rise the more minutes in your pocket. The stars prepare to align, the moon fills like a lung, the light along the Bowery tonight was magic and there is never so much storm on my calendar that I cannot stop
for a second
to see it.

Crunch

run run run 
as fast as you can
you'll never catch all the shooting stars
you keep hoping for 

but fuck it,
what else am I going to do?
might as well try and see if I can't
land
at least one.

the Scratcher

In between songs, the bar is entirely quiet, Monday revelers with no need to shout their angst into the void. There's a long stretch of tables to your right sitting empty, the bartender wears a sweater like she always does even though it is summer and you haven't looked in your sweater drawer since March. He spoke of foliage and you thought of it as little more than creative liberties, surely Christmas is merely something we invent in boredom, this bead of sweat has lingered between my breasts for as long as I can remember and were my brows not always so white?

We sat on the beach again this morning, toes in the sand and lungs reaching toward infinity, him with his peaceful hums and me with my mind on fire in the sunshine, everything was perfect and even in sleep we smiled. I stood in the waves later, soft fat waves like playful baby seals, letting them roll over me and thinking how grateful I was to greet them without all that sorrow in my bones, without that desperate plea to cleanse me, to rid me of the unbearable pain I couldn't seem to dispose of myself. The ocean is a playground now, a rainbow, a cloud, my to do list is a million pages long but dammit I'm doing it. Do you hear me?

I'm swimming myself to shore.

Wax (v)

Sometimes,
for a short moment,
you breathe like you never forgot
how,
for a short moment, your skin
contains you and ends where you end,
without edges bleeding
into the intangible beyond.
August evenings are dark,
and cool,
and even as summer ends
it whispers promises
that something in you is
only beginning.

All My Life

I still believe in magic, I tell him, late night in Chelsea and the weight of the world on our shoulders. We woke so early, weekend traffic to the Rockaways and the ocean quiet before the crowds arrive. I speak with the ocean still but sweet now, I’ve stopped pleading with it to bandage these bleeding wounds and giggle in the waves. A ragged man sat on F train with his busted keyboard, playing songs I knew in my youth and loved, this was all before the coffee set in but I still sank into his chords and smiled, despite myself.

The movie was long, but beautiful, all cowboy hats and western Americana, I breathe easier with home in my spine, I can handle every life’s sadness against that desert backdrop. We walked out to discover a concert in the late summer twilight, I wore a sweater and marveled at the temperature but maybe it didn’t cause the shivers, life is strange in its wayward miracles.

I still believe in magic, I told him, 23rd street as the train rolls in and who do we find on the train car but the same ragged man with his keyboard and quiet harmonies, I stood mouth wide open at the door and had no answers to offer. This is New York, was all I could think to say before I left him at west fourth street, smiling at the Universe. The bartender only charged us for half the drinks and the bride next to us waxed on about her black heart, how there is hope still to be had.

We do not know all the things that are yet to come, we wade in our own insignificance. One day I asked the Universe for a chance to fail up and boy did the Universe deliver, I still make wishes at 11:11 and do you know, all of a sudden on the A train at midnight, everything you could think to ask for can come true.

Halcyon

All we want is to succumb to a single kiss
that will contain us like a marathon
with no finish line, and if so, that we land
like newspapers before sunrise, halcyon
mornings arrived like blue martinis. I am
learning the steps to a foreign song: her mind
was torpedo, and her body was storm,
a kind of Wow. All we want is a metropolis
of Sundays, an empire of hand-holding
and park benches? She says, “Leave it all up to me.”