Elvira

Long Island is long, at the very tip there is a lighthouse and autumn, cold winds from across the entire Atlantic and you didn’t bring enough clothes for this journey. The people along the beach are white, so white, with tan eyebrows and pockets lined with hundred dollar bills, I recoil against my best intentions. Later, at night when I go to fetch some forgotten object in the car, I see a million stars stretch across the night sky. It’s no desert darkness, no dusty Milky Way, but it’s still a light nudge from the Universe. 

You are here. 

I sleep to the sounds of crashing waves, autumn winds, tired resilience. Tomorrow will be cold. 

You are here. 

Fee Fi Fo Fum

I see the blank page languishing on the desk top, don't worry. I know all my faults and abandoned castle ruins, scaffolding still leaning against each other. The wind picks up now, fall is here, I sleep with the windows open and wake in a chill. 

The city returns to me in gentle nudges, how we could never have expected this turn of events. One day suddenly you are on a subway train and your muscle memory kicks in, one day suddenly you are in a 3-story dive bar in FiDi watching terrible off-off Broadway awkwardly kilter along your pilsner, running in the rain to catch the R back home and something feels familiar. I careen down the east side on a bicycle, I careen up the stairs to my shoebox apartment when it's been too many hours away, do you know most days I still don't know how to live an entire life but every now and then there comes a moment when I don't think so much about it, I just enjoy, and after all this time I will take that moment, I will love it and hold it tight. 

So much is still burning, and crumbling, and decaying inside your skin. 

You'll take the peace where you can get it.

Whiskey Sour

I started walking. It wasn't intentional, I just tire of the inertia that came with the 2020s, just tire of the three square feet that make up my existence, I started walking and I didn't know how to stop. Do you remember when you were young and walked all night, for hours, what a strange life this is. I walked down through the Lower East, swerved through Nolita, raced across Houston, by evening a full moon rose behind the towers in Williamsburg, a strange silence settled over Stuy Town, and everywhere, at every turn, the city shimmered and glittered and whispered I am still here, through all the devastation of the last year and a half, it is still here, I tried so hard in a previous life not to make it out alive but that's all done now, do you hear me? I'm not the same now. 

We break
and break
but we are not broken. 

Maybe this is the time when you declare what you are made of.

Sekretess

The weekends twirl and toss, remind you of a life Before, a life when you rushed from one commitment to the next, and I sit on the subway home from Bushwick late in the evening, texting neighbors for spontanous rendez-vous in summer-buggy back yards, what is September in New York if not the true delights of summer, all blue skies and movies in the park. I stumble home at midnight, hickups and giggles taking turns, I nod at the little station wagon, I swipe left on everything I see, because do you know that nothing so far has delighted me more than life on these streets. I watch home improvement shows from the homeland and wonder if I will ever walk that land again. How strange life, that the more days we live, the more doors we've closed. There was a time when everything was open windows. 

I go to bed late and cannot sleep. 

There's a message in there, if you'll hear it.

Figured It Made Sense

Weeks rush to their inevitable ends, your life rushes to its inevitable end what
can possibly keep itself off the ledge how
are any of us supposed to be immortal?

I came here with scraps of paper and a dream outside rat races and yet
here we are don't we
all succumb to middle age after all?

I am more question marks than periods,
more commas and run-on sentences than
complete stops, than
finished thoughts, 

but honey I am still
suitcases full of scraps, still
piles and jumbles and joys of words
age
hasn't taken any of that from me
age
doesn't actually take so much as give 

if you look at it closely if you
count your pennies with an
open heart

the poet writes you from across the river
but you do not answer his pleas

You have your own poems
to dream, 

you run to your own end and make
the journey the thing that's
inevitable.

Loss

Some days I fear the words fall from me, tumbling out of my fingertips onto and into dust without having made themselves useful in any way, without having created any sort of music, emptying their vowels and emptying reserves until I have nothing left to say - or no means by which to say it. He says he feels old, that he's ready for the quiet life, ready to produce something meaningful and I wonder if we are an entire generation pummeled into the ground where this pandemic was only the final nail in an already solid coffin. 

I sat in Bryant Park last night, watching another old movie as the skyscrapers lit up around us, a thousand New Yorkers cheering when the lovers found each other, when the villain got his dues, I know it can never be how it was and a great innocence has been taken from us but oh, when New York sparks the whole house comes down, the Empire's downfall be damned. 

I didn't fight in this pandemic, I see that now. See creatives unfurl their wings and fly on the hot air of struggle and I couldn't, but here's the thing. There's a tree growing on the 5th story brick ledge of the building across the street, it makes no sense, but it found a way to grow where it stands, here's the thing. 

When all the digging's been done, and we make our way out of this, I'll have so many legs to stand on there's no way I won't jump to the moon.

Calls

At what point do these words become empty?

Just because we duet well together
doesn't mean we should.