"Breathing"
11/1/2009

I have two realities.
One where you’re with me
forever,
because we don’t have to speak.

The other, you’re gone,
because you’re bad for me.
A poison I long for.
I’m not allowed to have you.

Sometimes I can only breathe
in poetry,
the only place
the world meets me
where I am.

I feel suffocated around here,
now,
with your fingers wrapped silently
around my neck,
trying to get the child-proof lid
off.

I don’t want to be here.

I’d rather be in the place where
words are stealing my oxygen.

"A year later"
9/27/09

A year later
Under the house
in the sand
where we’d been lying
I found your bandana
Half-buried
I must’ve pushed it
Off your head
Let it lay there
Beneath us
As I kissed you
A year later
When I found it
Under the house
In the sand
Where we’d been lying
I walked
To the ocean
Through the mist and half-rain
I gave it up
To the ocean
Let the waves carry it
In the swell
A spot of red bleeding
Through the frothing blue
I watched it
Until it was consumed
The surf rushed up
To my ankles
I bowed
To the ocean
A year later

"Fantasy"
8/18/09

Sometimes I think of my wedding:
far off like a temple in the distance,
half-obscured by fog and haze,
but winking lucidly in my mind's
gaze. We are
on the beach, the sacred
beach of my childhood;
dune grass and a gentle
crushing ocean,
the sky surrounding us
like the walls of a cathedral.
I wear white
and no shoes.

I try to ignore the fact
that the bridegroom conjured
in this chimera
is you --
your hair blown gently
by the sea-wind,
your feet bare to match mine.
No, it can't be you.
I force someone else into your place,
a darker-haired being,
of cold unknown body
and empty face.

As a child
I rejected the pastimes
often assigned to young girls.
No pink, no frills,
and certainly no foolishly constructed
future plans for houses,
husbands,
domestic lives.
My friends would lay out their dreams
as children do -- perfect,
impossible.
I'd roll my eyes.

Now I find myself
fantasizing like a child
of my beach wedding.
You are beside me
in my hopeless dream.
You are a phantom
dressed in white.

"Futile"
5/14/09

“I loved him for a long time,”
she said,
“and it’s futile.”

Futile, she said,
and then added,
“I know you love him.”

As if I don’t know
the meaning of the word love!
Futile, she said,
and with those words
knocked the wind out of me,
and I felt that same black,
hollow, sucking emptiness
fill my lungs -
the same dark air
I felt that warm afternoon
between the pine trees,
when you broke my heart
with the truth of yours.

Futile, she said,
and maybe it is futile
the way I look for you in crowds
and foreign places,
the way my heart laughs when it sees you
for the first time,
laughs and runs towards joy and light
like a flower leans into the sun.

"Healing"
4/16/09

Across the circle
i leaned and lay one hand
on your arm, warm hairs
i’d never felt before,
but there you were,
and perfect Greek god body that you have
perfect grades, perfect girlfriend
perfect life that you have
i felt my palm, my fingers
burn with your pain
looked at your face
and saw it marked
with your pain.

What pain is it that you hold?
you left the chair and i took my hand from you,
skin still warm with anguish, now cooling,
your wet eyes,
drying.
I saw a spot still left in you,
still needed to be touched:
your neck,
two spots across from your shoulders.
But that time was over.

Closed my eyes and it was my turn now,
crouched in my chair and felt
hands upon my feet,
my hand,
and finally,
light fingers gently against my neck:
yours. Light fingers pushed
in and out with my breathing,
across my shoulders,
my neck, and soothing fingers:
yours.

When my healing was done,
when i had breathed out my pain
into all those hands,
you sat across from me again
and I saw you smile.
I knew what you were smiling about,
and I smiled too
as if we shared a secret joke,

the kind of joke that ripples through someone,
and suddenly everyone’s laughing,
and they know something’s funny but what is it?
they don’t know, they’re just laughing,
laughing.

I saw God ripple through you,
you child of the divine.
I saw a spirit laugh
across that circle.

I want to live life laughing like that.

"Patent Pending"
4/15/09

They say you can patent anything–
seeds, species of tomatoes,
carburetors, sheep,
screw caps.

If that’s true, then
I’m sending in my application:

I want to own the rights to
the sharp angle of your jawbone
and its smoky orange bristles of hair,

as well as the way your fingers
feel on my skin:
thick, electric, dancing.

"Philadelphia"
4/15/09

Today I visited the office of the Philadelphia Inquirer
and watched a hundred people
type a hundred poems
on a hundred computers
using all the words they’ve used before
as if some deity of the universe
was keeping a tally

It was a contest between who could use the phrase
“In spite of”
the most number of times
before they died of exhaustion.

"No One Writes Poems"
4/15/09

No one writes poems about

tiny baskets sitting on tables
extension cords
security guards sitting at octagon desks,
making friends with tv screens

No one writes poems about

getting hair stuck in your mouth
leftover tape on the ceiling
advertising agencies
my father sitting in an armchair,
complaining

No one writes poems about

cell phone towers
filling a salt shaker
the space between the window screen and the glass
teenagers taking the SAT,
drinking from aluminum bottles

No one writes poems about

a world where people stand in line
at the patent office,
waiting for word of new inventions
just so they can write poems about them

"Sad"
3/21/09

There is a child crying outside my window
I feel sad.
A harsh lawnmower snarls
I feel sad.
You left,
I hung up the phone
and I’m alone.
Fuck the overwrought
overexplained
overanalyzed emotions of adulthood.
That child’s crying,
That lawnmower’s growling.
And I feel sad.

"Goodnight"
3/20/09

Goodnight brothers
tomorrow think of me
when you’re driving through tv interstate screens
watching the headlights beam

Goodnight mother
don’t throw yourself in front of me
i need to bleed on my own
and i’m sorry you had to hear me scream

Goodnight lover
tonight I’ll be on my own
though you’re so far away
i’m tracing my finger down your cheek bone
feeling your pain even over the phone
you needle me sweetly
my blood pumps hotly
oh, lover, look at how we’ve grown
you crawled into me like a virus
and i can’t seem to leave you alone

Goodnight moon
cruel goddess of metal
weave silver in my room
sit at your gypsy loom
dance me a song sad and sweet
let me sleep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2/17/09

I see miracles in you:

Every time you close your eyes

Every time you touch me

and I feel home

"To My Siblings"
2/16/09

Brothers,
Sister,
You know ours is a bond
which spans many universes.
If twenty years from now a frog
stops me on the road and tells me
he is you, cursed by some witch,
you know I would believe him in a second.
I’d scoop you up and carry you with me,
asking,
How did this happen to you?
and
Do Mom and Dad know yet?

"Ghost"
2/10/09

I thought I saw you
through the skeleton screen
on the third-story window
You were walking towards
the building and you kept pushing
your hair back with your hands
And suddenly the halls stank
of your body
and of the long ago springtime
and I became frightened,
expecting you to leap out
at me from every corner
like a ghost

"Sunset in the Washroom Window"
2/7/09

How can I feel anything
but human
with black branches silhouetted
against the steam
with rosy light
glowing through the streaked glass
and the broom sweeping me
into one
small
manageable pile?

"Tree"
10/9/08

I am going to let
a tree grow inside me.
You can come sit under it
if you want.
You can climb on it
but be careful not to
pull my hair:
the strongest branch
grows from my mouth.

"Eat Right!"
10/9/08

Eat right!
the words on the computer screen told me

so I squeezed the mango between my fingers
delighting in the pleasure of its oozing flesh

I dirtied my fingers with smears of chocolate
and let the crumbs cling to my lips

I let every bitter spark of coffee
burn into my tongue

I bit tomatoes like apples
and swallowed the black watermelon seeds.

"Skin"
10/9/08

The naked showerhead
spits at me
and the warm sheer water
runs smoothly over my linoleum skin
and falls to the tiles,
chasing away oil and dust.

It seems strange to me:
how easily
the delicate membrane
resists liquid,
water,
ketchup,
saliva,
mayonnaise,
blood.

My skin is like paper
when I am near you:
it soaks up
every word you speak
with eagerness,
then finally tears softly
under the weight of your presence.

"Prayer"
9/28/08

Last night was the first
time I have truly
prayed.

What I thought was praying before was
mere desperation. Prayer
is not sadness;

prayer is exultation. Prayer
is when you are filled
with the ecstasy

of the Earth. Last night I ran
across the wet fields.
I ran in the dark

dressed in black. I ran
through the illuminated
mist. I ran

with my shoes in one hand,
the other grasping for
cool damp air.

Last night I felt the rapture
on my skin like a warm
stinging rain.

I looked over the hills
to the sky and saw it
lit with clouds.

I saw the dark tempest of the moon
crowned with silver, smiling.
Last night I saw God.

"Original Sin"
8/15/08

It is ancient,
maybe the oldest desire in creation:
the dinosaurs in heat,
no,
even before that,
the earliest creatures joining together and
creating more of themselves.
Yet to us it is
as new as a screaming wrinkled child
inhaling its first gasp of air,
and just as strange.
It is as though we have been waiting
billions of years for this,
since the first stardust broke through the
dark vacuums of time.
Our bodies fit together
like the plates of the earth,
and when we move
the world trembles,
our blood pulsing
like the deepest rivers.

5/14/08

I just
miss you, that's all.

I'm tired.
My body carries itself wearily
through these halls.
They were once
open and dark and
full of promise,
but now they are
closed, garishly lighted and
narrow.

My bones carry some kind of
deep fatigue.
How will they last me so long?
This heart, these lungs
how have they not given up on me yet?
Why have they not
taken their paycheck
and gone home?

Certainly in my current state
I would be liable to retire,
were I stretched out for so many years,
made to be someone's breath, life,
fluid and vital rythym
for so long.

But maybe this is what keeps them alive:
this electric energy
pulsing deep inside me
that has seeped through my flesh and
lies in the core of my every organ.

Maybe that is what keeps me alive:
the ever-present, taunting promise
that i will see you again,
that i will be able to
press my hands into yours and
taste the life on your skin.

"Fragile Forty-Year-Old"
4/12/08

Wrapped in your sweater you

stood there, the red threads

encircling you,

your eyes smiling,

the sleeves

dangling down,

obscuring your hands

as you

waved your arms

slightly at your sides

like a child