Tag: poetry

“After great pain, a formal feeling comes–”

it’s in front of the Christmas tree
one week before you die,
alone and panicked by the
thought of mustering
staring at white frosted
plastic pine dotted with
uniform red balls
when I feel it.
it’s like cement cracking.
the ornaments of my childhood
all gone, lost
with my yearbooks and the
oil painting of mom
taken by the asbestos garage,
poverty; my enslaver.
i’ve been writing this for you
for about ten years
waiting for the day I’d be
by your bed to read the ending.
the bargaining begins.
(it’s just one breath)

this is where the poem begins. 

  1. (dad)
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I put my headphones in.

begin to spin the happy thought
into years; of us.
your brusqueness
  it’s just one breath
syncopated with whatever song
I assign it like I walked
into a film set; replay a scene
of you coming back and
behind me, your mouth
hot with acrimony.
your hands rough in
both touch from the ungloved carpentry,
spackled with white paint
and the way
you take my waist.
I hum out loud.
the loop is what I have to
worry about.
the way you press your teeth
to me.
        it’s just one breath.

“the men”

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 you never ask about my mornings
or daydreams; just
twirl the edge of your Merit
between your thumb
and pointer and
years of pleasurable
silence, 
  it’s just one breath
look at me with such
masked inconsequence,
cold front and
lick whatever sugar is stuck to
my teeth,

go back to your lighter.
go back to your preoccupations.
go back to your opinion
that my anarchy is the danger of the
couple, not your ability
to wrap your fist around a throat
without a safety word.

it’s rent I have to worry about.

III.

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i’m counting tokens in a
donated tank top and barely
fitting jean shorts, everything about me
awkward and also sort of heavy in
the impassable space between states
I learned to love,
between beds I’ve been thrown on
and various seasons of us;
theorized or touched
whether it’s real or not,
irrelevant to the curve that’s forming
in my back as I hunch over the weight
of things I stuff in my bookbag
that I find on my walks out:
China set, forks, two new mini
skirts, pot holders neatly placed in
cardboard boxes on people’s
front porches and  I am,

crammed with charity,
stretched to my limit
and timorous.
I’m two miles to the El
with enough tokens to get me there
and back and enough money to pay
exactly
one phone bill,

one internet bill,
power and gas but we are still
working the rest out and
I feel drops forming at
the base of my
sweaty and salt-lined,
un-licked neck.
thats’s what I miss most.
the way a man curls behind you.
the way his curtness catches you.
it’s just one breath.

II.

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I just have to make rent.

this is how thoughts start
and then ten years go by
and you’re still spiraling
like you hadn’t found the answer
but really I just
had to make rent.
that was my first priority

and I think I may be a masochist
which could wait just
keep everything in some sort of order.
focus on the task.
the one thought as I open
the door to the mid-August heat,
89 degrees which is nothing compared to
the south that can swallow you whole
in one boiling breeze and I’m out of
my now near empty row home
that you cleaned almost all the way
out before you left
except the dirty armchair, old couch–
all the furniture found.
all the dishes donated.
everything I left come back,
everything kind of circuitous 

like my anfractuous spine
that stood straight once but
fractured under the weight
of this constant need to materialize
public ovation and actual groceries and
the ability to discern between a happy
thought and an actual hand to hold,
I become the reed reaching deep
but bent,
sinuous,
cracked.

I.

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I used to
leave class
in high school,
go to the bathroom stall
and masturbate whenever
I let dirty thoughts
build too long.
usually it wasn’t
the subject of the class
but the way a boy
brushed my sleeve
on the way to pick up
the beakers.

I used to ask men
to reach under blankets
at house parties
and touch me.
my shorts not so
tight they couldn’t
be pushed to one side.
I used to pay their
way in when there
was a cover,
crawl up
their stomachs,
my mouth smelling
of Bud Light and
cigarettes and smiling
bright asking them
if they were still seeing
Mariel and if they wanted
to reach under the
blankets.

I always had a spare
five dollars on hand,
at least three cigarettes
and a way to materialize
fire, a way to morph
into lap cat
for whomever I
craved.  my name
is a whispered name.
a baleful sweep
of syllable in halls.

“the rooms”

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sometimes when I think back
to my fuck ups or falling down,
I come here and I see all these
women and I think,
whose answered prayer am I?
she said
and that struck me.
when women speak
I put my head down deferentially
go back to past
but also out of my own
need to curl up
inside myself.
It’s winter, 2015,
just past the new year,
I’m broken hearted
and knee deep in
some fucking secrets
but whose answered prayer
am I? who called
the wounded shepard
here? It’s 2015 and I had
just been gifted three thousand
dollars from my grandmother
that my parents called and asked
for back.

I gave them two thousand and
used the  rest to move out of
the townhouse
into a one bedroom
in the heart of Kensington.
embraced by the “Auspicious
Coin Laundry” service next door.
no one would ever miss my house.
I didn’t have anything left
over but I never did.
it’s worth mentioning that when I was
eighteen and just home for
the summer from college,
my mother told me they had
cleaned out my savings account.


“family”

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normally
I just open the door
and walk right in
but this time I decide
I should be invited.
founded on repetition as the old adage
of classical conditioning,
some things work best in saturation,
 a vacuum
 and unrevealed to the participants.
this is an examination of ethics.
no, an examination of motive.
same thing, the query being:
is it stronger when stated?
as the querant believes,
 it is stronger with want
regardless of
palpable confirmation.
want is hope in modern language
and the most consensual
exchange of felt.

either way,  it is
best to have some controls.
I arrive, same fashion,
dramatically.
you have been out in
the snow with your friends
and enjoying the view
of the constellations above
when you hear the twig snap.
you will see their yellow eyes to
your right as you react
 and you will be alone
suddenly like that compelled
to walk right in
before you see me cloaked,
walk right out.
you say I am the coldest, darkest
thing you’ve ever met but
my two dogs are
licking your frozen cheek
as you lie beneath my feet,
a sturdy boot on top
of your face, me baring down
without much weight but
pressure of depth.
but you seem colder than that.

you are face down
becoming the tracks.
I am taller than you expected,
yes?

2.

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to seek me meant
pleasure in ineffability,
a loss for words perhaps
out of fear of my retaliation
and to remain hidden
from some parts of the depth
of me and from the world with
me. I prefer the furtive
curl against another.
the unutterable and silent
worship
drives this depth
and the others and
you and me
like rifts adrift
like that, the moment
I turn my head.
I like to live,
eat, sleep alone
and move the country
this way; solo,
home
a solitary war
between
picking up impulse
and
deep, deep reflection
upon impulse
control.

I’m so sensitive
though
that if I settle into
think and spread
the cards like a fan,
I’d feel it out
in five seconds
eyes closed.
show me,
she said.
show me one year
show me two years
show me three years.
flip it and
it’s the King of Cups,
again.

plus I’d pick the right
song to match.
get the numbers to flash 3:13,
my lucky bet. 

“duplicity”

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of course i would never kill
a child, I continued with her,
but the question was
how do we make something like
the death penalty less of
a moral argument?
and the only way to take morality
out of law is to write clauses that
outline exactly what will happen
and under what circumstances and
then without reneging, go and
enforce it every single time.
these are authoritarian things.

but I didn’t agree with any of it
so I felt like battling me
was moot but I enjoyed the spectacle
and had, for no reason, invited
a male friend to join me in
class that day.
I too was interested in
motive but we cannot prove
intent truly without
absolute confession
and even then, we may
doubt what we hear.she was pandering to my 
emotion, calling this episode
a real child even though my friend
took my side and mentioned how
dramatized television is
and that those cases are slim.
BUT

she said you said kill everyone.
I never said kill everyone, I said
if the law is  x=x then it’s x.
I could see her reaching for
the feminine in me
which
as far as I could see
was straddled and leaning back.
confident enough to be the first one
to volunteer for the exercise,
which I remind her, is not
examining the morality of the law
itself but to remove debate around it
so that it may be better enforced,
without outcry and fairly.


when I finished nine hands
went up. we were a class of eighteen.
unsure of why
I volunteered for the exercise
first, and given the freedom to begin
with any declaration, why I chose to
examine how mass assassinations
could really kick things off to accept
blindly that some people are
executed.
the argument was not over
until all counter points had been examined,
the professor said.
she was tall and smiling when
I spoke and I felt thankful for her
defense of me any time she reiterated,
I was correct in re-summarizing the
exercise for each of the
nine hands that went up,
consuming the bell with a
theoretical society that arbited
punishment blindly as the statue
alluded to also,
the society we have tried to
have now is composed of
criterion like that. 


I was eighteen and glowing
and enjoying the attention
with zero conviction about
the death penalty.
and when it came back to
her, and she presented it again
after many others had spoke,
I am sure I said,
to be perfectly frank,
we would HAVE to
kill the child in order
to make the law work.
and then I just kind of laughed
because the exercise itself asked you to
first pick a side and fight for it;
not to defend the death penalty
but to remove morality from law
having the freedom to remove all
structures of law around murder,
I could have created a punishless state
in which murderers walked free
or a Hammurabi and it is with the
same amount of callousness, that I
have begun to plant
nightshade around your house.

probability being like
you probably like to touch
things like me
and thinking it
to be Queen Anne’s Lace
giving it to your girl
for Valentine’s Day.

“Valentine’s Day ”

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