How in the world can I describe to you
what I am going through.
What I am going through right now.
How can I tell you?
How are you to know
what worlds we will create
the voyages we will take
the enduring bliss we will make
unless I find the right combination
of the correct sequence of sounds.
Would that our lives not be separate,
with you in your rooms; I in mine.
We meet once a month, if we’re lucky,
not to be together, or to dine.
Where do you go there without me,
the corridors along which you stalk?
What I’d give just hear, or to see
all these places abroad when we talk.
What is it you fight in the shadows?
What lives contend against yours in the way?
among hallways as endless as cornrows
these paths that are long as the day?
You didn’t break my heart.
My heart was already broken.
It was enlarged, infected from words,
I knew I should have spoken.
I used to have a notebook,
but now, when I write,
it’s scattered across paper
just before I sleep at night.
On pages looseleaf and spendrift,1
held together by my memory
and thus dashed by the world.
Though I know that if I quit it,
everything: my job, my town, my family,
girls, my friends, my food;
if a day spread out before me,
I would find some reason to shove
this to another part of the brain.
These things I think about, like how
I turned you down and turned you away.
I rebuked the love you draped me in,
touched my shoulder, so unrelenting,
when you forgave me again.
You thought you might be one of many.
I assure you that you were not.
There’s not much to say
so I’ll make good use of saying it.
I’m getting old a few times over.
I’ve thrown words cheaply after nothing,
wastefully disowned time without care,
abandoned chances as casually as
dandelion seeds across summer air.
But when I see love done well,
I still ache for it myself.
Lovewe are locked away from one another.
Only let our love break through between us.
As long as I have yet some life left in me
now I know what I desire:
To be your teacher and your master,
your acolyte and your slave.
The love I want breaks through
unto the clouds spattered near the sun,
over fields and meadows and grassy safety.
You are the drink that I imbibe, my sky,
vast, wild and high, my sunset and sunshine
my eyes, my heart, my death and rise.
I can’t stop thinking that I’ve lived too long,
that I’ve seen all I deserve to see, and it’s wrong
to grasp to life, the black, the bad, the strife,
the heat of the day
that grips me and sears my skin.
Oh, what a wonder, oh what a waste.1
Dead at 27, missed the rest of my life
but what was I going to do with it anyway?
I didn’t lose my focus
because I never had it.
Recline and lie back,
put your feet up,
fold your arms in your lap
get your phone and see
all the things you think and dream,
and everyone you want to be.
I ought to write you something
for something’s what you deserve.
I’ve given you so much nothing
and it’s not that hard
to cast it in some letters.
and arrange these into words.
Oh, it’s no work to think, or write
the things you make me feel at night
when I’m alone to brood and chide
myself and all the wasted time.
We’ve been apart at my design,
the work I ply along a line
so long alone in darknest hold
to cry and rhyme a chime sublime,
spending more time in darkness
has made me old.
When I feel it coming on,
in those times, like now,
when I am fated to be drawn
into the past and all my enemies there,
all my many enemies.
The weight of guilt, the sick of shame
the games I played, or those which claimed
me, but never without myself to blame.
And even now, I, selfishly,
fill looseleaf pages.
I do not call those I have wronged
nor atone myself through charity.
I take breaks from shame
to pretend that I was him wronged.
I pour my pain all along the page
and play my own victim.
Although no warlord, nor dictator,
I’m one of the silent people
who at every turn of life
choses to benefit himself
and chase pleasure amid strife.
If there were a God
or order to the riot of life
I’d never have been born,
nor ever live to waste the possibility
of concern for others, and not of me.
I try to analyze the facts
and understand in my self reflection
which feelings square with reality
and which ones are fantasies of me
upon my little crucifix,
sick and vain and useless.
When I dried your tear
you are an angel my dear,
my dear, dear,
I always wanted a write the songs
that were complex and beautiful
where kids could ride around in
Corollas and Accords with the cassette adapter
or the auxiliary cord
plugged in, gainst dusty windshields
the girl is driving, and the boy is me
desperately hoping he’s cool, or to seem
But I’m just another number
I’m just another voice,
just another singer
that some kid will say he’s going to be better than.
Dressed in a suit, gray and pretty, legs thin,
I went to your house in the night
and you thought I might be breaking in.
I want to tell you my story,
I don’t know why you would
want or need to hear it,
I understand that you’re at an age
where you feel the need
to be in a relationship headed
toward a future, headed for marriage.
When I love you is in the mornings,
unravelling from the night’s stories,
when the daylight struck a match
into the private worlds
we were keeping.
Listening, we turned over
with the windows open,
hearing, secondhand,
birds, once soaring,
reduced to roaring.
And in the fires of the day,
when light increased
the beauty of your face,
looking upon you,
I had storms of passion,
yet you were quietly breathing;
there, still, you lay.
It’s changes in the temperature,
slips of the wind, that move my heart.
To see you again, and later
I’ll strike the divide of us apart
to match you with my location
But now, in the exempt times
of morning, coerced inside,
I have to offer only warmth
and feeling, arms wrapped
around your form.
There are times when I think of my failures
in love, though I try not to.
For it did not go as planned.
Doubt civilized my hand
and counselled it
to remain aloof from all that.
My body remains where I left it.
Out of shape and unused.
Confused, torn and mottled,
chewed up, blackheads, soft chin,
brown eyes, good hips and bad skin.
I fix one thing and another breaks
my confession, abuse, reduced and mistakes.
I counted the number of times you breathed last night,
how many breaths caught and released with a sigh
but then I forgot;
I lost myself watching
the in and out of your breast
as the night eased your rest.
and the rhythm rocked us both soft
into the welcome of the stars aloft.
Those I did not try to count.
Write this lyric down, this melody, that line.
I risk losing ideas later, when I don’t oblige.
It threatens leaving me if I fail recording.
But sometimes so much comes all at once
that it runs over the rim
and I cannot keep
any of it in.
I don’t think we should, anymore.
Although you said that before me.
You said I would never be able to love
you, or to really love anybody.
You said I didn’t care about you
or what happened
when we were together
before it ended.
Please, please don’t text me again.
I never want to see you;
I just want this to end.
Around the spring I am reminded
that you introduced me to a feeling.
It’s neither your intention nor desire
that you should set my soul on fire
but I hope you still will for a while.
I wish there were more drama in me
not for youI wish you free
but rather drama of the most pathetic kind,
entranced by fires my [illegible] light.
I am not growing older, only weaker
my mind is getting younger,
becoming more a creature.
I am more selfish in my wants.
I thought I’d died and gone across.
But I’ve thought that countless times.
I think of all the chances that were mine
to take you in hand and lead you into the light
to show you the love I of you reciprocated,
the love you had made mine.
Somewhere, there must be you.
I am somewhere; you must be there too.
Fear is thinking this the peculiar work of dreams.
of a mind cycling through impossibilities
never to be real, while he sleeps.
Are you some figment or a fragment?
Some lesson or some flash?
A mistake or a phenomenon?
a mirage, or are you a trap?
Does everyone of us have a you?
How much sadness must it be,
your absence resultant, in their touch.
I hope until my hope is empty.
But hope has never brought me much.
When it is dried out, I wonder where I find the well
that remembers my love for you, lest it might fail.
I think it may be best found in the morning
when I’m awake, yet you’re asleep.
I think I see something at those times,
somewhere among the starts and sighs,
the remains of the starlit nights,
somewhere behind your lidded eyes
that reminds me. I, reminded,
commence my search for the rope that binds,
that gathers from that well1 the water, which is love,
so I can bring it back to you
and you can just shrug.
Driving through Ohio during sunset,
under the canopies of the copses of the trees
the pastures appear as if, closing in pockets,
golden light is at work protecting peace, and ease.
There is an older, two-lane highway
that skirts along the turnpike.
You go under a bridge, always traffic-chocked.
Trucks groan forward slowly, then they stall.
Transpiring the horizon of the overpass.
The overpass is passed.
They pass over the world.
How very sad and very alone one feels,
when staring into the black void awaiting us.
It is nothingness and it is indifferent.
Glimpsing it once or twice
through the years, handled
as it sometimes is;
it mangled me that day.
Facing oblivion takes
a few days’ denial
to right one’s spirit
and begin again
the delusion of life.
Some speak of the luck in which we all share
to be happening now, at being here.
But I see no luck,
none of its implied beneficence.
In our breaths and heartbeats
I see nothing which is at once
different from luck
in these atoms dancing among one another
we who made a story of the random.
There is no why, no how and no future.
There is no being.
We are beyond language,
alive for no other reason
than that for the time being,
the phenomenon of genetics
has chanced us with
a bundle of cells that
keep us breathing for another day.
We aren’t already dead.
We are alive
and here, and then
we are and were when.
We’re living a while until
we just aren’t again.
I got your number off a Craigslist
post from like a couple days ago.
I’m contacting you in response to
Fourty-Two Fourteen Jacinta Drive.
The green, two-bedroom house in Durham,
Forest Hills, sixteen oh five square feet.
I’m in need, potentially.
Are you still considering
tenants for that property?
If so, today, I live in Raleigh.
My lease is up the end of May.
Looking at the post, your place
is checking all the boxes
that I’ve had on my list,
and if the property
is still available,
I’d love to take a look.
You can text or call me at this number.
Texting me is what works best,
especially on weekdays
when I’m at work.
I hope you do.
We checked in on one another
within our separate dreams
the glades and meadows in between
through a waterfall, or streams.
But every time I left my dream
to find my way into yours
My heart snapped in two
again, again, again with you.
To see myself in your eyes
to contemplate that you might love me
that you could take up care or interest,
that you would trust and never judge me,
moreover that you would over, and throughout
you would be looking, pausing and crying, no doubt
at those things that are broken in me
or those dying things--they are many.
I was a star; I was light.
Wider than the sky at night.
I was heat. I was warmth.
Together, we were air.
There are all the girls,
and then then there is you,
whose smile I cannot see through
nor do I want to.
It is you I see now and see the most,
your scent haunts my room, a whisper, a ghost.
And you have never been here.
You have never shown your face here.
You refused to be around me
since I was not able
to be a person who could
understand how to talk to you.
I could say I tried.
And even though I did,
it still feels like a lie.
I have gotten used to taking up
a little space myself it will be fine.
I never should have given in to him.
There is alone, and then
there is without you.
A riot of hues subsumed by gray,
the sky that does not feel that way,
(It shouldn’t be so steel at May.)
a rage of plumes in blue arranged.
There is no more that I can say.