04/04/2016

What a strange thing it is

To outgrow a place.

It’s like the squares of the sidewalks don’t quite fit your feet anymore.

It no longer feels

Like the ceilings were built for you.

You look at the boys and girls who have taken your place and you wonder,

Do they feel the same infinity you did?

Do they attach themselves by their shoestrings just like you did?

Everything is different

Yet everything is the same,

If you had told yourself then how temporary it all was--

You would have laughed right in your own face.

Last Time

The last time you saw me my hair was still it’s natural blond and I still believed I could put off growing up forever.

The last time I saw you, you still adored big words, everything anyone said was a point to be debated.

The last time we saw each other I still thought the words ‘each other’ were one word, I still thought we were one word.

The last time you saw me, I was still who I thought I was, I was still adamant about things.

The last time I saw you it was still summertime, the sunlight was still thick enough to set your copper colored hair on fire.

The last time we saw each other we weren’t yet an almost.  We were the biggest almost I’ve ever had.  

The last time you saw me I was confused.  I was at sea.  You were a map that I couldn’t stop charting but our coordinates didn’t align.

The last time I saw you you were in love with me, so much so, you wished you had kissed me and I still don’t know what stopped you.  

The last time we saw each other we sat in a tea shop underneath an oyster sky and I watched you talk about the nature of time and place in a way that fascinated me endlessly.

The last time you saw me I had just been swimming in Lake Michigan, I was chilled to the bone and I felt the most zoetic.

The last time I saw you you, your hand barely left the space between the bottom of my shirt and the top of my pants, it continuously makes me smile that for all your big words and fantastical exclamations, you are still just a boy.  

The last time we saw each other we talked about big things, fragmented things, abstract things that in retrospect are hazy.  We drove through apricot city mist.  

The last time you saw me your voice in my hair reduced me to nothing more than skeleton ash and fiberglass lungs.  You make me intangible.  

The last time I saw you you scared me, you scared me because you are larger than the words we write and all day long I waited for something that wouldn’t happen.

The last time we saw each other we tried to outrun time, we roamed those streets so well it could have been our job.  

The last time you saw me so much had yet to happen.  I was at the sunrise of the sunset.  I was worried about all the wrong things.  

The last time I saw you you told me you loved me, you told me I was song lyrics and the sky and you told me we would be ok.  

The last time we saw each other we swung, we told stories, we held on.  We tried to fit four months into one weekend.

Did we pull it off?

The last time you saw me I was so many things.  I was up and down and peach and blush and gold.  I was your hands and your eyes and your words.  I was more you than me.

The last time I saw you your eyes looked mixed up, you asked what I meant and I couldn’t tell you.

The last time we saw each other we danced around the truth and danced around the sidewalks.  We got lost in a park and all the alleyways smoldered.  Every moment shimmered.   

Send Help

Help.
I have been trying for so long to find who I am inside this physical shell.

I have been working for a better understanding of who I think I'll grow into once I give myself time for that.

I have been looking in all the wrong places.

I have looked beneath my collarbones where stars have planted themselves.
I have looked in the sandstone cave that has replaced my gut on the nights when every name that isn't yours leaves me wanting.
I have felt between my fingers for something unexpected but they've always been the same hands.

Maybe who I want to find isn't in here.
Maybe who I'm looking for is somewhere out there.
Maybe they are a flashed reflection in a window of a building we've forgotten the name of.
Maybe the one I hope to find got lost among the leaves on a summer day when we tried to become part of something bigger than ourselves.
I've looked underwater. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough.
I've searched behind the thorns. Maybe I wasn't searching well enough.

These children's eyes are so like a pool in the way they reflect and yet plummet.
I miss my pool eyes.

Like golden leaves we let ourselves dissolve

we are so much bigger than this place.

We are as big as we want to be, we are as golden as the late evening light.

What is the best way to feel this?

What are the best letters to string into words to string into lines to string into rhymes to describe this?

How can I impart to you the way those eyes look when they glance in my direction?

How can I color your mind the way I am feeling, the dusty lavender that comes with a summer day well spent?

Soft green grass and sweet cool water, hills and melody wrap into a song that we sing all month long.  

There is a cavity just below my ribcage that I have come to know,

I call it the sandstone cave.

It is there where my deepest things hide,

It is there where I feel the strongest.  I feel it, full, on dark lonely nights, full of words I barely utter to the world.  

But I feel it more,

I feel it stronger,

On the full golden nights and the green sparkling days.  I feel it, empty and waiting, when the windows of my little sage colored car are rolled down and the breeze is fresh and I am smiling.

I feel it when something is even better than I expected, when my expectations are not met but are exceeded.

I feel it when all circumstances have aligned and I have ended up exactly where I want to be with exactly who I want to be.

I feel it when all the tabs on my little wave covered laptop are open to new places and new things.  Italy maps, workaway.info...There is so much out there to see.

I feel it when it is 1 am and everything is funny, laughing until I can barely breathe and I’m on top of the world.  

Nobody Knows Where To Stand At A Funeral

1/29/2016

Funerals are for the living.  

Grey and hazy we look through the tears in our eyes at what has passed before us.

A man I don’t know in a suit stands before us, telling us how to move our bones in the space like it is some kind of perfromance.

I guess it is.

I am tired.

I’ll be run dry before the day is over,

every time I

try to speak

or try to smile

or try to laugh,

I hear is his voice,

raspy,

old, yet full of life,

“Oh, is that right, doll.”

A smile always on the edge of it.

I have become the shroud around my shoulders.

I have turned into the bag hanging across my chest.

Maybe I can disappear inside these clothes,

Maybe I can go back to where they came from.

The scarf was plucked from a stand at a bus stop in Guatemala, I thought the soft color would be a good addition to my collection.  

I never thought it would become this.  

I gleaned the bag from a pile at Goodwill,

I knew it would become this.

Something that has held so much and been so many places.

It has held spray paint and words and snacks and adventures,

and now it is here, holding me together.   

Small

These things that we call our own
Are not really ours.

They are ours, for a moment, maybe more, until they're back,
Another tick on the clock
We can do all we want
But these things that we call our own
Are not really ours
And this is comforting, 
If you think about it.
These infinities,
These eternities,
Are not all ours.
They are not just ours,
Some parts,
A minute,
A moment,
80,
90, years if you're lucky, 
We are granted
These small eternities 
To claim.

Cinder Block

If you look at the tops of the domiciles it almost looks like summer, the sky is a crisp cerulean and the sun is effulgent, for a second I can consign myself to oblivion that we are barely into winter at all, for a moment I can disregard that this is just the beginning of the next three months of caliginosity.

Near the origination of things we can find what we’ve obscured, somewhere underneath last autumn’s leaves there is a diaphanous layer of gold promising something revived, something we thought was gone permanently.  

There is a cinder block wall near the fringe of town, we call it the first wall, not because it happened before everything else, but because that is where everything happened first.  Kisses, drinks, smoked cigarettes.  

On the other side of this palisade there is a marble town, empty integuments of people we used to cherish lie beneath the earth in infinite torpidity.